Release: VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 2

Without much noise, VMware yesterday released Update 2 for its vSphere 4.0 virtual infrastructure platform, which includes ESX/ESXi hosts (build 261974) as well as the vCenter Server (build 258672).

The Update for ESX/ESXi primarily introduces additional hardware support:

  • Fault Tolerance (FT) support for Intel Xeon 3400, Xeon 5600 and i3/i5 CPUs
  • IOMMU support for AMD Opteron 6100 and 4100 CPUs

ESX/ESXi 4.0 U2 also introduces support for Ubuntu 10.04 as guest operating system.

The Update 2 for vCenter only introduces environment customization for additional guest operating systems:

  • Windows XP Professional SP2 (x64) serviced by Windows Server 2003 SP2
  • SLES 10 SP3 and 11 (x32/x64 bit)
  • RHEL 4.8, 5.4 and 5.5 Server Platform (x32/x64 bit)
  • Debian 5.0, 5.0 R1 and 5.0 R2 (x32/x64 bit)

The lack of new features doesn’t surprise at all: at this point it’s a well-known thing that all the upcoming capabilities detailed by virtualization.info in the past few weeks will be part of vSphere 4.1 (or more likely 4.5) to be released at VMworld 2010 in early September.