The Console: The Software-Defined Datacenter Meets VMworld

The Console: The Software-Defined Datacenter Meets VMworld:

Posted by Steve Herrod

Chief Technology Officer

It’s my favorite time of year, again – VMworld! VMware is proud to host its annual conference in San Francisco this week where we get the opportunity to share the company’s vision, strategy and product portfolio with the industry, while interacting with tens of thousands of our best customers and partners. I have the pleasure of keynoting Day 1 and Day 2 of VMworld along with Paul Maritz and Pat Gelsinger.
My talk today on Day 1 focused on the software-defined datacenter (SDDC). A software-defined datacenter is where all infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, and the control of this datacenter is entirely automated by software.
VMware is making the software-defined datacenter a reality with the vCloud Suite announced today. The vCloud Suite brings together what customers need to build, operate and manage cloud infrastructure – virtualization, software-defined datacenter services, policy-based provisioning, disaster recovery, and applications and operations management.

During my keynote, I spoke about the vCloud Suite technologies available today and in the future. Here are some of the highlights:
Software-Defined Compute

• Customers recognize that vSphere is the best place to run all applications. With the latest release of vSphere 5.1 there are numerous new features and technical enhancements that all applications can benefit from.

• Monster VM capabilities are back and better than ever! vSphere 5.1 now supports 64 VCPUS and it also is the first to hit record performance numbers – 1.05M IOPS from a single VM. It’s all about I/O, and you can check out our Performance team’s blog to learn more about this awesome benchmark.

• In addition to today’s applications we are also thinking about future applications. vSphere is an asset to both PaaS environments and Big Data, and  is backbone of VMware’s Open PaaS offering, CloudFoundry. We’re also making Hadoop run well on vSphere, as you’ve heard from our recent announcement of Project Serengeti. For developers thinking about next-generation applications, think about vCloud Suite.

Software-Defined Storage & Availability

• We’re making storage a first-class citizen in the datacenter. I’ll show a preview of our Virtual SAN Technology, Virtual Volumes and Virtual Flash. At a high-level these efforts let network attached storage better leverage the server resources – and both VMware and our partners are making this possible.

• On the Availability front, I encourage all SMB attendees to check out Russ Stockdale’s VMworld Spotlight Session where you’ll have a chance to see a tech preview of DR to the Cloud for SMBs.

Software-Defined Networking & Security

• We’re enabling logical networks to work best in virtual environments, and with the ecosystem. vCloud Security and Networking is paving the way for L2 and L3, and we see real value in how you plug in L4-L7 services into logical networks, automate all this and then pull these services together. This is available now and I’ll demo this capability on stage. For a deeper dive on this area, check out the blog published today by my CTO colleague Allwyn Sequeira.

Management

• Management wraps all of these software-defined services together! We give our customers the ability to create clouds, deploy applications and pay attention to ongoing operations.
• vCloud Director 5.1 and vCenter 5.1 feature new enhancements and together make your infrastructure available as Virtual Datacenters. Customers will be pleased to know that the vCloud API is more extensible and can now be used with other clouds.
• vFabric Application Director can be used to deploy applications via an easy-to-use blueprint and is a key part of the vCloud Suite. vCenter Operations continues to handle the ongoing operations of a dynamic environment within a SDDC.
• To hear more about managing a SDDC, please read another great blog published today by Kit Colbert, a long-time engineer at VMware.

Multi-cloud

• We are also making vCloud Connector part of the vCloud Suite in order to address the need for management of hybrid cloud environments. This is particularly timely as our vCloud Datacenter Service Partner list grew today. We welcome T-Systems as the latest to share our hybrid cloud story.
• We believe standardization across the datacenter is critical if you’re a customer looking for efficiency and reduced complexity. However, we recognize the world has become more heterogeneous and we see a need for open platforms.
•  We are extending automation and orchestration (via DynamicOps) as well as software-defined networking (via Nicira] to OpenStack, other clouds and even physical infrastructure.

Innovation
What’s the secret sauce behind a lot of these technologies? VMware Innovation. Innovation is a big focus for the company, especially VMware’s R&D and Office of the CTO. A lot of the cool innovative projects happening at VMware are featured in the Innovation Lounge and in Julia Austin’s Spotlight Session. I encourage attendees to check it out.
A lot going on this week at VMworld 2012! If you aren’t in San Francisco, you can tune into watch my live keynote at VMware NOW or catch the replay afterwards. I’m looking forward to some great conversations with our customers and partners this week.