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Live Blog: Raising The Bar, Part V

Duncan Epping · Jul 12, 2011 ·

I am live at the Launch event in San Francisco with many other bloggers, journalists and analysts. It is the 12th of July, almost 09:00 PDT and Paul Maritz is about come up on stage to talk about the Cloud Infrastructure launch. This article will be update live during the event as we go.

Paul Maritz is taking the stage… Taking the next step in towards the more automated world.

We need to make infrastructure become something that people can depend on and focus on what is important to their business. Navigating your way forward offering a more dynamic infrastructure that will support your existing applications. Using a more flexible infrastructure, allowing people to take resources and aggregate to larger pools reducing operational costs by automating the use of these resources. More and more use of social media and use of mobile devices to connect anytime anywhere and most importantly securely.

Today we will be talking about  a more efficient infrastructure with exists of three stages IT Production, Business Production and IT as a Service. In 2009, the VI 3 era, 30% of the workloads were virtualized…. in 2010 with vSphere 4 we reached 40% and it is expected that in 2011 we will hit 50% virtualized with the majority on vSphere.

Accelerating and Amplifying business agility with vSphere 5! Not only vSphere 5 but the worlds first Cloud Infrastructure suite! In addition to vSphere 5 today we announce vSphere Site Recovery Manager 5 (Business Continuity), vCloud Director 1.5 (Policy, Reporting, Self-Service), vCenter Operations 1.0.1 (Monitoring and Management), vShield 5 (Security and Edge functionality).

VMware vCloud = Hybrid. Your private cloud experience needs to be similar to public cloud experience. VMware allows this through the vCloud offering and vCloud Service Providers. Trusted vCloud partners like Colt, Bluelock, Singtel, Verizon, NYSE Euronext, Softbank and CSC are some of the enablers for this.

Steve Herrod up on stage… I expect it is about to get more technical

Why do these new products matter and how do they fit together. Accelerating the adoption by increasing scalability. ESX 1.0 capable of 5000 IOps, ESX 2.0 ~ 7000 IOps, VI 3 100.000 IOps, vSphere 4 300.000 IOps and vSphere 5.0 1.000.000 IOps. Besides performance availability is key. Both HA and FT have been enhanced and of course SRM 5.0 has been released. Added to SRM 5.0 is vSphere Replication. vSphere Replication allows you to use the network to replicate between sites and different arrays. It will allow you to replicate more workloads with a lower costs. SRM is about datacenter mobility, not only for an outage but also pro-actively moving datacenters after an acquisition.

What does cloud computing really mean? Being able to order what you need and what without knowing what happens behind the scenes. IT will behind the scenes validate if they meet the consumers requirements. vCloud Director is all about Simple Self-Service. Deploy virtual machines but more importantly create new vApps and offer these in your own “app store”. The IT Cloud of the producer is all about offering agility. Virtualization enables automation in a way unheard in a physical environment.

Typically multiple tiers are offered within a cloud environment. The VMware Cloud Infrastructure enable you to do so. Intelligent Policy based Management is key with vCloud Director 1.5. Linked Clones is a very important feature to provision virtual machines “aggressively” within the system. It allows for fast provisiong and save up to 60% of storage.

Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS are part of vSphere 5.0. It enables you to map different arrays in to logical entities by a concept called a “datastore cluster” and link these to a profile. Virtual machines will be tagged with a profile and this allows you to validate compliancy. Storage DRS does for storage what DRS does for compute resources. Storage and Network IO Control ensures each virtual machine receives what it is entitled to.

For the SMB market a brand new shared storage appliance is introduced today: vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0. It takes vanilla servers and use local drives and present it as shared storage. It will bring agility and availability through shared storage to the SMB.

Auto-Deploy, PXE booting your ESXi hypervisor in to memory! It allows to spin-up more hosts within minutes instead of hours. Adding capacity has never been this simple?

vSphere 5 offers comprehensive security and isolation capabilities through vShield 5.0. vShield App 5 allows you to select regulations to protect sensitive data. It also enables you to get additional auditing in place.

The Cloud Infrastructure represents more than a million engineering hours, more than 100 additional capabilities, more than two million QA hours, more than 2000 partner certifications to enable this.

Rick Jackson up next discussing licensing.

Industry has traditionally licensed on physical constraints. It makes it difficult to create a cloud environment. Customers need to be able to upgrade to new hardware without having physical boundaries. No more “Cores per Proc” limits, no more “Physical RAM per host license”… vSphere introducing vRAM entitlement. Virtual RAM is the amount of virtual memory configured for a powered on virtual machine. vSphere 5 used pooled vRAM across the entire environment.

Packaging has been simplified and moving from 6 down to 5 packages. vSphere Advanced has been eliminated, all customers currently using Advanced are entitled to vSphere Enterprise.

Join us at VMworld for more details around the new product releases. 10AM virtual show, be there for more technical in-depth details!

Related

Server 5, 5.0, cloud, event, srm, Storage, vcd, vcloud, VMware, vSphere, vsphere storage appliance, vstorage

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Gabrie van Zanten says

    12 July, 2011 at 17:05

    Hope you did some stretching of hands, wrists and fingers…. We’ll be watching 🙂

  2. alexanderjn says

    12 July, 2011 at 18:06

    So…… release date?

    • Duncan Epping says

      12 July, 2011 at 18:17

      has not been announced yet unfortunately.

      • mkematt says

        12 July, 2011 at 22:11

        Third quarter according to the VMWare Licensing person I just spoke to.

  3. Christian van Barneveld says

    12 July, 2011 at 18:41

    “Customers need to be able to upgrade to new hardware without having physical boundaries.”

    48 GB vRAM per licence… What am I going to say to my customers with new server included 512 GB RAM?? Now they have 4 licences, with the new model: 11 licences!
    Calculate that to price per GB vRAM…
    $30k+ to licence 1 server, where is to business case to virtualize?

    Very disapointed with this nmew licence model

    • Wouter Verhulst says

      12 July, 2011 at 20:15

      I was also shocked to hear about the new price model. This will seriously increase cost for a lot of (potential) customers, probably even causing them to switch to a competitor.

      With hardware supporting over 512GB per host and ever increasing need for more RAM inside a VM I wonder why VMware chose to limit the amount of RAM per CPU to these ridiculous low numbers or why they even coupled it to a CPU license. Somehow a per xGB license scheme would have made much more sense, especially since decided to let go the core limitations anyway.

      Perhaps it is their way to impose a fixed cpu-mem-vm ratio?

  4. Jason Rahl says

    12 July, 2011 at 20:57

    I was excited until I saw the licensing model. Some of us realized real cost savings with VMWare without being a service/cloud provider. I cant say how disappointed I am with this licensing model.

  5. Pierre-Yves says

    12 July, 2011 at 21:48

    VSphere 5: Raising the bill ?

    • Pierre-Yves says

      12 July, 2011 at 21:51

      And to present the new model as “symplifying the licensing model for our customers” is really cynical….

      I have pushed VSphere in our mostly Xen environment, because my management was wary of licensing pitfalls. I must recognize they were perfectly right.

    • Pierre-Yves says

      12 July, 2011 at 21:54

      It’s funny: they insist on how a VM can now use a 1TB Ram and at the same time take away the possibility to do so (except if you are ready to purchase 20 Enterprise Plus to do so)

      • Wouter Verhulst says

        12 July, 2011 at 22:35

        In a way it’s quite remarkable: in order to run a 32vCPU, 1TB VM you need one bigass server (well two actually, you’ll want at least one extra for HA), add some 60k of licensing to the bare metal, and all you really get is a very very expensive VM that runs slightly slower then on bare metal.

        Makes me wonder if these kinds of workloads aren’t better of (and cheaper) running directly on the hardware in some form of cluster. I’m guessing VMware sees this differently, but perhaps I’m missing the clue.

  6. Pierre-Yves says

    12 July, 2011 at 22:02

    I have been doing the maths: say you buy Enterprise edition. You are limited to 64Go on a bi-processor machine that can at least support two or three times more (given you do not wish to pay for additionnal useless CPU licences).
    It’s very very disapointing, sad day indeed….

    • Duncan Epping says

      13 July, 2011 at 05:08

      Keep in mind that vRAM is pooled. All license entitlements combined will form the total amount of available vRAM. You are not limited to a single host.

      • Pierre-Yves says

        13 July, 2011 at 09:31

        Yes, but I try to keep my host as homogeneous as possible, and since I used to rely on memory overcommitment, my licence bill is going to go up quite a lot. It’ll grow to a point it is cheaper to move stuff to Hyper-V.
        So the argument that the memory is pooled doesn’t change anything. The only case in which it would be interesting would be if you had very different RAM consumption between your host, and I dont’t really see a reason for that. Isn’t it what DRS has been designed to fight against ?

      • Christian van Barneveld says

        13 July, 2011 at 11:16

        Not limited to a single host, but limited to a single licence. Keep in mind the customers who have invest in new hardware last year. 2 x CPU (8-core) with 128, 196 of even 256 GB RAM. A very reasonable setup.
        NOW: 2 x Enterprice licence and a memory utilization approx 70%
        What do I have to tell to this kind of customers? upgrade to Enterprice Plus, you can allocate 96 GB of vRAM. Oh yeah, you have to double or triple your licences to run the other VM’s….

        Customers with Enterprice databases (128GB per VM) are going back to bare metal. Run your 128GB VM, ohh you have first to buy 4 vSphere licences + SnS. Yes the benefits of virtualisation/cloud offcourse, but at which price?

        We have a lot of cases like this, 2010 was a year of invest in new hardware and consolidate server. 2011 is the year of….? Not to upgrade vSphere5 for certain customers.

        The vRAM licence has also good points, but not with 32/48 GB vRAM per CPU for Enterprice (Plus)

        I’m looking forward to your story, and don’t come only with 2 CPU/< 96GB per server examples.

  7. Pierre-Yves says

    12 July, 2011 at 22:27

    An other thing that came to mmy mind: when comparing different hypervisors, Vsphere memory management was a strong advantage: by allowing high consolidation ratio, it was possible to offset a good part of the license investment (even when comparing with free products like Hyper-V or Xen).
    Now it’s moot, who cares about TPM,vmmctl or memory compression when you have to pay for the RAM you are using ?
    MS will have a field day with this…..

    • Duncan Epping says

      13 July, 2011 at 05:09

      Don’t forget cost of:
      – Hardware (buying 3 hosts of 5 hosts makes a difference)
      – Cost of operating

      there’s more to the cost than just the license.

      • Pierre-Yves says

        13 July, 2011 at 09:34

        Yeah, instead of purchasing useless host, I have now to purchase useless licences… If you’ve tried already to ptich that kind of stuff to a management guy, you know the answer: “This product sucks, what else is there on the market?”

        Funny that Paul Maritz comes from MS, beacause it is more of an Oracle licence model (and it is not a compliment!!!!)

      • Christian van Barneveld says

        13 July, 2011 at 11:36

        Wow. It means no matter what kind of Vmware memory technology you applied to your vCenter, it’s calculated by virtual memory!!! Not even physical memory!!

        It means if you use 4 GB on 4 VMs, in fact, only 1GB your physical memory is used by VMs, but it’s still counted as 16GB vRAM!!

        WTF is Vmware thinking? guess what I feel when I read it? It’s a deal break for my career changing!! I guess I need to focus on Hyper-v and Citrix now. If their price is reasonable.

        Is 13th July an excited day for Vmware? No, it’s a very very SAD day.

        Source: http://geeksilver.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/vsphere-5-license-a-very-sad-day-to-begin/

  8. Brian says

    12 July, 2011 at 22:52

    That flushing sound you hear is VMWare’s chances for continued price-competition with Hyper-V.

    Oh well, at least I get to go to VMWorld this year, I’m not marking my calendar for 2010 though.

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

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