VMworld 2015 Day 1 Recap and Announcements

HUGE thanks to Doug Davis, Senior Technical Account Manager with VMware for compiling the data!

Photon Platform - Introducing the Photon Platform: Purpose-Built for Running Cloud-Native Applications

For DevOps and software as a service (SaaS) organizations, running cloud-native applications at scale requires a container-optimized platform developed for high churn workloads and an API-first model. VMware will today demonstrate the VMware Photon Platform, which is purpose-built to meet this emerging need and features "just the right level of functionality" to run cloud-native applications at scale. Showcased as a technology preview, the VMware Photon Platform is designed for DevOps teams planning to build out large pools of commodity computing capacity that solely run cloud-native applications. DevOps teams will have a choice of open container orchestration frameworks including Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos and Cloud Foundry to run on the platform. The technology -- components of which will be open sourced -- will also support dynamic continuous integration environments, platform as a service (PaaS) or SaaS deployments, and sizable data analytics clusters running Hadoop or Spark.

The VMware Photon Platform, which will include future integrations with VMware NSX, VMware Virtual SAN and VMware vRealize Suite, features the following technologies:

VMware Photon Controller - A multi-tenant, API-driven control plane optimized for scale, churn and high-availability. Automation-savvy DevOps teams will be able to speed the creation of thousands of new containers per minute and support hundreds of thousands of total simultaneous workloads. The controller will be released as an open source project to help encourage broad input, testing and adoption from customers, partners and the community at large. The technology will also incorporate Project Lightwave, which provides enterprise-grade trust and security for containers.

VMware Photon Machine - This technology will include a new ESX Microvisor based on the proven core of VMware ESXi. It also includes Project Photon OS, a lightweight Linux operating system for containerized applications and optimized for VMware environments.

VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery Services:

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 VM protected and the amount of storage consumed by the VMs. When a DR test is run or a DR event occurs, customers will only pay for the compute consumed when VMs are running.

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 comprehensive management solution for designing, testing, executing and orchestrating centralized business continuity and disaster recovery plans. VMware Site Recovery Manager Air will enable fast, reliable and orchestrated recovery of multi-VM applications and data centers protected in VMware vCloud Air.

VMware vCloud Air Object Storage: VMware vCloud Air Object Storage is a portfolio of highly 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 with easy access from any device, anywhere, anytime.

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 cost-efficient pay-as-you-go model, and built on the trusted foundation of 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 a variety of memory, compute and storage options, and plans to support other relational databases in the future.

VMware NSX™ 6.2 - VMware NSX 6.2 enables organizations to achieve application continuity through disaster recovery and metro-pooling for more efficient use of resources throughout a single data center and across data centers. With VMware NSX, customers can reduce recovery time objectives by as much as 80 percent1. VMware NSX 6.2 also adds better integration with physical infrastructure, enabling simplified and consistent operations for the entire data center network and the extension of micro-segmentation to physical servers. Finally, new capabilities such as Traceflow and Central CLI further simplify operations and visibility. Read this blog to learn more about VMware NSX 6.2.

VMware vRealize™ Operations™ 6.1 - VMware vRealize Operations 6.1 will deliver a consistent management framework as organizations evolve from the private cloud and 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. For more information, read VMworld 2015: Intelligent Workload Management with vRealize Operations 6.1.

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, and 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, performant and resilient. VMware also announced VMware Integrated OpenStack will be available to service providers through the VMware vCloud Air Network program.

VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 - VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 will integrate with VMware NSX 6.2, enabling IT to use network virtualization to simplify disaster recovery management and accelerate recovery in the software-defined data center. 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 center migrations. VMware Site Recovery Manager will interoperate with VMware vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management to enable automatic, policy-based disaster protection for VMs. VMware Site Recovery Manager will now add support for stretched cluster solutions including EMC VPLEX, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and IBM San Volume Controller.

VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering - VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering will enable 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.

Technology Preview - Project Skyscraper - Today at VMworld 2015, VMware revealed a technology preview of Project Skyscraper, a new set of innovative hybrid cloud capabilities for vSphere. These new capabilities will enable customers to extend their data center to the public cloud and seamlessly operate across boundaries while providing enterprise-level security and business continuity. At VMworld, the company will demonstrate live workload migration through Cross-Cloud vMotion and Content Sync across a private cloud and vCloud Air.

VMware vSphere Integrated Containers: Unveiled today as a technology preview, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will enable IT teams to support any application, including containerized applications, on a common infrastructure.

The technology can accelerate container initiatives by enabling IT teams to take advantage of their existing investments in VMware infrastructure, people, processes and management tools. The solution will also empower developers with the flexibility, portability and speed containers deliver. VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will easily integrate with other container ecosystem solutions including CoreOS Tectonic, Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere's Data Center Operating System and Cloud Foundry.

VMware vSphere Integrated Containers represents a complementary set of cloud-native technologies featuring Project Bonneville, Project Photon OS (formerly Project Photon), and VMware's Instant Clone technology (a feature of VMware vSphere 6) that will bring together the best of VMware vSphere with containers. With VMware vSphere at its foundation, the new offering will help IT operations team meet the following enterprise requirements for containers:

Security and Isolation - Assuring the integrity and authenticity of containers and their underlying infrastructure, Project Bonneville, a technology preview, isolates and starts up each container in a virtual machine with minimal overhead using the Instant Clone feature of VMware vSphere 6.

Storage and Data Persistence - While many container services are stateless today, customers have the desire to enable stateful services to support cloud-native databases. VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will enable provisioning of persistent data volumes for containers in VMware vSphere environments. This will enable IT operations and development teams to take advantage of the speed and portability of containerized applications in conjunction with highly resilient VMware vSphere storage, including VMware Virtual SAN™ and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes™-enabled external storage.

Networking - VMware NSX™ supports production container deployments today. With VMware NSX, IT can apply fine-grained network micro-segmentation and policy-based security to cloud-native applications. Additionally, VMware NSX provides IT with greater visibility into the behavior of containers. Finally, with VMware NSX, containers can be integrated with the rest of the data center, and can be connected to quarantine, forensics and/or monitoring networks for additional monitoring and troubleshooting.

Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) – IT teams will be able to assure service-level agreements for container workloads with Vmware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler as well as reduce planned and unplanned downtime with Vmware vSphere High Availability and Vmware vSphere vMotion®.

Management - Administrators will be able to use VMware vCenter Server™ to view and manage their containers without the need for new tools or additional training through Project Bonneville, which will enable the seamless integration of containers into VMware vSphere. Customers can further achieve consistent management and configuration compliance across private and public clouds using the VMware vRealize™ Suite.

By bringing together all the necessary capabilities into a single solution to run enterprise-class containers in production, VMware will help IT organizations to accelerate time to value, reduce risk and enable long-term viability for their container initiatives. Additionally, IT teams will have tremendous choice and flexibility over the hardware, operating systems and third-party software certified for VMware vSphere.

VMware EVO SDDC - Previously code named VMware EVO: RACK™, VMware EVO SDDC will be a fully automated software suite for delivering the software-defined data center as an integrated system. Enterprises and service providers will be able to use VMware EVO SDDC to deploy a software-defined data center at scale. With VMware EVO SDDC, IT organizations can meet key data center scale initiatives, ranging from application and infrastructure delivery automation to business mobility to high availability and resilient infrastructure, without compromising security, control or choice.

"Organizations have adopted the software-defined data center architecture to become more agile, responsive and profitable," said John Gilmartin, vice president and general manager, Integrated Systems Business Unit, VMware. "VMware EVO SDDC will bring to bear the entirety of our innovations across our software-defined data center portfolio in a comprehensive and integrated system that will be easy to deploy, operate and scale."

VMware EVO SDDC will include VMware EVO SDDC Manager™, a new intelligent automation engine that will simplify and significantly reduce the time required for power-up, provisioning and monitoring of virtual and physical resources, including software, servers, top-of-rack and spine switches. The EVO SDDC Manager will pool resources across multiple racks as a single "virtual rack" and can dynamically carve out workload domain capacity based on availability and performance requirements. VMware EVO SDDC Manager will provide automated lifecycle management of the entire hardware and VMware integrated software stack, including:

Compute - VMware vSphere, the industry-defining virtualization solution, delivers a highly available, resilient, on-demand cloud infrastructure to run, protect and manage any application from business-critical to cloud-native applications.

Storage - VMware Virtual SAN is the ideal storage platform for virtual machines, including business-critical applications. A 64-node VMware Virtual SAN cluster exceeds eight petabytes of storage capacity while delivering up to seven million input/output operations per second (IOPS) with nearly perfect linear scalability.

Networking - VMware NSX is helping hundreds of customers realize the full potential of a software-defined data center. Integrated within VMware EVO SDDC, VMware NSX reduces the time to provision multi-tier networking and security services from weeks to seconds, abstracting virtual networks from the underlying physical network. VMware NSX also brings security inside the data center through micro-segmentation and automated fine-grained policies tied to the virtual machines.

Cloud Management - VMware vRealize™ Operations™ provides intelligent operations management across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures using predictive analytics and policy-based automation. The combination of VMware vRealize Operations and VMware vRealize Log Insight™ enables IT teams to combine and analyze structured and unstructured data for end-to-end operations management to help them improve overall performance and avert disruptions.

VMware EVO SDDC will also include Hardware Management Services to abstract the characteristics of heterogeneous switching, server and power distribution unit (PDU) hardware. Hardware Management Services will be responsible for executing hardware management tasks. VMware intends to offer this solution as open source code, enabling the company to work with a broad ecosystem of partners to drive ongoing development leading to broad hardware compatibility and improved technology.

VMware EVO SDDC customers will be able to easily add VMware Horizon® virtual desktops and VMware vRealize Automation™ to enable infrastructure as a service. In addition, VMware is exploring future integration between VMware EVO SDDC and VMware vCloud Director® and VMware Integrated OpenStack to support service provider environments.

Rack-scale offerings built and managed with VMware EVO SDDC will scale in capacity starting from one-third rack to multiple racks and thousands of nodes at single server increments. Each fully populated rack will support more than 1,000 infrastructure as a service virtual machines or more than 2,000 desktop virtual machines, delivering a highly efficient and scalable infrastructure for cloud and virtual desktop deployments.

Initially, the solution will be available via branded, integrated system offerings direct from partners Dell, QCT (Quanta Cloud Technology) and VCE. Over time, customers will also have the option to purchase the software direct from VMware, and then work with a pre-qualified partner to integrate the software onto hardware.

VMware Virtual SAN 6.1 - VMware Virtual SAN 6.1 will increase data protection options for business-critical environments with the new Stretched Cluster Feature and enhanced VMware vSphere Replication™ providing five-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Additionally, the latest release enables new advanced management and monitoring through deep integration with VMware vRealize Operations and a new Health Check Plug-In for performance monitoring, root cause analysis and capacity planning.

VMware Virtual SAN is designed to be the optimal storage solution for VMware vSphere virtual machines. The software will enable core storage services for virtualized production environments, with greater performance, scalability, flexibility, and lower latency and cost. VMware Virtual SAN is ideal for a range of use cases including business-critical applications, virtual desktop infrastructure, remote IT, and test / development.

In 15 months since its initial release, more than 2,000 customers have adopted VMware's industry-leading hyper-converged infrastructure stack globally. Featuring storage policy-based management, VMware Virtual SAN shifts the management model for storage from the device to the application, enabling administrators to provision storage for applications in minutes.

"Customers have adopted VMware Virtual SAN because of the simple, high-performance storage it offers for VMware vSphere virtual machines," said Charles Fan, senior vice president and general manager, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware. "The enhanced enterprise availability and data protection, new flash hardware device support, and advanced management and troubleshooting capabilities of VMware Virtual SAN 6.1 are examples of the rapid evolution of the storage software to meet the needs of enterprise customers."