VMware unveils next-generation products and services

"With today's news, VMware is further empowering IT to help organizations become more agile, responsive and profitable," said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president, Cloud Infrastructure and Management, VMware. "New products such as VMware nsx and VMware Virtual SAN will fundamentally redefine the hypervisor and its role in the data center. Along with the recently introduced VMware vCenter Log Insight, these products represent the next wave of innovation at VMware. We continue to evolve the software-defined data center architecture to address IT's critical needs - enabling them to build infrastructure that is radically simpler and more efficient while delivering the agility and flexibility to support the velocity of their businesses."

A year after introducing the software-defined data center architecture, VMware's pioneering IT framework has gained wide acceptance across global business giants and start-ups alike. In addition, customers that moved to a software-defined data center architecture have experienced greater value than those that did not. In a recent survey, for example, VMware found two-thirds of respondents reported being able to generate new revenue for their businesses when they expanded their use of virtualization1. Of those businesses able to take full advantage of a complete software-defined data center architecture, 85 percent were able to generate new revenue as high as 22 percent for their businesses.

"The development of new software and services for the auto retail and the OEM auto manufacturing industry globally is key to ADP Dealer Services business," said Bill Naughton, CIO of ADP Dealer Services. "The software-defined data center architecture enables us to deliver true Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service to our lines of business and our development organization with the requisite performance, availability, and security – all automated by software. With increased IT agility and efficiency, we're poised to meet the present and future demands of the business."

Enabling the Future of the Data Center By extending the virtualization principles of abstraction, pooling and automation across all data center resources and services, the software-defined data center architecture can simplify and speed up the provisioning and management of compute, storage and networking resources through policy-driven automation. Today, VMware is announcing four products that enable customers to virtualize infrastructure and deliver it as a service; providing efficiency, agility and control for building and operating private, hybrid and public clouds:
• VMware NSX – The Platform for Network Virtualization Today, VMware launched VMware NSX, a network virtualization platform that will deliver the entire networking and security model in software, decoupled from networking hardware. By virtualizing the network, VMware NSX delivers a new operational model for networking that breaks through current physical network barriers and will enable data center operators to achieve significantly better speed and agility, while reducing costs.

Like server virtualization, VMware's approach to network virtualization enables data center operators to treat their physical network as a pool of transport capacity that can be consumed and repurposed on-demand. Virtual networks are programmatically created, provisioned and managed, utilizing the underlying physical network for simple IP connectivity. VMware NSX brings together the best of Nicira NVP™ and VMware vCloud Network and Security™ into one unified platform, delivering the entire networking and security model (Layer 2 – Layer 7) in software. In addition, the VMware NSX virtual networks support existing applications, unchanged, on any physical network infrastructure.

Similar to other distributed VMware vSphere services, VMware NSX is built upon a groundbreaking distributed architecture where the network services are integrated with the hypervisor kernel. This enables network services to scale out in concert with the hypervisor to meet the application's needs. Since VMware NSX delivers Layer 2 - Layer 7 services entirely via software, all that customers need to do to grow their infrastructure is add more server nodes. This architecture enables VMware NSX to handle as much as 1 TB per second of network traffic per cluster of 32 hosts.

VMware NSX is an extensible platform that leverages a distributed service framework for easy insertion of partner services. VMware NSX technology partners are organized into service categories that follow the network virtualization lifecycle and include network service gateways to bridge physical and virtual environments; network security platforms that provide multi-service network security including firewall and threat prevention; application delivery services including load balancing, application delivery and WAN optimization controllers; and security services including anti-virus, IDS/IPS and vulnerability management. Today, more than 20 partners announced support or showed demonstrations of VMware NSX at VMworld. VMware NSX will be available in Q4 2013.

• VMware Virtual SAN – Delivering Simple and Dynamic Storage for Virtual Machines
Today, VMware introduced VMware Virtual SAN, a breakthrough technology that extends VMware vSphere to pool compute and direct-attached storage. VMware Virtual SAN will deliver a virtual data plane that clusters server disks and flash to create high-performance, resilient shared storage designed for virtual machines. It will unlock a new tier of converged infrastructure that enables rapid and granular scaling of compute and storage resources.

Similar to VMware NSX, VMware Virtual SAN is built on a unique distributed architecture that will enable storage services to scale out linearly with the needs of the application. Through the seamless integration of VMware Virtual SAN with VMware vSphere, VMware has redefined the role of the hypervisor to deliver virtualized compute and storage services in an elastic, flexible fashion. The distributed architecture enables VMware Virtual SAN to deliver I/O performance comparable to mid-range storage arrays while leveraging the economics of direct-attached storage.

VMware Virtual SAN offers a policy-driven control plane that automates storage consumption and management via virtual machine-centric policies. Relying on server-side solid state disks (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs), VMware Virtual SAN delivers significantly lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and test/development environments, among other use cases. Customers can start small and grow storage performance and capacity by adding servers as needed. VMware Virtual SAN will be available via a free public beta program in Q3 2013.

• VMware vCloud Suite 5.5 – New Release of the Leading Cloud Infrastructure and Management Suite
Today, VMware introduced VMware vCloud Suite 5.5, which features new and enhanced product functionality as well as broad product integrations. The VMware vCloud Suite will enable customers to build and operate a vSphere-based private cloud using the software-defined data center architecture, providing virtualized infrastructure services with built-in intelligence to automate on-demand provisioning, placement, configuration and control of applications based on policies. The comprehensive, integrated private cloud infrastructure solution simplifies IT operations while also delivering the best SLAs for all applications.

The VMware vCloud Suite is built on the foundation of VMware vSphere, the world's leading virtualization platform. With VMware vSphere 5.5, VMware continues to evolve vSphere to provide customers with the best platform for all their applications including new workloads through new and enhanced compute, availability, storage and backup capabilities. To improve the availability of business-critical applications, VMware vSphere 5.5 introduces vSphere App HA to detect and recover from application or operating system failure. New VMware vSphere Flash Read CacheTM virtualizes server-side flash to lower application latency dramatically. To further improve the response time of latency-sensitive applications, VMware vSphere 5.5 introduces a low-latency sensitivity feature. VMware vSphere 5.5 enables configurations two times the previous physical CPU, memory and NUMA node limits.

With VMware vSphere Big Data Extensions, customers can now run Apache Hadoop and Big Data workloads on VMware vSphere 5.5, alongside other applications, to achieve greater resource utilization, reliability and agility. In addition, VMware vSphere 5.5 now supports next-generation Intel ® Xeon ® processor E5 v2 and Intel® Atom™ Processor C2000.

VMware vCloud Automation CenterTM and VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite™ capabilities have been added to all VMware vCloud Suite 5.5 editions. VMware vCloud Automation Center provides the agility customers need with the control they require through a flexible solution for automating the delivery of IT applications and services. VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite offers integrated, proactive performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities for dynamic cloud environments. VMware vCloud Suite 5.5 also features new releases of VMware vCloud Connector, VMware vCloud Director®, VMware vCloud Networking and Security, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager™.

• VMware vSphere with Operations Management 5.5 – Optimize Virtual Platform Capacity
Introduced in February 2013, VMware vSphere with Operations Management combines the industry-leading vSphere virtualization platform with insight to workload capacity and health. VMware vSphere with Operations Management will enable customers to optimize their environment through integrated capacity planning while proactively monitoring and maintaining overall performance of their environment. VMware vSphere with Operations Management 5.5 will take advantage of VMware vSphere 5.5 to provide customers with the best platform for all their applications and workloads.

New Services and Certifications
VMware also announced a host of new professional services to help customers outline the strategy and technology roadmap to define and implement a software-defined data center architecture:
• New levels of Certifications including VMware Certified Associate (VCA). Available for cloud (VCA-Cloud), data center virtualization (VCA-DCV), and network virtualization (VCA-NV), these certifications offer a new credential to validate entry-level skills before progressing on to the VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certifications.
• New Technology Consulting Services focus on building an extensible platform for a software-defined data center architecture. These services address the key design and deployment elements that deliver the efficiency, agility, control and choice enabled by VMware products and technologies.
Strategic Consulting Services, through VMware Accelerate Advisory Services, that help organizations quantify the value of a software-defined data center model within their IT environments, mapping out an actionable strategy to deliver tangible business value.