Introducing Evo SDDC - your Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solution
What is it? Your fastest path to the software-defined data center.
Tell me more: EVO SDDC provides an easy way to deploy and operate a private cloud on integrated SDDC Systems. IT can build and run a general purpose Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and/or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) private cloud based on a complete software-defined data center (SDDC) architecture. The fully integrated and interoperable software components of EVO SDDC can be deployed on pre-qualified hardware offered by select partners.
Perks:
- View into both physical and logical infrastructure and automated lifecycle management so you no longer need to chase down upgrades and updates.
- Significant OpEx and CapEx benefits drive down total cost of ownership by as much as 49 percent.
- Simplified bring-up, provisioning, and monitoring of virtual and physical resources with Evo SDDC Manager.
Why do I need this? With EVO SDDC, customers can expect to easily deploy and operate virtual infrastructure as a service; providing efficiency, agility and control for building and operating private, hybrid and public clouds.
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Radically simple shared storage for vSphere VMs withVirtual SAN 6.1
What is it? A software-defined solution designed to simplify IT infrastructure and run mission-critical workloads from business-critical applications to thousands of virtual desktops.
Tell me more: This solution is hyper-converged, which means that all storage and compute for virtual machine’s are delivered from the same x86 server platform running the hypervisor. All virtual machine provisioning and day-to-day management of storage SLAs can all be controlled through VM-level policies that can be set and modified on-the-fly.
What’s new? Virtual SAN 6.1 has increased enterprise availability and data protection with its new “Stretched Cluster,” and an enhanced VMware vSphere Replication capable of providing five-minute RPO. New features also include advanced management and troubleshooting for performance monitoring, root cause analysis, and capacity planning all through a new Health Check Plug-In. Ultimately, Virtual SAN 6.1 greatly improves space efficiency and lowers CapEx costs. Here’s the breakdown:
- Stretched Cluster - Virtual SAN is able to create a stretched cluster and synchronously replicate data between two geographically separate sites, enabling enterprise-level availability and ensuring no data loss and near-zero downtime even in the event of an entire site failure.
- Virtual SAN Management Pack for vRealize Operations - New integration with vRealize Operations provides a comprehensive set of management features that reduces troubleshooting, improves monitoring, and enables global visibility across Virtual SAN clusters.
- Health Check Plug-in - A free vCenter plug-in delivers hardware, firmware and driver compatibility checks, provides network and real-time diagnostics, and ensures consistency for advanced configuration options across the cluster.
- Support for Cloud Native Applications - Virtual SAN datastore can now be used to deliver storage persistency for applications residing in Docker containers.
- New Hardware Options - Leveraging the advantage of a flexible, software-defined storage solution, new hardware configurations and choices continue to be added, including:
- 2-Node Support – Deploy a small, highly available 2-node cluster at remote IT server rooms for a powerful, cost effective hyper-converged solution, perfect for locations with limited storage expertise
- DIMM-based SSDs – Connect flash storage to the memory channel via DIMM slots for very low (<5us) write latency.
- NVMe SSDs – Deploy the new SSDs with the improved communications protocol for even greater SSD performance.
Why do I need this? With Virtual SAN, storage becomes radically simple. You will see 50 percent lower TCO and experience better performance than a virtual appliance or external device. It is the perfect storage solution for use cases that include business critical applications (such as Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAP ERP), virtual desktops, remote IT applications, test/dev environments, and IT management clusters.
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VMware Extends Unified Hybrid Cloud Platform - vCloud Air
What is it? This Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) extends your workloads to Hybrid Cloud.
Tell me more: VMware vCloud Air is a secure, dedicated hybrid cloud platform built on VMware vSphere, allowing the data center and cloud to remain connected so that all resources are accessible and shared across the hybrid cloud.
Perks: Build applications faster, improve IT security, rapidly recover from disasters, and drive meaningful business value.
What’s new? Enhanced disaster recovery services; highly scalable, reliable, and cost effective storage services for unstructured data; advanced networking and security; and a new database as a service offering that provides easy access to scalable, cloud-hosted relational databases.
- VMware Air Disaster Recovery Services - Be able to test and run plans for disaster recovery through new cloud-based Site Recovery Manager (SRM) AND pay for what you use, rather than purchase packages in monthly/yearly subscriptions.
- VMware vCloud Air Object Storage - This durable and highly available object storage service is powered by Google Cloud Platform. Customers will have total access to three different classes of storage and reduce the need for data protection with built-in redundancy.
- VMware vCloud Air SQL - This is a new pay-as you-go database as a service (DBaaS) built to deliver quick access to scalable cloud-hosted relational databases.
- vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager - This platform brings your data center and vCloud Air into a single view. Enjoy greater, all-environment management capabilities and easy application migration to and from the public cloud.
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Welcome Intelligent Workload Management, Log Insight, and Air Compliance to vRealize Operations 6.1
What is vRealize Operations? A platform that delivers intelligent operations management across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. We’re talking self-learning tools, out-of-the-box and customizable policies for critical IT operations, and visibility in a single console across applications, storage, and network devices.
The breakdown: Better management, visibility, and compliance analysis are they key drivers for all vRealize-related upgrade announcements. Here are the cliff notes:
- Intelligent Workload Management - The ability to get cross-cluster visibility on your workloads and a balance your IT infrastructure. You can visualize how your clusters are loaded with workloads across clusters, vCenters, and data centers. The perks of intelligent workload balancing also come with integrated OS & App monitoring, meaning you have a single solution to monitor and manage your environment.
- vRealize Log Insight 3.0 - This platform delivers real-time log management for VMware environments with machine learning-based intelligent grouping, high-performance search, and better troubleshooting at scale across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. In its latest release, 3.0 has doubled the scale and performance to 15,000 messages per second, and features improvements in both analytics, and fault tolerance around clustering, just to name a few.
- vRealize Air Compliance - This is a new compliance service built for the SDDC. It’s an easy to use SaaS solution that helps organizations continuously monitor and quickly report on the configuration compliance of your vSphere infrastructure and take proactive action. Perks include very low overhead, rapid time to value, and immediate compliance analysis.
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Enable application availability and mobility across sites in private cloud environments with Site Recovery Manager 6.1
What is it? An industry-leading solution to enable application availability and mobility across sites in private cloud environments. Site Recover Manager offers policy-based management, non-disruptive testing, and automated orchestration of recovery plans.
What’s new? 6.1 can be purchased either as a standalone product or as a part of VMware vCloud Suite Enterprise Edition. Enhancements include new integration with VMware NSX, support for stretched storage, and policy driven protection.
Why do I need this? IT departments will enjoy simple and reliable recovery and mobility of virtual machines between sites with minimal or no downtime.
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Project A2: Where VMware and Microsoft join forces
What is this? A new mobile-centric approach to delivering and managing applications and devices for Windows 10 using Airwatch enterprise mobile management (EMM) and VMware App Volumes application delivering technology
Tell me more: This platform’s purpose is to accelerate the adoption of Windows 19 by eliminating the costly and complex process of managing and upgrading Windows PCs and applications. Project A2 will make applications lightweight and easy to deliver, providing a consistent end-user mobile workspace that provides access to all of end users applications including Windows, SaaS and mobile, to any device.
Resources:
- How VMware EUC Solutions Can Help With Windows 10 Desktop Migrations
- Windows 10: A Milestone Moment for the Industry and VMware Customers
Key Advancements of Horizon 6.2
What is VMware Horizon? A Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that delivers virtual or hosted desktops and applications through a single platform. With Horizon 6, end users can access all of their virtual desktops, applications, and online services through a single workspace in a few simple clicks.
What’s new? 6.2 introduces five new key capabilities that help customers deliver virtual desktops and apps with greater security and scale while offering a rich user experience, including:
- Scalable and available apps across locations
- An enriched user experience with support for 3D graphics in virtual desktops, and RDHS hosted sessions using ultra HD monitors
- Simplified and optimized storage that includes support for all-flash, and the ability to easily scale-out 4000 desktops per cluster to maximize TCO
- Enhanced security capabilities including seamless and secure access that ensures only authenticated traffic can access all end user computing services, and biometric fingerprint authentication
- Improved compliance readiness
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New IDaaS Solution - Identity Manager Advanced Edition
What is it? The industry’s first Identity-as-a-Service (IDaas) offering, providing application provisioning, self-service catalog, conditional access controls, and Single Sign-On (SSO) for SaaS, web, cloud, and native mobile applications.
Tell me more: Identity Manager is offered on-premises as a cloud service hosted on vCloud Air.
The breakdown: Identity manager simplifies business mobility with one-touch access from any device. User experience can be optimized and secured; and employees can be empowered with a self-service app store.
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Accelerate Cloud-Native Apps in the Enterprise withvSphere Integrated Containers and Photon Platform(technology preview)
The Preview: VMware is expanding its cloud-native technology portfolio to projects that promise to improve the developer experience for building applications using container technology while addressing enterprise IT requirements.
Perks: Both projects are designed to meet IT requirements across security and isolation, service-legal agreements, data persistence, networking services, and management.
The breakdown:
- VMware vSphere Integrated Containers - This project enables IT teams to support any application, including containerized applications, on a common infrastructure.
- VMware Photon Platform - This project is designed for DevOps teams looking to build out large pools of commodity computing capacity that solely run cloud-native applications, on- or off-premises.
Resources:
- Technology Walkthrough
- How to choose the best infrastructure stack for your cloud-native applications
- VMware’s Photon Platform and How it Treats Containers
Mainstreaming the network virtualization platform withNSX 6.2
What is it? A network virtualization platform for the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC).
Tell me more: With NSX 6.2, organizations can be twice as secure at half the cost. The platform enables virtual networks to be created, saved, deleted and restored on demand without requiring any reconfiguration of the physical network.
Perks: NSX is a non-disruptive solution that can be deployed on any IP network. Customers can transform their data center network operational model, reduce network provisioning time from days or weeks to minutes, and dramatically simplify network operations.
What’s new: 6.2 has the ability to extend across data centers, enabling organizations to achieve application continuity and resource sharing across a metro area (queue disaster recovery plan excitement). Also notable? NSX’s speed and accuracy of deployment. Customers are able to reduce recovery time objectives by as much as 80 percent. Other enjoyable improvements feature expanded security (think Intel Security and Check Point), and the ability to recover from disaster faster, pool from multiple data centers, and support multiple vCenters.
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