A unified platform for the Hybrid Cloud

Defined in software, VMware’s unified platform will enable customers to create one consistent environment across the private and public cloud to run, protect and manage any cloud-native or traditional application. The platform will also offers customers openness and choice in how to build and manage their applications and cloud environments based on their specific needs.

“Every traditional industry across the globe is being transformed by software,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware, Inc. “To navigate and thrive in the face of this change, businesses must be decisive in the face of uncertainty. Today, we are taking another leap forward in helping our customers meet these demands through a unified platform, defined in software, which will offer unmatched choice and extends our innovations across compute, networking and storage to deliver the hybrid cloud.”

Intotal, VMware has launched the following new solutions and services for the hybrid cloud:

VMware vSphere® 6
Featuring more than 650 new features and innovations,VMware vSphere 6 delivers ‘breakthrough’ new capabilities to address the needs of business-critical and cloud-native applications with higher performance, scale and consolidation ratios.

VMware Integrated OpenStack
VMware Integrated OpenStack is an OpenStack distribution that will enable organizations to provide developers with open APIs to access VMware’s enterprise-class infrastructure. VMware packages, tests and supports all components of the distribution, including the open source OpenStack code, and will provide the distribution free of charge to VMware vSphere customers.

VMware Virtual SAN 6 and vSphere Virtual Volumes
Designed to enable mass adoption of software-defined storage, VMware Virtual SAN 6 introduces significant scalability and performance enhancements to the company’s hypervisor-converged storage solution. Additionally, VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will offer a new level of storage integration to make external arrays natively aware of virtual machines.

VMware vCloud® Air
VMware has revealed vCloud Air hybrid networking services that will help customers bridge VMware’s vCloud Air public cloud service and VMware vSphere-based private clouds to enable a single, secure network domain through a gateway appliance. VMware NSX is a network virtualization platform that delivers the entire networking and security model from L2-L7 in software. VMware NSX is being deployed as the networking foundation for VMware vCloud Air™.

VMware’s unified platform includes advanced virtualization support for developers and system administrators who are leveraging continuous delivery and container-based distributed application technologies.

VMware vSphere 6 new capabilities and features include:

· Broad Application Support – VMware vSphere 6 will address the specific challenges of cloud-native applications, including agile development cycles and multiple application instances. With VMware vSphere 6, organizations will be able to manage thousands of component instances of a single cloud-native application. New scale, performance and availability capabilities also make vSphere 6 the platform of choice for virtualizing scale-up applications such as SAP HANA, scale-out workloads such as Hadoop, and business-critical applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, and SAP ERP.

· New Long-Distance Live Migration Capabilities – VMware vSphere 6 introduces Long-Distance vMotion®, which will enable zero downtime live migration of workloads over long distances such as New York to London. With multi-processor fault tolerance, another industry first, customers will benefit from continuous availability for larger virtual machines up to four virtual-CPUs.

· Instant Clone Technology – Introduced as Project Fargo, a technology preview at VMworld® 2014 San Francisco, VMware’s Instant Clone technology will make it possible to rapidly clone and provision thousands of container instances and virtual machines to make new virtual infrastructure available in sub-second timeframes.

· 3D Graphics for Desktop Virtualization – VMware vSphere 6 will enable enterprises to deliver high-end workstation and graphics-intensive applications to virtual desktops such as VMware Horizon® 6 for industries such as engineering, automotive, education and architecture. Using NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology, immersive 3D graphics can be delivered from the cloud enabling greater density, scalable performance and increased cost-savings

· Enterprise-Class Hypervisor-Converged Storage – VMware’s flagship will provide enterprise-class scale, performance and new data services making it the ideal storage platform for virtual machines including business-critical applications.

· Virtual Machine-Awareness for Third-Party Storage – VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes is the industry’s first solution that will enable native virtual machine awareness on a wide range of third-party storage systems, extending VMware’s software-defined storage control plane to the ecosystem.

Customers can optimize the performance, capacity and configuration health of VMware vSphere 6 with the newly introduced VMware vSphere with Operations Management 6. An integrated platform and management solution, VMware vSphere with Operations Management 6 simplifies infrastructure management with predictive analytics as well as automated recommendation and remediation capabilities.

VMware Virtual SAN™ 6 introduces significant scalability and performance enhancements to the company’s hypervisor-converged storage solution, and VMware vSphere® Virtual Volumes™ will offer new levels of storage integration to make third-party arrays natively aware of virtual machines.

To achieve the full potential of the software-defined data center, a new software-defined storage approach is required to address storage-related operational complexity and cost challenges. VMware’s software-defined storage strategy leverages the hypervisor to advance storage in the cloud era and deliver the kind of operational efficiency that server virtualization brought to compute.

“Customers have told us they need a simple, cost-effective and cloud-aware approach to storage,” said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president and general manager, Software-Defined Data Center Division, VMware. “VMware Virtual SAN 6 and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will deliver on this, and represent the next phase of our software-defined storage strategy. They address customer requirements through an improved hypervisor-converged storage tier, and a new virtual machine-aware integration with existing storage arrays.”

The Virtual SAN release features:

· New all-flash architecture – VMware Virtual SAN 6 will enable a two-tier all-flash architecture in which flash devices are intelligently used for both caching and data persistence. The new all-flash architecture will provide more than four times increase in input/output throughput per node compared to VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 while delivering predictable sub-millisecond latency.

· Maximum throughput of seven million IOPS / cluster – A 64-node VMware Virtual SAN cluster will deliver up seven million input/output operations per second (IOPS) with nearly perfect linear scalability.

· Scalability increased to 64 nodes / cluster – The new release will double scalability to 64 nodes per cluster enabling customers to achieve up to 6,400 virtual machines per cluster and exceed eight petabytes of storage capacity from a cluster.

· New enterprise-grade snapshots – The release will introduce a high-performance and efficient snapshot capability increasing the snapshot depth to 32 per virtual machine while minimizing the performance overhead.

· New Rack-awareness – VMware Virtual SAN 6 will enable intelligent placement of virtual machine objects across server racks for enhanced application availability even in case of complete rack failures.

· Expanded support for blades – With new support for direct-attached JBODs, customers will be able to scale VMware Virtual SAN 6 clusters to large capacity in server blade environments.