From 8th until the 11th of February VMware held its annual Partner Exchange conference. During the conference VMware detailed its roadmap for the upcoming version 5 of vSphere, VMware’s virtualization platform expected to be released in the second half of this year.
Although some of the features were already detailed earlier during VMworld , mentioning them on the conference tells us that it’s more likely that the features will make it into the product. VMware detailed the following new upcoming features:
- Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) for Storage
DRS for storage will enhance Storage vMotion in order to provide automatic load balancing for storage. Users will be able to define groups of data stores, called storage pods capable of automatic load balancing based on capacity, increasing storage utilization.
- Host-based replication for Site Recovery Manager
This feature will benefit companies which don’t use array-based storage replication, by providing asynchronous replications and protection for individual VM’s.
- Network I/O control for Virtual Machines
This feature will reserve bandwidth for high-priority workloads in a cluster if that clusters network path is overloaded.
VMware also previewed features coming in vSphere after version 5, including the Service Level Agreement (SLA) framework, which will enable users to set SLA policies for specific applications. Using a policy engine these policies and quality of service will be guaranteed. Also long-distance vMotion as a standard feature is on the roadmap for this release, long-distance vMotion is already possible using partner solutions.
Thanks to Techtarget for providing the news.