What’s New with VMware? vSphere 6.0
VMware’s long awaited release of vSphere 6.0 is almost 6 months old now, yet it is still in the spotlight. It is one of the most searched (IT) terms. Launched in February, vSphere is the first major upgrade to the flagship product, and it comes with no less than 358 upgrades!
As a corporate strategy, VMware is continuing with its vision – the software-defined data center. Within the software-defined data center model are the key components: compute, storage, management, and network. It appears VMware is focusing on management, which makes sense as the product matures and gains widespread adoption. Additionally, we see WMware focusing on IT outcomes. Among the top CIO issues of 2015, Security and Change Management are frequently mentioned. VMware is aligning solutions in these areas.
Notable upgrades to vSphere 6.0:
- Long Distance Motion
- Content Library – an organized, central repository for ISO’s and templates
- Web Client – cooler and faster
- Virtual Volumes (VVOLS)
- Security Enhancements
- Virtual SAN enhancements
Long distance VMotion plays a key role in disaster avoidance, load balancing over multiple sites and helps with migrations.
In our opinion, a significant enhancement is Virtual Volumes or VVOLS. VVOLS is a new way to attach to your storage. In the past is was VMFS or NFS. Now VVOLS is the game changer! It enables you to manage IOPS, latency, throughput and targets through VMware. In essence, you can manage and align Quality of Service to the storage. Virtually (pun intended) all the major storage vendors (Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, NexGen, Nimble, Pure and SolidFire) are working towards this.
We anticipate that 20% of current VMware customers will upgrade to v6.0 by the end of 2015 and an additional 40% in 2016. We already have clients on 6.0 and the overall impressions have been positive.
See what’s new with 6.0 and what impact it may play on upcoming hardward and software purchases. if you are intereste, we are conducting “What’s New with VSphere 6.0?” as an education series. The sessions typically run an hour or less and are targeted specifically to your environment.