The 10th edition of VMworld US took place in San Francisco between 25 and 29 of August 2013, with over 21,000 attendees this event confirmed that the market expectations for VMware is comparable to the one on Apple which has been answered with the presence on stage of large customers such eBay, Citi and GE and the announcement of several new releases.
The intent of this article is to briefly summarize all the major releases in this edition:
- vSphere 5.5: is the core release on which VMware introduces all the new technologies at server virtualization level. While not introducing any price changes this new release presents 4 new major features:
- Support for Reliable Memory Technology to optimize the placement of the VMkernel and other critical components.
- vSphere Flash Read Cache, a new storage solution that enables the pooling of multiple flash-based devices in a single vSphere Flash Resource.
- Integration of Virtual SAN technology that allows the aggregation of local storage in a single shared datastore.
- vSphere Big Data Extensions that allows the deployment and management of Hadoop clusters within vSphere interfaces.
This release bring also the complete rewrite of the Single Sign On component and some interesting enhancements of vSphere Replication component and Site Recovery Manager (now reached 5.5) like the support for replica versioning and vSAN technology.
More details in the related post. - vCloud Suite 5.5: is the suite that provides all the components needed for building and running a private cloud infrastructure based on VMware vSphere. First of all now vCloud Automation Center is part of all vCloud Suite editions, providing automation functionalities with different features available in a per edition basis (Standard, Advanced and Enterprise).
vCloud Director 5.5 introduces a set of new capabilities and is not a standalone product anymore along with vCloud Networking and Security. - VMware NSX: is the new network virtualization platform from VMware, equated to ESX as a network hypervisor, leverages technologies from Nicira acquisition and VMware vCloud Network and Security to provide switching, bridging, routing and firewall.
More details in the related post. - vCloud Hybrid Service: probably the most relevant announcement in this sector, is VMware’s Public IaaS service targeted to enterprise customers. Located, for now, only in the US has its strong point in being based on the same technologies that many organizations use in their on-premises infrastructures. Sharing the same hypervisor will ease workload mobility inside and outside companies’ boundaries providing an incentive to experience this kind of opportunity.
More details in the related post.