In early September virtualization.info broke the news about the upcoming features expected with ESX 4.0 and vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) 3.0.
Few days after VMware formally confirmed them presenting its new vCloud strategy at VMworld 2008.
Despite that, nor during the keynotes neither in the breakout session the name VMware Infrastructure (VI) 4.0 was mentioned.
The reason was that VMware is changing the bundle name pretty much like it changed almost every product name: VI 4 is now vSphere 4.0, as Jason Boche revealed on his personal blog.
This name seems to imply some clear changes in the product positioning, not necessarily related to the new cloud computing mission: the sphere is a 3D circle and the circle usually represents a 360 degrees solution.
VMware may be trying to say that vSphere is the core of the datacenter, addressing all the challenges its management implies, in every possible direction, no matter if we are talking about servers, desktops or mobile devices.