This year over 20,000 people attended VMworld and participated in 350 different sessions.
The big news at VMworld this year was centered on Cloud services. They announced many upgrades to existing products and some exciting announcements about work they have been doing with Software-Defined Data Centers, SAP HANA, AppHA, and the NSX platform.
AdvizeX’s own Jason Linden, Director of Presales Engineering, presented the highlights in a Webinar on October 9th for those of us who couldn’t be there in person. At AdvizeX we are always interested in learning about VMware. We have 138 different VMware certifications and accreditations. This includes experts in infrastructure virtualization, business continuity, Cloud infrastructure as a Service, desktop virtualization, management and application virtualization. We were VMware’s Infrastructure Partner of the Year in 2010.
At the forefront of VMworld this year was their Software-Defined Data Center. VMware envisions its Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) architecture becoming the platform for the Cloud deployments of tomorrow. It is the ideal architecture for private, hybrid, and public clouds, where compute, network, and storage infrastructure is fully virtualized and control of the data center is automated. The SDDC architecture is included in the vSphere and vCloud products.
The big product announcements this year were vCloud Suite 5.5 and vSphere 5.5. Even though these are not major releases there are lots of important new enhancements and features in these releases. For example, the single-sign on (SSO) issues from vSphere 5.1 have been resolved. VMware has also boosted performance in vSphere 5.5. They doubled the host CPU max (from 160 to 320 CPUs) and RAM Max (2 terabytes to 4) and they increased the virtual machine disk from 2 terabytes to 62 terabytes, which is over 30 times more. vSphere also includes enhancements to disaster recovery, with upgrades in replication and data protection.
VMware has also been working hard on both Application Aware High Availability (AppHA) and the NSX Network Virtualization Platform. AppHA recognizes and remedies application failures fast and provides application resiliency. It’s still in its early stages, but VMware’s NSX platform will allow true network virtualization. NSX makes the network much less expensive to manage, at only one fifth of today’s cost. It also has the potential to eliminate 98% of the downtime caused by devices that are misconfigured through human error.
Jason’s favorite session from VMworld is one that did not get a lot of press, but he feels it is big news for our customers. After 12 months of joint testing, VMware and SAP are now running SAP HANA on virtualized instances at 95% performance. This adds a new dimension of scalability to Big Data platforms without sacrificing performance. This is very big news for Big Data!
VMware and network virtualization is a big part of what AdvizeX does every day. VMworld grows exponentially each year because virtualization in general and VMware’s role in virtualization is becoming a much larger part of the network environment. It can be complex to understand all of the new changes and what they mean, but that is our job. With our consultants’ expansive VMware knowledge and our Advizer™ tools, AdvizeX provides the expertise and trusted advice to help you understand which new products and features can help you today and which you will need tomorrow.
If you are interested in viewing Jason’s webinar, please go to http://bit.ly/16qMbRs. ▪