Today is a great day at VMware as we launch our cloud infrastructure suite, a coordinated advance in the collection of software required to build secure, efficient, and enterprise-ready clouds. Today’s announced releases include vSphere 5, vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5, vShield 5, vCloud Director 1.5, and the new vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0. These are joined by vCenter Operations, which we launched in March of this year, to complete the offering.
I’ve found myself to be a bit nostalgic during this release, thinking back to when I joined VMware in 2001. This was right in the middle of a big ESX 1.5 release (anyone out there remember this one?), and our big worries were around booting Windows NT quickly enough and handling 100Mbps networking. We have come a long way from simple virtualization, and today's release represents major advances in our innovation around cloud computing.
Below are all links to many details on the products we’re announcing today but there are a few higher-level highlights from my perspective:
-
This vSphere 5 release marks an important milestone in virtualization performance. With its 'monster' VMs (32 vCPUs, 1TB of virtual RAM, and very substantial storage and networking speeds), we’re ready to take on even the most demanding of applications.
-
We have made great strides on delivering the agility that is so attractive in a cloud computing environment, with special focus on intelligent “policy-based” automation, which we are calling intelligent policy management. New innovations include Auto-Deploy, Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS capabilities, all of which help your cloud satisfy extreme elasticity needs and tight performance guarantees without manual intervention.
-
And I am particularly proud that VMware is the first company to offer a “suite” of cloud computing products. Traditionally companies have had to select, install, and cobble together disparate software tools themselves. With this release, we’re helping customers create their clouds in a simpler and more efficient manner, decreasing the time to get started and ensuring a more seamless experience once up and running.
-
All of these product offerings, VMware vSphere 5 together with the updated cloud infrastructure suite, are expected to be available in Q3, 2011.
These highlights and the 200+ new capabilities that you can read about below are a tribute to our global product teams and their relentless focus on these offerings over the last two years. I’m quite proud of them all and made this little video to help you meet the suite and get a little tour of our Palo Alto campus along the way.
Thanks for your time, and I hope you take the chance to learn even more about our new offerings below.
Cheers,
Steve
More about this latest version of vSphere:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/overview.html
This release of vSphere removes the service console. Learn more about the transition from the traditional ESX architecture to the lighter weight ESXi:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/esxi-and-esx/overview.html
Here’s more about vShield and how it can help provide trust in the cloud:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vshield/overview.html
This second release of vCloud Director has a number of improvements:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-director/overview.html
Here’s where you can learn all about the new vSphere Storage Appliance:
http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/vsphere-storage-appliance/overview.html
Learn more about vSphere replication and other new capabilities in vCenter Site Recovery Manager:
http://www.vmware.com/products/site-recovery-manager/
And along the way, we’re continuing to advance many other features including High Availability (http://www.vmware.com/products/high-availability/overview.html) and load balancing (http://www.vmware.com/technical-resources/virtualization-topics/high-availability/load-balancing/load-balancing.html)