It looks like the cat has been let out of the bag.  For all you folks who have been wondering about VMware Infrastructure 4.0, I bet you weren't wondering what the product's name was going to be, were you?  Did you just assume that VMware was going to be releasing VI4?  Well, think again.  Can you say, VMware vSphere?  Well, get used to it.

Evidently, today at a Minneapolis VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting, VMware employees told a room of 150+ VMware users the new name... whether they were supposed to or not, who knows really.  But, vSphere has made its debut nonetheless. 

Jason Boche and Roger Lund were at the meeting, and in addition to the name change, evidently the same VMware employees made it known that VI4, er, vSphere will support a maximum of 1TB of memory on the host server and up to 256GB of memory for a guest.  That's a lot of RAM.

Am I the only one that's still going to call this thing VI4?  Is that really such a bad name?  I know VMware is going marketing crazy with product name changes, but really?  vSphere?  Are they changing the ESX name too or is that sticking around as the hypervisor technology in the vSphere product (Hey look, I did it, I didn't call it VI4 - oops)?

I guess I'm just too old school for my own good sometimes.  I've been using ESX since it was alpha code, and it's hard for an old dog to learn new tricks.  Besides, I'm not sure I get this one.  I mean, I just don't get the sphere reference just yet. 

What about ESX 4i?  What is it going to be called?  Does anyone know?

I think I'll keep calling it VI4 or ESX 4.0 to myself and to close friends.  Is that allowed?