Upgrade to vSphere 4.1 and migrate to ESXi!Īs you may have read already read, 4.1 will be the last release of VMware vSphere to offer both the ESX and ESXi architectures. To learn more about the unique advantages of VMware ESXi take a look at the Why ESXi? section of the VMware ESXi and ESX Info Center Thanks to this unique design the ESXi architecture dramatically improves the security, deployment and configuration, and ongoing administration of the hypervisor while delivering the same level of performance and reliability of ESX.
The ESXi hypervisor architecture is independent from a general purpose operating system like Windows or Linux, making its code base size less than 5% of that of ESX. We designed ESXi to deliver the highest levels of reliability, robustness, performance and security for virtual environments in the industry.
What are the advantages of the ESXi hypervisor architecture?ĮSXi is VMware’s latest generation hypervisor architecture. In upcoming blog posts will provide a more information about each enhancement, so stay tuned. We also have produced a new white paper on Transitioning to ESXi 4.1. You can find a more detailed description of the new capabilities of the ESXi hypervisor architecture in this KB article. As you can see ESXi 4.1 supports nearly all the same advanced management features as ESX 4.1
The table below shows you a high level summary of main features of the last two versions of both ESX and ESXi. Over the past year since the release of vSphere 4.0, we put a lot of effort in addressing these shortcomings and we believe that with the new capabilities of vSphere 4.1 we achieved our goal. While the ESXi architecture already delivers the same performance and reliability as ESX, it was missing few advanced management features particularly useful in large scale environments. VMware ESXi is the industry’s gold standard when it comes to hypervisor architectures thanks to a streamlined code base (less than 100MB) that dramatically improves the security, deployment and configuration, and ongoing administration of the hypervisor. We are proud to announce the release of ESXi 4.1! With the new version of VMware vSphere 4.1 – whose General Availability was announced earlier today – VMware delivered several substantial improvements to the ESXi hypervisor architecture.