Just had a meeting with our VMware rep and his engineer, focussing mainly on SRM implementation and, also on our licensing/eligibility for vSphere 4 upgrades. Long story short, we have decided not to upgrade to vSphere 4 when it comes out within the next month or so, for 2 main reasons:
1. vSphere 4 does not support SRM. This is a must for us, given my mandate from management to get SRM up and running this Spring/Summer. Apparently, in their haste to get 4.0 out the door, VMware is leaving SRM for the 3.x implementations out there, until around the end of 2009/early 2010.
2. The new Fault Tolerance feature only supports VMs with a single vcpu for the initial release. Most of our 'critical' VMs that we would protect in this manner were determined to require 2 vcpu's, so this feature is less compelling until it supports 2 or more vcpu's. This will no doubt happen in a future release of 4.x.
Other than that, 4.0's feature set and performance enhancements look great. We are currently a VC 2.5 U3 / ESX 3.0.2 shop, and my plan is to upgrade to VC 2.5 U4 / ESX 3.5 U4 within the next couple months, then implement SRM. We'll upgrade to 4.x early next year, I'm sure. Going through 2 upgrades won't be that big a deal, especially with update manager and since upgrades of VC and ESX hosts themselves don't take long, are reasonably fool-proof (if release notes are read!) and contingencies for rollback put into place.
Good luck to those going with 4.0 right out the gate! May there be few bugs and many appreciable gains for all going that route immediately.
