VMware extends Unified Hybrid Cloud Platform

Today at VMworld 2015, VMware announced new public cloud services and software-defined solutions for the company’s unified hybrid cloud platform that enable customers to build applications faster, improve IT security, rapidly recover from disasters and drive meaningful business value.

“Digital business transformation is creating new opportunities and new risks across every industry,” said Raghu Raghuram, Executive VP and GM, Software-Defined Data Center Division, VMware. “Applications are the fuel of this digital business transformation. With our One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device strategy and our unified hybrid cloud platform, VMware is empowering the next wave of industry leaders to deliver applications with the stability, security and reliability of an enterprise, while allowing organisations to innovate with the agility of a startup.”

VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform enables customers to create one consistent environment based on VMware vSphere across the private and public cloud to securely build, run and deliver any traditional or cloud-native application. VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform is built on a software-defined data centre architecture, and offers customers openness and choice in how to build and manage applications and cloud environments based on their needs.

New or expanded services for VMware vCloud Air, the public cloud component of VMware’s unified platform include:

 Enhancements for VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery Services

o Disaster Recovery OnDemand: VMware will add a pay-for-what-you-consume pricing option to VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery. Customers will pay a flat fee for each virtual machine (VM) protected and the amount of storage consumed by the VMs. When a disaster recovery (DR) test is run or a DR event occurs, customers will only pay for the compute consumed when VMs are running.

o Site Recovery Manager Air: Site Recovery Manager Air is a software as a service offering that will provide VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery customers with a management solution for designing, testing, executing and orchestrating centralised business continuity and disaster recovery plans. VMware Site Recovery Manager Air will enable fast, reliable and orchestrated recovery of multi-VM applications and data centres protected in VMware vCloud Air.

 VMware vCloud Air Object Storage – This portfolio of scalable, reliable and cost effective storage services for unstructured data. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by Google Cloud Platform is based on Google Cloud Storage and integrated into vCloud Air OnDemand. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by EMC is based on EMC ViPR, offered by EMC Cloud Services and integrated into vCloud Air OnDemand. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage will be easy to setup and exceptionally durable and available, and will reduce the need for data protection with built-in redundancy. It will support global access use cases.

 VMware vCloud Air SQL – VMware vCloud Air SQL is a new database as a service offering that will provide easy access to scalable, cloud-hosted relational databases. Delivered in a pay-as-you-go model, and built on vSphere, vCloud Air SQL will support hybrid data solutions that seamlessly and securely extend on-premises databases to the cloud. VMware vCloud Air SQL will support Microsoft SQL Server, with plans to support other relational databases in the future.

Research indicates the software-defined data centre is going mainstream, as customers move from virtualising compute resources to implementing storage and network virtualisation. A new report by Research and Markets notes that the software-defined data centre market will hit US$77.18 billion by the year 2020, which is up from the US$21.78 billion it’s expected to rake in for 2015. The trend is well aligned with VMware's new product releases for the software-defined data centre:

 VMware NSX 6.2 – VMware NSX 6.2 enables application continuity through disaster recovery and metro-pooling for more efficient use of resources throughout a single data centre and across data centres. With VMware NSX, customers can reduce recovery time objectives by as much as 80%*. VMware NSX 6.2 also adds better integration with physical infrastructure, enabling simplified and consistent operations for the entire data centre network and the extension of micro-segmentation to physical servers. Finally, new capabilities such as Traceflow and Central CLI further simplify operations and visibility.

 VMware vRealize Operations 6.1 – VMware vRealize Operations 6.1 will deliver a consistent management framework as organisations adopt technologies for the hybrid cloud. With the new Intelligent Workload Placement capability, VMware vRealize Operations will match the workload to a customer’s specific IT and business needs, and recommend the best placement location. Proactive Rebalancing enables customers to continually meet those needs. Operating system and application monitoring will be available natively in VMware vRealize Operations and predictive analytics help IT proactively identify and avoid potential issues across infrastructure and application stacks from a unified self-learning management solution.

 vRealize Log Insight 3 – New features in vRealize Log Insight 3 will include double the scale and performance to 15,000 messages per second, improvements in fault tolerance around clustering, analytics improvements with new charting options and query snapshots, improved integration with vRealize Operations, plus improvements in big data style query execution.

 VMware Integrated OpenStack 2 – VMware Integrated OpenStack 2 will be based on OpenStack Kilo, making it current with upstream OpenStack code, and will include an industry-first seamless upgrade capability that will address one of the largest deployment and operational challenges for OpenStack clouds. VMware Integrated OpenStack will also include enhancements such as load-balancing as a service, Ceilometer and Heat Auto Scaling to make VMware-based OpenStack clouds more scalable, feature-rich and resilient. VMware also announced VMware Integrated OpenStack will be available to service providers through the VMware vCloud Air Network programme.

 VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 – Integrates with VMware NSX 6.2, enabling IT to use network virtualisation to simplify disaster recovery management and accelerate recovery in the software-defined data centre. VMware Site Recovery Manager will orchestrate the live migration of VMs at scale between sites by automating cross-vCenter vMotion operations, enabling zero downtime disaster avoidance and data centre migrations. VMware Site Recovery Manager will interoperate with VMware vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management. VMware Site Recovery Manager will also add support for stretched cluster solutions including EMC VPLEX, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and IBM San Volume Controller.

 VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering – enabling ecosystem partners including Asigra, EMC, Infinio, PrimaryIO, Samsung, SanDisk and StorageCraft to offer third party software-based data services such as replication and caching. These data services will be fully integrated in vSphere and managed through vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management, which is the same framework used to manage all the software-defined storage services in vSphere.

“As a result of the success and comfort level IT organisations are having with software-defined data centre strategies and the increasing simplicity of cloud solutions fueled by core virtualisation, we are witnessing an IT infrastructure and information security sea-change taking place. VMware is one of the companies that is driving this IT transformation. VMware’s strategy to combine a platform for achieving a unified hybrid cloud with business mobility solutions that enable organizations to extend secure access to applications and information to any device or user is resonating with customers, and increasingly making them a more strategic IT partner.” – Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst at ESG.

VMware also previewed Project Skyscraper, a new set of hybrid cloud capabilities for vSphere. These new capabilities will enable customers to extend their data centre to the public cloud and seamlessly operate across boundaries while providing enterprise-level security and business continuity. 

Interested?

Read the VMware blog on Project Skyscraper

 VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by Google Cloud Platform is generally available.

 VMware vCloud Air SQL is available now as part of an early access programme.

 VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by EMC is expected to be available as part of an early access programme in Q3 2015.

 VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery OnDemand and Site Recovery Manager Air are expected to be available as part of early access programmes in Q4 2015.

 VMware NSX 6.2 is generally available and can be purchased with either a perpetual or term license. List pricing for a perpetual license starts at US$$4,995 per CPU and list price for a term license starts at US$$34 per VM per month, with volume discounts available.

 VMware Integrated OpenStack 2, Virtual SAN 6.1, vRealize Operations 6.1, vRealize Log Insight 3, Site Recovery Manager 6.1 and VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering are all expected to be generally available in Q3 2015.

Interested?

Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about VMware's open source efforts around container delivery

Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about VMware's software-defined data centre portfolio

*Based on internal estimates