Yesterday, the long awaited VMworld 2014 US conference finally started. Every year the conference has a theme. This year’s theme is “No Limits“ and during the keynote, it was made clear why.

 

One of VMware’s main goals for 2014 is to extend their current suites and services to a new level of interoperability. Also, new products were announced. In this post, we will give you a summary of new products, features and services.

 

VMware EVO: Rail & EVO: Rack

EVO_rail_logoDuring the past few months, rumors about a new product with work title “Marvin“ were spread. Marvin’s final title is called EVO: Rail. It’s a vSphere based management solution, which runs on top of a hyper-converged appliance build by qualified system builders. Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Inspur, Net One and Supermicro all offer a solution that will have the following specifications:

  • A 2U height enclosure (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance, HCIA) that will host 4 nodes.
  • The EVO: Rail solution supports up to 16 nodes.
  • Every node could support up to the next specs:
    • Dual Intel Xeon E5 2620v2 CPUs, 6-core.
    • Up to 192GB of RAM.
    • 1 SAS or SATA boot device.
    • 1 SSD and 3 SATA disks to support VSAN.
    • 1 Management NIC (RJ45) – 1Gb.
    • 2 Network interfaces -10Gb.
  • The workload per HCIA for general purposes is approximately 100 VM’s.
  • VDI workload per HCIA is approximately 250 VM’s.

 

Key features of VMware EVO: Rail:

  • A bundle of vSphere, VSAN and hardware provided by the system builder.
  • Software Defined Datacenter in one solution
  • A brand new HTML 5 based interface (no need of Flash or Java!).
  • A rapid deployment that builds a running infrastructure in only 15 minutes.
  • Non-disruptive patches & upgrades.
  • One point of support for the complete solution! (just call VMware in case of emergency).

Click here if you want to know more about VMware EVO: Rail.

Later this year, EVO: Rack will also be released. Additional to the EVO: Rail solution, Rack will also include NSX and the vCloud product suite. It will also have a higher scalability due to a higher number of nodes.

Click here if you want to know more about VMware EVO: Rack.

 

vRealize

VMware introduced vRealize as a new brand of existing products that focuses on Automation, Operation and Business, basically the whole management of the Hybrid Cloud.

The following image displays the suite with its included products:

vRealize_map

Existing products like vCloud Automation Center and vCenter Operations Management are rebranded into vRealize Automation and vRealize Operations and are bundled into one suite.

VMware will also offer the suite in a SaaS offering called vRealize Air (including Operations, Automation and Business).

 

vCloud Air & Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand

The VMware Hybrid Cloud service has been rebranded to VMware vCloud Air. Together with rebranding, Vmware has also extended the service by a pay-per-use model called Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand. The Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand service can seamlessly connect to your private cloud when extra resources are needed. Billing is based purely on what is used.

The Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand service is now in beta. To register, click here.

 

vCloud 5.8

The new announced vCloud 5.8 Suite has the following new features:

  • Improved business continuity and disaster recovery. Self service, policy based provisioning of DR tiers, increased scalability of protection and recovery capabilities, improvement on SRM integration with vCloud Automation Center. SRM can now be included as a Service in vCAC’s self service portal.
  • vCloud Automation Center 6.1.
  • Improved interoperability with NSX.
  • Enhanced next-generation applications, such as Big Data Extensions for Hadoop 2.
  • Support Assistant, a free vCenter plug-in that offers proactive support by attempts to identify issues before problems occur.

The following picture displays an overview of the the vCloud, vRealize and vCloud Air suites:

vcloud-map

 

VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO)

As OpenStack is getting more popular every day, VMware introduced a new appliance called the VMware Integrated OpenStack that further integrates the Software Defined DataCenter and OpenStack. A VMware-supported OpenStack distribution will run on top of the existing vSphere infrastructure.

Integration with vCOPS and Log Insights is included.

 

The VIO has gone in beta. Applying to the beta can be done here.

More about VMware Integrated OpenStack can be found here.

 

Other announcements

VMware also announced:

  • NSX version 6.1 for vSphere/Multi hypervisor.
  • Virtual Volumes and VSAN 2.0 beta.
  • Site Recovery Manager 5.8. Find more about SRM 5.8 here.
  • vSphere Data Protection & vSphere Replication 5.8. Find more about VDP and vSphere Replication 5.8 here.
  • vCloud Air Object Storage. Find more here.
  • Partnership with Docker and Project ‘Fargo‘. Find more about the partnership here.

All these great new features, suites and services show that this years theme was chosen wisely. ‘No Limits’ indeed.

Johan van Amersfoort Chief Evangelist

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