In Unified Communications there is a fairly newer protocol that has been gaining some attention called XMPP. In short, XMPP is a protocol (like SIP). XMPP was majorly used for presence and Instant Messaging. But it is being expanded to other areas like call signal controlling. Here are some basic facts about XMPP

• XMPP was built from ground to support presence and IM
• XMPP is "eXtensible"
• XMPP is being (or has been) adopted by many big vendors like Cisco, Microsoft, Google, etc.

Within the leading products we deploy on a regular basis (Cisco and Microsoft) there are multiple products that support XMPP, like Webex Connect, Microsoft's Office Communication Server as well as Cisco CUPS. Microsoft product has to have an additional configuration setup and server in order to support XMPP and it not a native server role with the edge service. As for Cisco CUPS, with the release of CUPS 8.0 that introduces the jabber platform, it is based on XMPP.

A little history about XMPP, it was introduced in 1998 and later refined by the Jabber open source community that Cisco aquired a couple of years back.

Since XMPP is a protocol, it has many streams of communications or eXtensions that are used for different "features" you see within your chat window you use on a daily basis. Technical developers have different names for the standards they come to develop, then what we end user come to know them as.

For example a couple eXtensions within the protocol are "chat state notifications" which is indicating whether a chat partner is actively engaged in the chat, composing a message, temporarily paused, inactive, or gone. We also call that a presence status.

Another example is a "jingle" which is managing peer-to-peer media sessions in a way that is interoperable with existing standards. We end users know this as a voice chat, video chat or file transfer.

If you are interested in learning more about the XMPP protocol and the extension standards, they can be found here.

I hope this provided you with some interesting tidbits about XMPP and all protocols for that matter. Every feature within an application we use (Browser, Outlook,etc.) has some sort of communication protocol that is driving the ability for you to do basic tasks.

When we all come to adopt the standard that it becomes a GREAT technology that we highly depend on. Most of the time using it as a business tool just like E-Mail. From a philisophical level, this protocol "adoption" approach is Metcalfe's law.

-D

• 2X larger resource pools with 3X the management power
• Up to 25% better performance and reduced cost per application
• 5X faster virtual machine migrations for increased agility
• New network and storage I/O controls deliver Quality of Service guarantees
• Increased performance through open integration with storage environments

You can view the "What's new is 4.1" yourself at this PDF LINK.

If you would like to compare the VmWare Editions (Standard->Advanced->Enterprise->Enterprise Plus) you can go HERE.

Enough with the Fluff! Here are the technical advantages on why an organization would make the move to 4.1.

1)Storage I/O control
Prioritized use of storage (similar to how compute is prioritized with vSphere)
this means you can now make sure that your "VIV"s or Very Important VMs get the IO they need when you have IO congestion. This is done via the I/O Shares within the VM properties.

2)Network I/O Control
Set different levels of service per Storage Flow type.
virtual machine, vMotion, FT, and IP storage traffic.
This means you can make iSCSI or NFS take priority over vMotion.
But there is a gotcha:
Enabled with Distributed Switch only and therefore Enterprise Plus only

3)Memory Compression
Slower than real memory but much faster than swapping to disk.
Improves the performance for the VM when under contention as far less memory is swapped to disk.

4)vMotion Performance Increases and Scale Increases
Allows up to 4 on a 1Gbps network and 8 on a 10Gbps network.

5) Storage vMotion Scale Increases
Allows up to 128 (both VMFS and NFS)

6) DRS Host affinity
Allows you set set rules on where your VMs vMotion to when DRS needs to move them.
e.g. VM W2003-DC1 only goes to DRS Group 1, however VM W2003-Exchange only goes to DRS Group 2.

Here is where you create the rules:


7)vStorage API for Array Integration
This is another great feature (if supported by your SAN),
essentially this means vSphere can interact directly with your SAN.
Therefore instead of copying the files from one datastore to another, it instructs the SAN to move the blocks for you! Increasing the performance for Storage vMotion and Provisioning VMs etc