The much anticipated launch of vSphere 5 has happened, but now what? What are the new features that will help your company accelerate their adoption of the cloud.
First of all, the release date for this is targeted for August. That’s great timing considering there is a really cool conference that VMware puts on at the end of the month. VMware is aiming for more performance scaling and security from their product. Businesses are starting to deploy critical applications on virtualized platforms more and more these days, and VMware is accelerating that adoption in vSphere 5. Customers should feel confident when deploying these apps which will in turn give your Business Cloud Agility and respond to the needs of your customers much faster than ever before. Trust is also a huge deal in vSphere, and customers can feel confident moving in the cloud direction. There will be other releases surrounding vSphere 5 including SRM 5, vShield 5 and vCloud Director 1.5.
Here are some key points that vSphere 5 will offer:
Service Console – Gone. We all knew this was going to happen. Much more hardened security wise, smaller foot print, single package. Our company has removed all of the dependencies from our integrations, so no worries there.
vSphere Storage Appliance – Smaller customers can take advantage of using local disks in their servers as shared storage. It is a licensed feature available in Standard Edition or higher. Its really targeted for customers that have 2-3 servers in a remote office set up. Its only vSphere storage, nothing else. You buy a server, buy some disks, and you have shared storage. That simple.
More vCPU’s, more Memory – 32 per virtual machine with 1TB of RAM – WOW!! There isn’t anything out there you can’t virtualize! NO EXCUSES!! Business critical apps, go for IT! We are doing it, in some MAJOR deployments surrounding a major Database product!
Auto Deploy – Gives the ability to have stateless ESX Clusters. Much like UCS does for server deployments, vSphere 5 will do for deploying ESX hosts.
VASA -vStorage API for Storage Awareness – vSphere will know what the characteristics of the storage array. Very important for Storage DRS.
Storage DRS – Uses VASA information or administrative information to group datastores into datastore clusters, automating the initial placement of a VM, and then automatically redistributes them across the same grade of LUN’s /Filesystems dynamically to balance load. SIOC will be turned on by default with this. Other storage changes will include an expansion of VAAI, new virtual machine file system (VMFS-5), Storage I/O Control, storage vMotion enhancements, and NFS scale-out improvements.
VAAI – New hardware assists for Block and NAS. New Thin Provision stun and Space reclamation for Block storage. New NAS capabilities include Full cloning, extended statistics, and space reservation.
vCloud Director 1.5 will be getting some enhancements as well including broadened API’s and support for Linked Clones. Reduces the time to deploy virtual machines and takes up less space. vCD will also increase the ability to link instances together, allowing multitenant federated vCloud. There will also be a module for vCenter Orchestrator allowing automation of all vCD actions.
Site Recovery Manager 5 will include Automated Failback, and Workload Mobility workflows. This gives you the ability to move workloads between sites. Another major update is a Host Based Replication. They are introducing a Native VM level replication. You do have to use SRM 5 with this, however. It gives you about a 15-60 minute RPO. The UI is pretty simple to use. I can see a really good use case for customers who have older equipment they want to still utilize for DR. Take newly purchased servers and deploy at the production site, and move the old stuff down to DR.
VMware vShield 5 is getting some upgrades as well. Improved management of vShield 5 and the ability to scan VM’s for secure data and quarantine them in trust zones with vShield App 5.0. This was developed in conjunction with the RSA folks embedding RSA’s DLP & Envision products.
There are a lot of new features in vSphere 5 that extend capabilities to customers that have not had the opportunity before. Many of the vendors out there take these capabilities to the next level, including, and exceedingly more than most, my company. All of these new features can be used in a variety of different environments for multiple situations. I would encourage you to take a deeper look at some of these new features and engage myself or any of my team members and discuss how we can accelerate your business to the next level, and ultimately, move you further on your journey to the cloud.
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