
With last week's kickoff
of the annual VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) conference in San Francisco, more
than 4,000 partner attendees from more than 80 countries found their way to the
Moscone West Conference Center to hear from VMware executives.
VMware's president and
chief operating officer, Carl Eschenbach, set the tone early for the conference by
daring partners to disrupt the industry and work towards fostering change and
growth.
With PEX in full effect,
the virtualization giant introduced a series of new products across its cloud,
network, and storage groups. Amongst the
many announcements, VMware made a much anticipated introduction to the newest
member of its flagship server virtualization product line, vSphere version 6.0. The technology received a major overhaul,
with more than 650 new features, making it - according to chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger - "the
biggest ever release of vSphere." The latest iteration also laid the
foundation for VMware's long-term plan to allow easy transfer of workloads not
only between machines but also between data centers and clouds.
A few of the standout
features found in vSphere 6.0 included:
- Scale
and Performance - This seems to come with each
major release of vSphere; and 6.0 was no exception. It now supports 64 hosts per cluster
(double that of vSphere 5.5) and 2,048 VMs per host (four times as many as
vSphere 5.5). It also increases the
maximum virtual RAM per VM fourfold, with support now up to 4TB of virtual
memory per VM. It also increased the
amount of RAM supported per host by threefold, making it 12TB with the new
release. And when it comes to CPUs,
6.0 is listed as supporting up to 480 CPUs per host and up to 128 vCPUs
per VM.
- Long-Distance Live Migration Capabilities - VMware introduced Long-Distance vMotion for live,
real-time migration of workloads over long geographic distances (i.e.
between New York and London); boasting zero downtime for larger virtual
machines with up to four virtual CPUs.
- Instant Clone Technology - Remember Project Fargo from VMworld 2014? This technology is no longer "preview,"
and it allow users to clone and provision thousands of container instances
and virtual machines to make new virtual infrastructure available in
sub-second time frames.
- Fault Tolerance -
The release also introduced support for fault tolerance with support
added for up to 4 vCPUs running in a natively supported fault tolerant way
- arguably, a very difficult nut to crack.
- 3D Graphics Support -
Adding support for designers, architects and engineers, vSphere 6 features
integration with NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology for 3D graphics support
delivered via the cloud for scalability and cost savings. Administrators can allocate a single
graphics processor to up to 8 users to provide support for Windows 2D/3D
and media-rich Windows applications on any device.
Beyond the vSphere 6.0
announcement, VMware also discussed other new ingredients that would make up the
company's software-defined data center.
VMware drilled down into
the storage side of the software-defined data center equation with the debut of
Virtual SAN (vSAN) 6.0 -- aimed at simplicity but still providing greater
capacity and performance.
Perhaps the biggest
enhancement is the introduction of its virtual storage
software, Virtual Volumes (vVols), so that the management software can see and
control the storage being used by a single virtual machine. It does so by moving the control plane off the
storage device and into the hands of the storage manager. What's interesting is that it can recognize
storage on third-party and external storage arrays inside the virtual storage
pool, and manage it centrally along with the rest of the virtualized storage in
the data center.
VMware also revealed
that its networking software, VMware NSX, can now securely bring together
public and private infrastructures under a single network via its hybrid cloud
connectors. VMware revealed on stage
that this is the "first time ever we can really deliver hybrid networking - the
ability to tie together on-premises environments with hybrid networking, to
view the public cloud as an extension of their on-premises data center."
The
company also positioned where it was going with OpenStack cloud management, and
provided more details about the VMware Integrated OpenStack software - its
commercially supported distribution which has been in beta for the past few
months. It provides deep hooks into the VMware environment. VMware said this distribution would provide smaller IT shops with little to no OpenStack or Linux experience the ability to deploy an
OpenStack cloud within minutes.
On
stage, Gelsinger said the UI was both elegant and familiar, and added, "It's
not just that it's the best of breed components, but it's also a better way to
deploy an OpenStack environment."
The
company is making the distribution free of charge to anyone running vSphere
Enterprise Plus, vSphere with Operations Management Enterprise Plus and the
vCloud Suite.
What's next for PEX?
For the first time since the event's introduction, the structure of Partner
Exchange will change. Eschenbach
announced that next year's partner event would be not one, but two
conferences. One conference will be
called the "Business Partner Summit" and focus on changes in business models;
while the other will cater towards the technologists, allowing them to get more
in-depth with the products. The latter would
be scheduled to coincide with VMworld for deeper collaboration between
technologists and business leaders.
Eschenbach described the Business Partner Summit
as a more intimate event, with more one-on-one and one-on-few engagements with
partners. Adding, "We need to change in
how we engage with you. We're evolving
to meet your demands and your needs."