ESX 4.0 to hit the dancefloor in May

El Reg's ever-twitching cyberspace antennae have detected that Compellent is certifying its storage product with a coming major release of ESX which appears to be slated for May.

It was expected by many people that ESX 4.0 would have been announced at VMworld in Cannes last week. Instead there was much talk about VMWare and the cloud and a re-working of VMware Infrastructure but no ESX 4.0 data, at least not in public.

However it is apparent from net watching that beta testing of ESX v4.00 is ongoing. Compellent's iSCSI interface has been certified OK against the beta version of ESX v4.0 and the Fibre Channel interface qualification work is proceeding. Apparently Compellent is the first storage vendor to be so qualified.

Other testers are also looking at ESX 4.0, for example with regard to how SQL 2008 works with it.

A picture is also emerging of what might be in ESX 4.0 as it changes to make better use of existing compute hardware and work within and manage much bigger servers. Elements include a 64-bit kernel and console operating system. Virtual servers will become clusterable. ESX 4 will support 8-way symmetric multi-processing and 256GB per virtual machine. There will be cross-host virtual networking and distributed virtual switches as well as virtual machine fault-tolerance across multiple hosts.

There could be profile management of ESX hosts, access control on storage resources, alarms on physical hardware faults, full support for SATA local storage, configuration change tracking and vCenter could run on Linux.

According to one net source ESX 4.0 could be launched in early May. These things are mentioned in various VMware community boards, blogs and so forth on the net. None of them are identified as, frankly, we'd like them to keep on posting.®