So, some of you may have heard, VMware made a big announcement today (well, yesterday in US time) about a number of new product / upgrade launches. Given below is a summary of what was announced. I will post more detailed articles about each topic over the coming weeks, as and when I managed to plough through the marketing layers and gotten to the real technical details for each offering.
- VMware OneCloud:- This seems to be a new spin to what was previously called Hybrid Cloud (combination of on premise vSphere private cloud + the vCloud Air managed networking services + vCloud Air public cloud platform service working as one)
- VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO):- Free for the VMware enterprise plus customers which provides a VMware integrated OpenStack distribution. This is a good one…!! For those who are new to OpenStack (including myself), OpenStack is an open source, cloud operating system that allows you to control large pools of compute (managed by the “Nova” module and is compatible with KVM, VMware, XEN, Docker…etc), storage (block storage managed by the “Cinder” module) and networking (project Neutron) recourses in a datacentre. To put it differently, OpenStack is a collection of open source software, bundled together under a single framework, that let you manage number of hypervisors (KVM, XEN, vSphere) to provide a cloud computing platform. With whats announced today, existing OpenStack solutions can connect to vSphere via the installation of VIO software. VMware support is also on for VIO now. OpenStack management packs also available for vCops.
- vSphere 6.0:- Finally…!! Over 650 new features added to vSphere platform. Some key ones are vVols, big data for Hadoop support, 64 hosts per cluster (2X), 4X the VM’s per host supported, cross vCenter VMotion, long distance VMotion, Fault Tolerance for multi processors – up to 4 vCPUs (yeah boy..!!) & vCenter enhancements to support bigger environments. I will be aiming to produce a separate, dedicated article to cover this release. Also announced were vCloud suite 6 & vCenter Operations suite 6.0. I believe there’s also added graphic supports available in vSphere 6.0 for VDI deployments (especially when deployed with the likes of NVDIA GRID cards with vsga support)
- VMware vSAN 6:- I’m not a big fan of vSAN personally yet. but if you are, you may find this interesting. Again, will produce a more detailed post in time about new features. Rack awareness support through a concept of fault domains seems interesting (provided that you power you racks from different, redundant power feeds. Otherwise this is practically of not much use). Virtual SAN Snapshot Manager fling is available through the fling site (though I haven’t been able to find this yet within the flings site)
- vSphere Virtual Volumes:- Storage policy based management. Probably the single biggest addition to vSphere platform in my view. NetApp was a reference case partner for vVols since way back and provide vVol support with Clustered Data OnTAP (cDOT) for VMware from day 1 and of course there are many other storage vendors announcing support too.
- vCloud Air Enhanced Disaster Recovery:- vCloud Air for DR was already available as an offering before. 15 Min minimum RPO is still the same as still based on the vSphere replication adaptor. But some new additions include easier fail back (from vCloud Air back to on-prem) now, and easier offline seeding capability (for the initial synch using offline disks), up to 24 recovery snapshots on vCloud Air (DR), vRO (Orchestrator) integration with a new plugin are all the details I have on new additions at this stage.
- vCloud Air Advanced Networking Services:- If you run VMware NSX in your on premise environment, you can now extend that network to VMware’s public cloud platform, vCloud Air public cloud. (this used to be somewhat possible with vshield edge products earlier, but todays announcement now allows NSX customers to do this too by the looks of it). Think stretched VXLAN between on premise and cloud. Some the features offered here seems similar to some of the features what Cisco Intercloud offers. In addition, inherent NSX features such as Micro segmentation (distributed firewall), dynamic routing & up to 200 virtual interfaces (NSX edge interfaces behind the scene) per vDC within vCloud Air are now available (I believe NSX is rolled out in the EMEA version of vCloud Air platform based in UK datacenters so these features are now fully supported)
Great set of announcements…. vSphere 6 and vVOLs are the biggest ones I like most….. Time to start dipping in to the technical nitty gritties of everything now. 🙂
More details can be found on onecloud.VMware.com
Slide credit goes to VMware..!!
Cheers
Chan