[This post was updated after being published to delete NDA material – sorry, RL] Attended VMworld2014 in San Francisco this past week. Lots of news, mostly about vSphere 6 beta functionality and how the new AirWatch acquisition will be rolled into VMware’s End-User Computing framework.
vSphere 6.0 beta
Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) is in beta and extends VMware’s software-defined storage model to external NAS and SAN storage. VVOLs transforms SAN/NAS storage into VM-centric devices by making the virtual disk a native representation of the VM at the array level, and enables app-centric, policy-based automation of SAN and NAS based storage services, somewhat similar to the capabilities used in a more limited fashion by Virtual SAN today.
Storage system features have proliferated and differentiated over time and to be able to specify and register any and all of these functional nuances to VMware storage policy based management (SPBM) service is a significant undertaking in and of itself. I guess we will have to wait until it comes out of beta to see more. NetApp had a functioning VVOL storage implementation on the show floor.
Virtual SAN 1.0/5.5 currently has 300+ customers with 30+ ready storage nodes from all major vendors, There are reference architecture documents and system bundles available.
Current enhancements outside of vSphere 6 beta
vRealize Suite extends automation and monitoring support for a broad mix of VMware and non VMware infrastructure and services including OpenStack, Amazon Web Services, Azure, Hyper-V, KVM, NSX, VSAN and vCloud Air (formerly vCloud Hybrid Services), as well as vSphere.
New VMware functionality being released:
- vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.8 – provides self service DR through vCloud Automation Center (vRealize Automation) integration, with up to 5000 protected VMs per vCenter and up to 2000 VM concurrent recoveries. SRM UI will move to be supported under vSphere’s Web Client.
- vSphere Data Protection Advanced 5.8 – provides configurable parallel backups (up to 64 streams) to reduce backup duration/shorten backup windows, access and restore backups from anywhere, and provides support for Microsoft Exchange DAGs, and SQL Clusters, as well as Linux LVMs and EXT4 file systems.
VMware NSX 6.1 (in beta) has 150+ customers and provides micro segmentation security levels which essentially supports fine grained security firewall definitions almost at the VM level, there are over 150 NSX customers today.
vCloud Hybrid Cloud Services is being rebranded as vCloud Air, and is currently available globally through data centers in the US, UK, and Japan. vCloud Air is part of the vCloud Air Network, an ecosystem of over 3,800 service providers with presence in 100+ countries that are based on common VMware technology. VMware also announced a number of new partnerships to support development of mobile applications on vCloud Air. Some additional functionality for vCloud Air that was announced at VMworld includes:
- vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud On Demand beta program supports instant, on demand consumption model for vCloud services based on a pay as you go model.
- VMware vCloud Air Object Storage based on EMC ViPR is in beta and will be coming out shortly.
- DevOps/continuous integration as a service, vRealize Air automation as a service, and DB as a service (MySQL/SQL server) will also be coming out soon
End-User Computing: VMware is integrating AirWatch‘s (another acquisition) enterprise mobility management solutions for mobile device management/mobile security/content collaboration (Secure Content Locker) with their current Horizon suite for virtual desktop/laptop support. VMware End User Computing now supports desktop/laptop virtualization, mobile device management and security, and content security and file collaboration. Also VMware’s recent CloudVolumes acquisition supports a light weight desktop/laptop app deployment solution for Horizon environments. AirWatch already has a similar solution for mobile.
OpenStack, Containers and other collaborations
VMware is starting to expand their footprint into other arenas, with new support, collaboration and joint ventures.
A new VMware OpenStack Distribution is in beta now to be available shortly, which supports VMware as underlying infrastructure for OpenStack applications that use OpenStack APIs. VMware has become a contributor to OpenStack open source. There are other OpenStack distributions that support VMware infrastructure available from HP, Cannonical, Mirantis and one other company I neglected to write down.
VMware has started a joint initiative with Docker and Pivotal to broaden support for Linux containers. Containers are light weight packaging for applications that strip out the OS, hypervisor, frameworks etc and allow an application to be run on mobile, desktops, servers and anything else that runs Linux O/S (for Docker Linux 3.8 kernel level or better). Rumor has it that Google launches over 15M Docker containers a day.
VMware container support expands from Pivotal Warden containers, to now also include Docker containers. VMware is also working with Google and others on the Kubernetes project which supports container POD management (logical groups of containers). In addition Project Fargo is in development which is VMware’s own lightweight packaging solution for VMs. Now customers can run VMs, Docker containers, or Pivotal (Warden) containers on the same VMware infrastructure.
AT&T and VMware have a joint initiative to bring enterprise grade network security, speed and reliablity to vCloud Air customers which essentially allows customers to use AT&T VPNs with vCloud Air. There’s more to this but that’s all I noted.
VMware EVO, the next evolution in hyper-convergence has emerged.
- EVO RAIL (formerly known as project Marvin) is appliance package from VMware hardware partners that runs vSphere Suite and Virtual SAN and vCenter Log Insight. The hardware supports 4 compute/storage nodes in a 2U tall rack mounted appliance. 4 of these appliances can be connected together into a cluster. Each compute/storage node supports ~100VMs or ~150 virtual desktops. VMware states that the goal is to have an EVO RAIL implementation take at most 15 minutes from power on to running VMs. Current hardware partners include Dell, EMC (formerly named project Mystic), Inspur (China), Net One (Japan), and SuperMicro.
- EVO RACK is a data center level hardware appliance with vCloud Suite installed and includes Virtual SAN and NSX. The goal is for EVO RACK hardware to support a 2hr window from power on to a private cloud environment/datacenter deployed and running VMs. VMware expects a range of hardware partners to support EVO RACK but none were named. They did specifically mention that EVO RACK is intended to support hardware from the Open Compute Project (OCP). VMware is providing contributions to OCP to facilitate EVO RACK deployment.
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Sorry about the stream of consciousness approach to this. We got a deep dive on what’s in vSphere 6 but it was all under NDA. So this just represents what was discussed openly in keynotes and other public sessions.
Comments?