VMworld 2012 -The Top 3 Changes That Will Affect You

1. New vCloud Suite offering
2. The addition of Go Pro and Essentials Kits to the SMB offering
3. Introducing vSphere 5.1

1. New  vCloud Suite offering announced at VMworld 

The vCloud Suite includes all the elements that you require to stand up a Private Cloud in a single SKU:  virtualization, policy-based provisioning of network and security, disaster recovery, application management, and operations management. The suite is a major step towards creating the ‘software-defined data center’, which expands the virtualization principles of pooling, abstraction and automation to the domains of storage, networking, security and availability.

Who is it for?

• vCloud Suite Standard – Customers seeking to get started with infrastructure-as-a-service
• vCloud Suite Advanced – Customers seeking a managed, high performance and easy-to-use IaaS deployment which supports all types of workloads
• vCloud Suite Enterprise – Customers seeking a complete and mature cloud for infrastructure as a service and rapid application provisioning

What does it mean to me?

vCloud Suite editions are licensed per-CPU with no limitations on cores, VMs, physical RAM  or vRAM.  Building a Private Cloud and Virtual Data Center just got a whole lot easier. With a single licensing policy and all the features required to provide IT as a Service, IT organizations can focus on driving additional value to the business vs. just trying to keep the lights on.

What’s New?

The chart below illustrates the editions as well as what you now get with vCloud:

 vCloud Suite Going Forward:

VMware continues to develop and acquire new technologies that will add capability to the vCloud Suite delivering on their promise of the software defined data center. Their recent acquisition of Nicira is an example of their efforts to extend virtualization beyond compute to the network infrastructure as well. Nicira has developed a software technology that abstracts heterogeneous networks allowing simple and seamless provisioning of network resource to virtual datacenters.

 2.  Two SMB Offerings Offer More: Additional Capabilities and  Services to Help Stand up and Manage Your Environment

VMware is offering solutions that are customized to support a range of SMB environment needs. The changes look like they are geared towards protecting the business, infrastructure automation and cost-effective purchasing.

Who is it for?

There are 2 distinct categories of  customers this solution targets: 

What’s New?

Below are the products recommended for SMB deployments. New products, or existing products with new features, are noted:

What Do The Essentials Kits Mean To Me?

For smaller environments, the Essentials Kits are like bundles:

• Essentials Kits are designed for small environments with up to 3 virtualized hosts.
• Acceleration Kits are an all-in-one set of bundles starting at 6 CPUs and scalable with vSphere Editions.
• Now customers can perform vMotion without the requirement for shared storage bringing new levels of availability with very little incremental costs.

 What Does Go Pro Mean To Me?

• Embedded IT assessments for specific server and workload recommendations.
• Remote web-based wizards for deploying, managing and monitoring virtualization.
• Remote administration capabilities.
• Availability as an annual subscription service to eliminate installation complexities and CapEx needs.
• Optional management services for the addition of incremental endpoints.

Looking forward with Go Pro – Backup and recovery of virtual machines coming soon!

3. Introducing vSphere 5.1 as announced at VMworld

The vSphere 5.1 editions are now licensed per CPU with no limitation on cores, VMs ,RAM, or vRAM. The elimination of the vRAM requirement was a direct response to the feedback provided by customers.

Customers told VMware that the added complexity of calculating vRAM requirements was an impediment to progressing towards private cloud. With the new licensing policies, customers are free to allocate an unlimited amount of memory to VM’s.

What’s New?

Many features have been added and several have cascaded down editions.  The chart below illustrates what’s new, what’s existing and what is improved in vSphere 5.1:

 What Does vSphere 5.1 Mean To Me?

• Networking: Enhancements to the vSphere Distributed Switch to support private and public cloud deployments.
• Scalability and Performance: Virtual machines with up to 64 vCPUs and 1 TB of RAM to run even the most demanding mission critical applications on vSphere.
• Security:  Virus scanning API now included. Simply plug in third-party scanning engines to protect your datacenter from threats and improve performance.
• Availability: New data protection and replication features to protect mission-critical applications.
• New  Licensing Policy: Licensed per-CPU with no limitation on cores, VMs, RAM,  or vRAM.

Looking forward with vSphere 5.1

According to Gartner, 81% of installed VMs are VMware-based, and vSphere supports over 80 operating systems. It’s crazy to think that compared to other technology, like the motor car or telephone, this is new technology!

What you can do right now! Join the webinar

Let our dedicated VMware team help you understand your options and choose the simplest path to navigate these changes and whether or not they affect you.