Unless you have spent the last 48 hours entrapped in a shopping center doing last minute Christmas shopping you will have seen that the new name for the next version of VMware has been officially leaked. vSphere it is.

I say officially leaked because no one was game to spill the beans until someone with enough authority gave the okay. The name was mentioned at a user group meeting last week and wanting to report on it Jason Boche got authority from VMware marketing to say it in a wider forum. You do wonder if this is was a plan by VMware? Seems strange to have the big name change for your key product launched via a user group and the blog sphere. Are they just following the hype that Veeam are getting with the release of their new free product, I doubt it? Did they feel that it was going to get out anyway so might as well be part of it, maybe. Lets see how long it takes for the official press release to appear.

At the end of the day its just a name (sorry Marketing). This new version has been called many things, starting out with K/L. At VMworld you would hear lots of VMware employees use the phrase "K/L" and the Beta forum is labeled "K/L". Of course most people have been calling it VI4. It will be interesting to see how this name integrates into all the other recent name chnanges, VDC-OS et al.

Things could be worse, can you imagine what it was like for all of those die hard Citrix fans. One day your company buys this thing called Xen and then after a few months they rename just about every product in your sweet by putting Xen in the front of it. Now that has to put the whole vSphere name into perspective. It could have been EMCompute or something. Although I think Sean Clark gets the prize for Atmos-vSphere because EMC have Atmos, their cloud optimized storage. Atmos-vSphere, it has a certain ring to it don't you think.

Rodos