VMware Advances Cross-Cloud Architecture With vSphere, Virtual SAN and vRealize Solutions

VMware, Inc. unveiled releases of its compute, storage and cloud management solutions to help IT operations teams efficiently run, manage and secure their traditional and modern applications on- or off-premises.

The releases of vSphere and VMware vRealize Automation all introduce support for containers, enabling developers to become more productive and IT to easily run containerized applications in production.

These releases advance VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture, which enables customers to run, manage, connect, and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment. As a complete hybrid cloud architecture, the Cross-Cloud Architecture delivers consistent deployment models, security policies, visibility and governance for all applications, running on- and off-premises, regardless of the underlying cloud, hardware platform or hypervisor.

The Cross-Cloud Architecture builds on its private and hybrid cloud capabilities by offering customers the freedom to innovate in multiple clouds, and is delivered through Cloud Foundation as well as a set of Cross-Cloud Services. The Cloud Foundation delivers a next-generation hyper-converged infrastructure for building hybrid clouds. It integrates scalable hyper-converged software (vSphere and Virtual SAN) with the network virtualization platform, VMware NSX, into a unified SDDC platform that is simple to deploy and operate thanks to the built-in lifecycle automation capabilities of SDDC Manager.

“Enterprises count on their hybrid cloud environments to boost business agility and accelerate application deployment on the path to digital transformation,” said Raghu Raghuram, EVP and GM, software-defined data center division, VMware. “These new releases will deliver significant new customer benefits including support for containerized applications in production and simplifying operations at scale with these new releases. They represent important building blocks of our Cross-Cloud Architecture to help customers scale out their hybrid clouds.“

vSphere 6.5: Next gen infrastructure
vSphere 6.5 will feature a simplified customer experience through increased automation and management capabilities, comprehensive built-in security, and support for new application types including containers. With these capabilities, it offers an universal application platform that supports traditional and modern applications – spanning 3D graphics, big data, cloud-native, containerized machine learning and software-as-a-service – to run any application anywhere.

This release will feature:

vCenter server appliance – will deliver a simplified building block for vSphere environments offering an easy to deploy and manage approach that reduces operational complexity by embedding key functionality into a single virtual appliance. The appliance will offer simplified patching, upgrading, backup and recovery, HA and more, including a 2x increase in both scale and performance of their vCenter Server environments.
REST APIs – will improve both the IT and developer experience by enabling greater control and automation of virtual infrastructure for modern applications via new REST-based APIs.
vSphere client – based on HTML5, the new vSphere Client will simplify the administrative experience via a native tool that meets the performance and usability needs and expectations of users for day-to-day operations.
VM encryption – VM-level encryption will protect against unauthorized data access safeguarding data at rest as well as VMs that are moved with VMware vMotion.
Secure boot – new feature will prevent the tampering of images as well as the loading of unauthorized components into vSphere environments.
vSphere integrated containers – will allow IT operations teams to provide a Docker-compatible interface to their app teams enabling vSphere customers to transform their businesses with containers without re-architecting their existing infrastructure.

Virtual SAN 6.5: Lowering TCO for hyper-converged infrastructures
The company continues to update its hyper-converged solution with Virtual SAN 6.5 – its fifth product release in less than three years. This release will improve TCO savings an additional 50% by adding support for containers and physical workloads, unveiling iSCSI support, eliminating networking hardware costs from two-node ROBO configurations, and adding all-flash hardware support to Virtual SAN Standard Edition. Virtual SAN 6.5 will deliver:

iSCSI support – will enable Virtual SAN storage to be presented as an iSCSI target for external physical workloads including clustered applications such as SQL Server with failover clustering on a limited number of physical servers.
Containers support – Virtual SAN will provide persistent data layer for containerized applications via vSphere Integrated Containers.
Two-node direct connect – Functionality will eliminate the need for routers/switches between Virtual SAN systems in ROBO sites helping customers lower infrastructure costs by 15 to 20% per site.
REST APIs and expanded PowerCLI – will help customers accelerate responsiveness with enterprise automation that brings cloud-like flexibility and management to Virtual SAN environments.
512e HDD Drives and SSDs – support for 512-byte emulated disk drives enables high-capacity drives to be supported.

In Q4 2016, the company will update the packaging for Virtual SAN Standard Edition to introduce support for basic all-flash configurations enabling customers to further lower TCO for their storage system.

The firm announced a VMware Ready for vSAN certification program to provide customers with the confidence that file services and data protection partner solutions will deploy, run and interoperate with Virtual SAN. The program will accelerate customer time-to-value by helping them to find a qualified solution partner. Dell EMC, NetApp, Inc. and Nexenta Systems, Inc. are the initial file services partners. Commvault Systems, Inc., Dell EMC, Veeam Software, Inc. and Veritas Technologies LLC are the initial data protection partners participating in this program. Over time, the company expects to work with additional partners to further enhance the ecosystem.

In addition, the company also announced vSphere Virtual Volumes 2.0, which will feature enhanced enterprise-readiness through capabilities like native support for array replication, as well as support for business-critical applications such as Oracle Database with Real Application Clusters.

VMware vRealize: Enhances ease of use
with out-of-the-box support for Azure and containers
The firm introduced a number of updates to its cloud management platform with enhancements to vRealize Automation and vRealize Log Insight. To better address the needs of developers and IT teams, vRealize Automation 7.2 will introduce out-of-the box support for Microsoft Azure as well as new container management capabilities. With this release, the ability of IT and DevOps practitioners to use unified service blueprints to simplify the delivery of integrated multi-tier applications with application-centric networking and security will be extended to Microsoft Azure, as well as currently supported clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS), vCloud Air and the vCloud Air Network.

vRealize Automation 7.2 support for containers will enable developers and application teams to accelerate application delivery. The latest release will feature Admiral, a scalable and lightweight container management portal to deploy and manage containers to Docker hosts supporting OSs that Docker supports. Currently the company is testing Admiral to deploy containers to virtual container hosts on vSphere Integrated Containers in a private beta. Beyond Admiral support, developers will be able to provision container hosts from the vRealize Automation 7.2 service catalog. They will have the choice of modeling containerized applications using unified service blueprints or Docker Compose. Application teams will have the ability to build hybrid deployments consisting of VMs and containers. Cloud administrators will be able to manage container hosts and apply governance to their usage including capacity quotas or approval workflows. vRealize Automation 7.2 is suited to organizations required to support existing apps while modernizing them via the adoption of micro)services and a cloud-native architecture. Multi-technology approach across private and public clouds with support for containers and OpenStack affords customers the flexibility to manage their talent pools and technology stacks as needed today and over time.

The company is also introducing vRealize Log Insight 4.0 and vRealize Operations 6.4. The latest release of company’s log management and analysis solution will feature enhanced alert management functionality and a redesigned, easy to use interface. vRealize Operations 6.4 will deliver improved alert management and metric grouping for faster troubleshooting and new dashboards customized to specific user personas that span infrastructure, application and cloud teams. Both vRealize Log Insight 4.0 and vRealize Operations 6.4 will also include integrations with the announced vSphere 6.5.

Cloud Services: Hybrid cloud solutions for enterprise
The company continues to help customers extend their private workloads into the public cloud, using vCloud Air Network and vCloud Air. A common driver for cloud adoption is DR as a Service. vCloud Air Network recently introduced vCloud Availability for vCloud Director to the ecosystem of over 4,000 service providers located in more than 100 countries offering firm-based cloud services. As part of today’s announcements, the company is also introducing the beta of a vCloud Air DR solution designed specifically for the enterprise. The new offering is designed to provide the security and isolation of a dedicated cloud environment combined with the simplicity of a replication solution that is directly integrated into vSphere and optimized with SD-WAN technologies. As part of the announcement, the firm is also introducing the beta of Cloud Foundation Service on vCloud Air which provides a fast and easy way to leverage the combined power of vSphere, Virtual SAN, NSX and SDDC Manager in an integrated service offering. When combined with Cloud Foundation environments on-premises, customers gain cloud scale, agility, and flexibility with compatibility for an unified hybrid cloud experience.

“VMware Virtual SAN provides a compelling combination of low TCO and high performance,” said Søren Vendler, IT enterprise architect, Coop Danmark A/S . “VMware Virtual SAN’s broad support for hardware enabled us to tailor a hyper-converged solution exactly suited to our needs. We have standardized on VMware Virtual SAN to power our core business systems from point of sale to customer loyalty to web sites, to remote sites, to supply chain and backend systems.“

“ISS has adopted DevOps methodologies to increase agility across our business,” said David Coker, VP, business informatics, Intelligent Software Solutions, Inc. “To complement those practices, we rely on virtualization, containers and other technologies to achieve increased efficiencies, responsiveness and the scale required to best serve our customers. The container management capabilities of VMware vRealize Automation 7.2 will give us the opportunity to support container-based applications while maintaining the necessary governance and policy requirements.“

“Otto Group is a global company of approximately 53,000 employees across 120 companies with local development teams located across different companies,” said Frank Borchard, head, datacenter services, transformation management, Otto IT Group. “Many of our development teams use containers to build new software projects. vSphere Integrated Containers is the logical evolution of our private cloud platform. It will provide our developers with on-demand access to IT resources all while using our existing processes for service management, operations, security and BC.“

“UKCloud is the market leading provider of assured cloud services to the UK public sector, supporting digital transformation across the UK government,” said David Woolger, director, technology strategy, UKCloud. “The UK public sector has a strong desire for better data-driven decisions enabled by big data solutions, and have a clear Cloud-First policy based on a desire for cost-effective and flexible cloud services. To this end, UKCloud engineers worked collaboratively with VMware to deliver a low cost, agile and scalable consumption-based Hadoop service, which leverages UKCloud’s investment in VMware technology including vSphere big data Extensions, NSX and vCloud Director.“

Pricing and availability:

vRealize Automation 7.2, vRealize Log Insight 4.0, vRealize Operations 6.4, Virtual SAN 6.5, vSphere 6.5 and vSphere Virtual Volumes 2.0 are all expected to become available in Q4 2016.
Pricing for vSphere starts at $995 per CPU. vSphere Integrated Containers is a new feature of vSphere 6.5 (also supported on vSphere 6) and will be available for vSphere Enterprise Plus Edition customers at no additional charge.
Virtual SAN list price starts at $2,495 per CPU. Virtual SAN for desktop list price starts at $50 per user. Virtual SAN Standard Edition includes support for all-flash hardware.

Resources
Perspective on the conference “VMworld 2016 Europe: Advancing the Cross-Cloud Architecture by Joe Baguley, Vp and CTO, EMEA,VMware
VMworld 2016 Europe: VMware is also announcing the general availability in Q4 2016 of the new 1.4 version of the VMware Adapter for SAP Landscape Management, featuring integration with vRealize Automation 7 to automate SAP management operations. Additionally, customers will now be able purchase VMware support for the adapter to deploy it in production.
Blog post: Introducing vSphere 6.5
Blog post: What’s New – Virtual SAN 6.5
Blog post: What’s New – Virtual Volumes 2.0
Blog post: What’s New – vRealize Automation 7.2
Blog post: What’s New – vRealize Log Insight 4
One More Step Forward: vRealize Automation + Puppet
How vCloud Air is making hybrid cloud simpler with a new Disaster Recovery solution and VMware Cloud Foundation on vCloud Air
IDC whitepaper that quantifies the energy and carbon emission reductions from VMware vSphere and compute virtualization technologies