Major Platform and Product Upgrades Strengthen Infrastructure Foundation for the Cloud Computing Era
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.,: At a live event today, VMware CEO Paul Maritz unveiled VMware vSphere® 5 and a comprehensive suite of cloud infrastructure technologies built to help customers transform IT to drive greater efficiency of existing investments and improve operational agility.
With nearly 200 new and enhanced capabilities, VMware vSphere 5 will continue to set the standard in virtualization, delivering better application performance and availability for all business-critical applications while automating the management of an increasingly broad pool of datacenter resources. VMware today also announced VMware vShield™ 5, VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5, and VMware vCloud® Director 1.5, products that together with VMware vSphere 5 will amplify the value customers can realize from virtualized resources by enabling cloud-scale operations.
“The market has fully embraced virtualization as a key transformative technology at the heart of the next era of computing,” said Paul Maritz, VMware CEO. “With vSphere® 5 and our cloud infrastructure suite, VMware is helping customers accelerate towards more efficient and automated cloud infrastructure, redefining how resources are managed and secured, and ultimately, driving a more productive relationship between IT and the businesses they serve.”
The VMware cloud infrastructure suite will help organizations build intelligent virtual infrastructures, which infuse highly virtualized environments with the automation, self-service and security capabilities customers need to:
- Deploy Business-Critical Applications with Confidence – Dramatic performance and scalability gains in VMware vSphere 5 will enable customers to run even the most resource-intensive business-critical applications in virtual and cloud environments.
- Respond to the Needs of the Business Faster with Cloud Agility – From rapidly provisioning new resources to intelligently managing ongoing operations, VMware’s cloud infrastructure suite will radically simplify infrastructure management.
- Move to Cloud Computing with Trust – VMware is evolving security from a physical model to a virtual software model, driven and managed by policy, enabling customers to trust in the security of their applications and data regardless of where they reside or how frequently they move across various private, public and hybrid cloud environments.
“A recent Gartner contextual research study revealed that end user organizations overwhelmingly consider x86 virtualization an essential foundational component of private cloud infrastructure-as-a-service architectures,” said Chris Wolf, Research VP, Gartner. “In addition, many organizations consider the x86 VM as the default infrastructure platform for new applications. Cost savings and business agility remain the two most frequently cited drivers behind both virtualization and cloud computing investments.”
VMware vSphere 5: Advancing the Cloud Infrastructure Foundation
VMware vSphere, the most trusted, most widely deployed virtualization platform in the world, forms the foundation of VMware’s cloud infrastructure suite. Architected to support the broadest range of virtual and cloud infrastructure needs, VMware vSphere is broadly utilized by enterprises, small and midsized businesses (SMBs), public cloud service providers and as the foundation for the growing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) market. An increasing number of customers are standardizing on VMware vSphere as their strategic IT platform.
VMware vSphere 5 will support virtual machines (VMs) that are up to four times more powerful than previous versions with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs. These VMs will be able to process in excess of 1 million I/O operations per second, which will far surpass the requirements of even the most resource-intensive applications. When combined with VMware vSphere 5’s enhanced, simplified High Availability, these VM scalability and performance gains will allow customers to run their most business-critical applications with confidence in their performance and availability.
VMware vSphere 5 will also introduce three new flagship features that extend the platform’s unique datacenter resource management capabilities, delivering intelligent policy management to support an automated “set it and forget it” approach to managing datacenter resources, including server deployment and storage management. Customers define policies and establish the operating parameters, and VMware vSphere 5 does the rest. VMware vSphere 5’s new Auto-Deploy, Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS features can save a customer with a 1,000-VM environment up to a full year of administrator time.
“With VMware vSphere® 5 and the cloud infrastructure suite, the task of virtualizing our business-critical applications will be greatly simplified,” said YP Chien, information intelligence manager, Kingston Technology. “This will help accelerate Kingston Technology’s journey into cloud computing to achieve ultimate operational performance and business agility.”
The Comprehensive Cloud Infrastructure Suite
All built upon the foundation of VMware vSphere 5, VMware is bringing to market a comprehensive suite of technologies that will deliver the automation, self-service and security capabilities customers need:
- VMware vShield 5 – Addressing the top enterprise concerns about cloud computing – security, control and compliance – the vShield product family overcomes the limits of traditional security solutions by delivering an adaptive, software-based security model designed for virtual and cloud environments. vShield 5 will include new Data Security capabilities that will enable IT to quickly identify risk exposures resulting from unprotected sensitive data, isolate applications with different levels of trust and migrate security policies as data and applications move between different virtual systems and apply the same policies in public clouds.
- VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 – Extending this proven disaster recovery solution, vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 will introduce built-in VMware vSphere replication capabilities that will allow customers to double the number of protected applications for the same cost while supporting heterogeneous storage configurations in the primary and backup sites. New automated failback and planned migration capabilities will allow customers to orchestrate migrations for disaster avoidance and to support planned maintenance activities and datacenter consolidations.
- VMware vCloud Director 1.5 – Enabling a self-service model for provisioning infrastructure services across internal and external sources, VMware vCloud Director 1.5 will enable IT to dramatically reduce the time required to provision new servers. New Linked Clone capabilities will reduce provisioning time to as few as 5 seconds, while also reducing storage costs by as much as 60 percent, all while managing resources from a single pane of glass.
In a separate announcement VMware today introduced the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance™, a new software product that will bring the rich business continuity and automated resource management capabilities of VMware vSphere to SMBs without the cost and complexity of shared storage. The new VMware vSphere Storage Appliance will transform server internal storage into shared pools of storage enabling SMB customers to take full advantage of the unique business continuity and automation capabilities of VMware vSphere, including High Availability, vMotion®, and Distributed Resource Scheduler™.
VMware’s cloud infrastructure suite is supported by more than 25,000 partners, including technology partners and independent software vendors (ISVs), solution providers, service providers, and systems integrators, as well as every major global hardware manufacturer. VMware’s partner community continues to mature as the company consistently sets the bar for innovation in virtualization and cloud technologies.
Learn more about this robust community of support for VMware’s cloud infrastructure suite.
New Licensing Model Extends Benefits of Pooling Beyond Technology
With the introduction of VMware vSphere 5, VMware is evolving the product’s licensing to lay the foundation for customers to adopt a more “cloud-like” IT cost model based on consumption and value rather than physical components and capacity. VMware vSphere 5 will continue to be licensed per processor (CPU), however, VMware is eliminating the current, restrictive physical entitlements of CPU cores and physical RAM per server and replacing them with a single, virtualization-based entitlement of pooled virtual memory, or vRAM.
Pooled vRAM is the total amount of memory configured to all VMs in a customer’s environment. Each VMware vSphere 5 CPU license will entitle the purchaser to a specific amount of vRAM, which can be pooled across the entire vSphere environment to enable a true cloud or utility based IT consumption model. There are no restrictions on how vRAM capacity can be distributed among VMs: a customer can configure many small VMs or one large VM. VMware vSphere has made it possible for customers to maximize hardware utilization and efficiency by pooling CPU, memory, storage and networking. With these licensing changes, VMware is extending the concept of pooling – one of the foundational elements of cloud computing – beyond technology to the business, allowing the pooling of licenses for maximum utilization and value.
Because VMware vSphere 5 is still licensed on a per-CPU basis, customers can continue leveraging established purchasing, deployment and license-management processes. For more information on VMware vSphere 5 licensing, visit: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf
Availability
VMware vSphere 5 together with the updated cloud infrastructure suite is expected to be available in Q3 2011.