After a hectic past two weeks of traveling to the east coast, catching some sort of bug and recovering, and attending most of the first World Wide Technical Summit for VMware’s Field Organization, I find a long back log of both emails and blog posts.  While I prepare some of the more writing intensive posts, here is a quick link to a recently published vShpere whitepaper:  What’s New in VMware vSphere 4: Performance Enhancements (pdf download).  It’s a great summary of all the performance enhancements that VMware’s Performance Team has measured in vSphere 4.

I found the following items of specific interest:

• Efficiency improvements from hardware-assisted memory virtualization
  • Apache Compile was almost 55% more efficient – of special interest to my client who is looking at virtualizing part of their Rational software development environment, specifically their build servers.
  • Citrix XenApp (aka, presentation server) was 30% more efficient – of interest to my client who is wrapping up the virtualization of their XenApp environment to an ESX Cluster.  with vShpere 4 they may be able to reduce their 40 or so ESX hosts due to greater density of XenApp VMs possible with vSphere 4.
• VMotion performance enhancements show huge reduction in time  (almost 1/5th the time) to vmotion an active VM.  Every client of mine will love this as they all depend on VMotion to administer their virtual machines.
• Fibre Channel VM Boot performance enhancements showing massive reduction in time (again, almost 1/5th the time) to boot 512 VMs from a fibre channel SAN.  My client who is building a virtualized training lab environment and needs to boot 800 VMs in preparation for some training classes will really appreciate this.

With all the performance enhnacmenets in vSphere 4, there really does appear to be something for everyone!