vSphere 4.1 has been out for a couple of days now.

As well as the new features which have been covered extensively (see What’s New), the release notes list some future changes for the product range. They’re not really hidden but haven’t been given much publicity.

  • ESX will be dropped in future releases, with ESXi being the hypervisor product for vSphere.
  • Future versions of vCenter Update Manager will not scan or remediate guest OSes. I presume the cross-licensing costs of using Shavlik were outweighing any benefit. UM will continue to scan and update ESXi hosts. and presumably aid in conversion of ESX hosts to ESXi.
  • VMware vCenter Converter plugin and VMware vCenter Guided Consolidation are also going away in future versions. Converter will continue in a standalone format rather than a vCenter plugin.
  • Web Access isn’t available on ESXi so that’ll be going away when ESX is dropped too

There are a few other items being dropped such as support for some versions of Linux in guests, VMI paravirtualization support, and MSCS in Windows 2000 but they aren’t as widely used.