VMware vSphere 5 + Cloud Infrastructure Suite Announced

As expected, VMware is announcing vSphere 5 as I type this. But to throw a curve ball, VMware is also announcing a Cloud Infrastructure Suite to help move to the next level of cloud computing. This suite includes vSphere 5, vCenter SRM, vCenter Operations, vShield Security, and finally vCould Director. This touches on all the major aspects of an all-inclusive, self servicing and managing cloud infrastructure. The goal is for a highly automated, low involvement infrastructure environment. Paul used the term “Make Infrastructure Go Away” quite frequently in this keynote. The big goal here is to really help the enterprise reach that ITaaS goal.

The announcement today includes new releases for multiple products. vSphere 5 is a leaps and bounds above vSphere 4 in terms of VM performance. 32 vCPUs, 1TB of memory, <36GBps network throughout and 1,000,000 IOPS. There are also substantial updates to HA and DRS, as well as SRM. One new technology is vSphere Replication to move away from Array based replication, and more towards software based replication over the network. This is a huge thing that allows of different levels of storage and use of vendors. Automated Failback is also being introduced so your load can return to the primary site once the troubles are over. SRM is also being pitched so that you can proactively migrate in the event of planned outages, as well as use for mergers and acquisitions to migrate an existing data center to your new data center.

vCloud Director is getting updated to 1.5. First item is an iPad app for the consumer portal. The portal acts like an App Store for VMs. Linked Clones is now available in vCloud Director. This allows for similar VMs to run off the same disk until they differ enough, creating a separate disk for the machines.

vSphere 5 has Profile Driven Storage and Storage DRS. This allows you to map your multiple storage systems into logical units. Storage DRS now allows you to set reservations and DRS will automatically move it between arrays and datastores to ensure its reservations are being met.

vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0 allows you to present an illusion of shared storage between local disk storage on multiple servers. This is being aimed at SMBs that cannot afford enterprise storage solutions. vSphere w/ Autodeploy is also being announced. Up until now, you had to manual build ESXi host. Autodeploy uses PXE to not only grab the image, but the system configuration as well. vSphere 5 also has Network and Storage I/O Controls. This creates a chance to ensure network and storage I/O requirements for VMs are met and aren’t affected by ‘Noisy Neighbor Syndrom.”

vSphere Edge allows you to create virtual data centers to ensure isolation, but also allows you to create trust between these virtual data centers. VMware is now announcing Sensitive Data Discovery that lets you take Regulations (PCI, etc) and run them against your virtual data centers to ensure you group specific security and compliance requirements together to create less work.

Obviously, VMware has released multiple new features that couldn’t be covered in this event, but will definitely be touched on in other presentations as well as VMworld sessions and announcements. The new products released today include vCloud Director 1.5, vShield 5.0, vCenter SRM 5.0, and vSphere 5.0 in this new Cloud Infrastructure Suite.

The biggest new announcement of the day I think now is licensing. vSphere 5 will now ditch the physical constraints of licensing. There is no Core per Proc or RAM per Host. They are now introducing amount of vRAM pooled across the entire environment as a licensing model. They are getting rid of the levels of licensing they had with vSphere 4. They are going from 6 packages down to five. vSphere Advanced is now collapsed into vSphere Enterprise, meaning existing advanced customers, automatically fall into enterprise now.

Sorry for the dishoveledness of this post, but I wanted to get this news out there. I’ll update it and try to get things in a little better format as the day goes on.

Raising the Bar, Part V (Hint, Hint)

VMware blasted out a webcast invite yesterday for the “unveiling of the next major step forward in cloud infrastructure.” The event is July 12, 2011, less than two months before VMworld. There’s a lot of speculation as to whats going to be announced, though it appears quite obvious what Paul Martiz and Steve Herrod are going to be showing off. Lets look at the obvious:

• The Event Title: Raising the Bar, Part V – AKA Part 5, like vSphere 5
• The reference to “the next step forward in CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE.” vSphere is constantly branded as the infrastructure to the a cloud based environment.
• The event is less than two months from VMworld 2011, where VMware will be able to have multiple sessions on it, as well as labs.
• The session catalog for VMworld includes some sessions that discuss technologies not currently available on vSphere 4.1 U1.

Needless to say, I’m signed up to see whether or not I’m going to be right, but if I were a betting man, I’d be putting my money that in a few weeks we will be laying eyes on vSphere 5. Feel free to join me and a ton of other virtualization professionals to hear what will be announced. Below is the full invite as well as a registration link.

Raising the Bar, Part V
July 12, 2011
9 a.m. Pacific time 
Register for this free online event »Please join VMware executives Paul Maritz, CEO and Steve Herrod, CTO for the unveiling of the next major step forward in cloud infrastructure.Paul and Steve’s 45 minute live webcast will be followed by additional online sessions where you can learn more about the industry’s most trusted virtualization and cloud infrastructure products and services.

Join us and experience how the virtualization journey is helping transform IT and ushering in the era of cloud computing.

Microsoft Can’t Quite Invade VMworlds; Attacks from Outside!

As a huge VMware fan, I hate to see this, but I’ve gotta give the big MS credit for this ballsy move. On Tuesday, Microsoft took out a full page add in the USA Today paper. This may not seem like much, but its the same paper dropped at the door of almost every VMworlds hotel goer. The add tossed jabs as VMwares cost, three year commitment and cost of labor to support.  The letter can be seen below:

While its no POKER CHIP FIASCO, this and other recent events, such as the Dell & HP bidding war for 3PAR, make it evident that multiple companies are going all in on cloud computing, and will do whatever it takes to win your business. On the upside, it makes you feel good to be on the ground level of this technological tidal wave.