The 9^th annual VMworld launched with at literal bang during the VMworld 2012 opening General Session on Monday morning. Many announcements were made and we’d like to provide all of our readers with a recap of the announcements, releases and updates.

But first…

VMworld 2012 TAM Customer Central

The first day of the inaugural VMworld 2012 TAM Customer Central was a resounding success. This new and exclusive TAM Customer-Only room was designed to ensure that TAM Customers have the best possible experience during the conference. On Monday customers had exclusive access to VMware product managers and experts for in-depth technical deep dives and discussions, product road maps, technical previews, demos and more.

Some of the topics that were covered included: Trusted Cloud Controls, VMware vSphere 5.1 Technical Deepdive and a Cloud Infrastructure Roundtable.

Today we continue with, as one customer said, the “The Shadows Sessions of Awesomeness” that include:

• 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM – Cloud Services Roundtable
  Amit Gupta, Senior Product Manager, Cloud Services

• 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM – VMware vSphere Roundtable
  Yatin Patil, Product Manager, VMware vSphere

• 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM – Cloud Infrastructure Roundtable
  Jim Senicka, Group Manager, Infrastructure Product Marketing

• 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM – VMware Horizon Roundtable
  Mehul Patel, Director, Product Management

• 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM – Log Aggregation, Management and Analytics Roundtable
  Spiros Xanthos, Director, Research and Development – Log Management and Analytics
  Mahesh Ramachandran, Group Product Manager

• 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM – Enterprise Management Roundtable
  Kit Colbert, Principal Engineer

• 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM – Improving Access to Technical Support
  Simon Yu, Product Marketing Manager, Infrastructure

• 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM – Oracle Support, Licensing, Best Practices and Total Cost of Ownership on VMware vSphere

• 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM – VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite Demo
  Eric Rider, Staff Engineer (UI/UX Architect)
  Justin Smith, Senior MTS Engineer

If you haven’t come by VMworld 2012 TAM Customer Central – you are missing an incredible and exclusive opportunity to engage with our product managers, engineers and experts. Come by today through Thursday!

Now, on to the announcements…

VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 – Delivering the Software-Defined Datacenter

Perhaps one of the more exciting announcements made today at VMworld, Paul Maritz, Pat Gelsinger and Steve Herrod unveiled the VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 – the first solution to deliver the software-defined datacenter. The VMware vCloud suite integrates virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management portfolio into a single SKU, in order to simplify the adoption of cloud era technologies.

The VMware vCloud Suite to simplify IT operations and deliver the best SLAs for all of your applications. Now, you can build a complete infrastructure-as-a-service cloud and operationalize your VMware environment, becoming more responsive to business.

vCloud Suite is part of the complete VMware cloud solution, a comprehensive set of technology, services intellectual property, and skills enhancements based on real-world deployment experience. The integrated offering includes everything you need to build (technology and architecture), operate (processes and control) and staff (people and organization) a cloud environment while measuring the improvements (IT business management) of cloud computing.

Paul Maritz shared during VMworld, “VMware and its partners are taking a bold step toward simplifying IT, offering customers everything they need to build, operate and manage their cloud environments. The VMware vCloud Suite delivers the software-defined datacenter – the architecture for implementing cloud computing.”

As Steve Herrod mentioned, available in three flavors of Standard, Advanced and Enterprise editions, the vCloud Suite includes:

• VMware vSphere 5.1 — Enhance IT agility, reduce costs and improve service availability. vSphere is at the heart of the Software-Defined Datacenter, designed to deliver the peak of automation, flexibility and optimized efficiency for every application.

• VMware vCloud Director 5.1— Orchestrate the provisioning of Software-Defined Datacenter services to deliver complete virtual datacenters for easy consumption in minutes. Fundamentally simplify infrastructure provisioning and enable IT to move at the speed of business.

• VMware vCloud Connector — Extend your cloud with vCloud Connector 1.5. View, operate on and transfer your computing resources across vSphere and vCloud Director in your private cloud environment, as well as public clouds from vCloud Service Providers. New Advanced 2.0 functionality will improve public cloud extensibility.

• VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0 — Dramatically simplify performance, capacity and configuration management tasks to get more out of your virtual and cloud infrastructure. Proactively manage vSphere, gaining a real-time understanding of issues and risks before they impact end users.

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1 — Enable simple and reliable business continuity for all of your applications. Eliminate the need for a dedicated failover site for disaster recovery (DR) with VMware DR to the Cloud services.

• VMware vCloud Networking and Security 5.1 — Virtualize and create agile, extensible, secure logical networks that meet the performance and scale requirements of virtualized applications. Use VXLAN to drive agility for software-defined networking.

• VMware vFabric Application Director — Improve DevOps collaboration with closed-loop application provision and monitoring of multi-tier application service catalogs. Use standard components to deploy and manage applications quickly. Decouple application and infrastructure management to facilitate cloud deployments. Understand cloud-based application performance from the user perspective.

During the Day One VMworld 2012 General Session, several notable blogs posts from the Office of the CTO and new Technical Whitepapers for the VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 were released:

VMware Office of the CTO

• The Software-Defined Datacenter meets VMworld by Dr. Steve Herrod
  Dr. Herrod focuses 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. He disscuses the VMware vCloud Suite technologies available today and in the future such as Software-Defined Compute, Software-Defined Storage & Availability, Software-Defined Networking & Security, Management and Multi-Cloud.

• Software-Defined Networking and Security by Allwyn Sequeira
  Sequeira discusses the key attributes of software-defined networking (SDN)  and security (SDsec) the announcements from VMware on the networking and security front. 

• Managing the Software-Defined Datacenter by Kit Colbert
  Colbert discuses how the management of the software-defined datacenter is much different than in traditional systems.

Technical Whitepapers on VMware vCloud Suite 5.1

• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – vSphere 5.1 is VMware’s latest release of its industry-leading virtualization platform. This paper describes the new features and enhancements contained in this release

• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Performance – VMware vSphere 5.1 continues to enhance the performance features and capabilities of the vSphere® platform making it the most robust and highest-performing cloud platform. vSphere 5.1 supports even larger virtual machines and physical hosts to accommodate even the most demanding of workloads. vSphere 5.1 also introduces several new features that reduce latency and increases throughput for network, storage and compute. This paper outlines many of these new vSphere 5.1 performance enhancements.

• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Storage – This white paper discusses the various storage enhancements found in vSphere 5.1 and how these enhancements are leverage by other VMware products.

• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Platform – VMware vSphere 5.1 introduces many new features and enhancements that further extend the core capabilities of the ESXi platform. This white paper discusses the various platform enhancements found in vSphere ESXi 5.1.

• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Networking – This paper will cover new features and enhancements around Operational improvements, monitoring and troubleshooting enhancements, and improved scalability and extensibility of the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) platform.

• Introduction to VMware vSphere Data Protection – VMware vSphere Data Protection is a simple-to-deploy, disk-based backup and recovery solution for VMware virtual machines. This technical note provides an introduction to VMware vSphere Data Protection.

• Introduction to VMware vSphere Replication – vSphere Replication is a powerful new capability of the vSphere platform to enable virtual machines to be replicated to another location within a cluster or even between clusters. This paper introduces the technology, as well as showing the means by which a virtual machine can easily be both protected and recovered through the vSphere Web Client.

• VMware vSphere 5.1 vMotion Architecture, Performance and Best Practices – A series of tests were conducted at VMware Performance labs to investigate and compare the performance implications of vSphere 5.1 vMotion over the proven vMotion and Storage vMotion technologies in various scenarios including the migration of a database server and an in-memory application. In addition, live migration tests were performed over metro area network scenarios.

• VXLAN Performance Evaluation on VMware vSphere 5.1 – Virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) is a network encapsulation mechanism that enables virtual machines to be deployed on any physical host, regardless of the host’s network configuration. This paper evaluates VXLAN performance to demonstrate that vSphere 5.1 is readily able to host network-intensive applications on VXLAN without a significant drop in performance.

• Impact of Enhanced vMotion Compatibility on Application Performance – VMware Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) enhances the scope of vMotion by making ESXi hosts with different CPU technologies compatible for vMotion. In this paper, we quantify the performance impact of EVC mode on a diverse set of applications. We study workloads from database, Java, multimedia, and encryption categories and report the results.

• VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Database Performance Improvements and Best Practices for Large-Scale Environments – vCenter Server 5.1 reduces the resource overhead of the database through enhancements in stored procedures in the database, specifically, the rollup and TopN procedures. This paper describes these changes and provides best practices for configuring the database to best take advantage of the improvements.

• Storage I/O Performance on VMware vSphere 5.1 over 16 Gigabit Fibre Channel – Fibre Channel (FC) interconnect speed has increased to 16 gigabits per second (Gbps). To take full advantage of this enhancement, VMware vSphere 5.1 has added support for the 16Gb FC host bus adapter (HBA). This white paper illustrates the improvements in storage I/O throughput that vSphere gains when using a 16Gb FC HBA instead of an 8Gb FC HBA. In addition, this paper looks at the CPU efficiency of the vSphere host when handling the increased storage I/O.

Role Based Technical Training and Certification

VMware announced 8 new certifications, a new Cloud Certification Solution Track,  and a complete update to VMware’s Certification Program that aligns with the practitioner roles required for an IT organization’s success in the cloud era.  The VMware certifications are shifting to a role-based framework to align with both a)  the roles that companies need to effectively design, operate, and evolve their cloud environment, and b) the key technology solution areas that support the evolution to the cloud.

In addition, the VMware training curriculum is shifting to a role based approach, with courses aligned to roles and technology tracks, and learning paths to help practitioners identify what courses will prepare them both to be successful in their real-world roles and to achieve VMware certification status.

Check out the VMware Learning Paths and work with your Technical Account Manager to help you plan your organizations education roadmap.

• Engineer: The Engineer ensures the stability, integrity, and operation efficiency of the in-house information systems that support core organizational functions by monitoring, maintaining, supporting, and optimizing all networked software and associated operating systems. The Engineer applies communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills to identify, communicate, and resolve issues in to maximize IT systems investments.

• Administrator: The Administrator designs, installs, administers, and optimizes company servers and related components to achieve high performance of the various business applications supported by tuning the servers. This includes ensuring the availability of client/server applications, configuring all new implementations, and developing processes and procedures for ongoing management of the server environment. Where applicable, the Administrator assists in overseeing the physical security, integrity, and safety of the data center/server farm.

• Architect: The Architect strategically designs and implements in-house information systems and networked software architectures that support core organizational functions, and assures their high availability. The Architect gains organizational commitment for all systems and software plans, evaluates and selects all technologies, and provides technical leadership across the organization, from strategic decision making down to project level planning.

• Developer: The Developer identifies, defines and models the application requirements, translates the software requirements into workable programming code, then maintains and develops programs for use in the business. The Developer defines the data structures and distribution to satisfy the application solution ensuring the needs of the organization. The Developer prepares deliverables to support the development and deployment of the solution, such as application guides and test plans which is achieved by staying current on the latest application development frameworks, best practices, testing techniques and deployment scenarios.

• Governance/Operations: The Governance/Operator role defines the intricacies of people, policy, process and product interactions that deliver true IT as a service. People-Governance includes defining job roles, skills, training plans, organization and charter. Policy-Governance defines policies around job roles and the IT components affected. Process-Governance identifies processes that support KPIs and how the policy ripples through to the processes. Product-Governance identifies what products are involved, their implementation structure, the process roles t, and what value they deliver.

Additional Announcements

VMware vSphere 5.1 for SMBs

VMware has also announced vSphere 5.1 solutions to help SMBs simplify and protect IT – with industry-leading virtualization, business continuity and automated management. With the release of vSphere 5.1, VMware will also significantly extend the capabilities of vSphere Essentials Plus to include:

• vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1, to deliver high availability at a low cost.
• vSphere Data Protection, for reliable VM backup and recovery.
• vSphere Replication, to simplify disaster recovery for all applications.
• vShield Endpoint, to secure virtual machines.

New Cloud Ops Education, Transformation and Advisory Services 

The new Cloud Ops Intellectual Property (IP) and advisory, transformation and education services was designed to help transition IT to a new operating model for cloud computing – to accelerate the delivery of new business value and innovation. Cloud Ops and the Cloud Ops Forum (also announced today) address how to build, operate, staff and measure a cloud environment to maximize business innovation and efficiency.

EMC and VMware Partner to Deliver vSphere Data Protection

Built on EMC Avamar deduplication backup software technology, the new VMware vSphere Data Protection solution is now available in place of vSphere Data Recovery – providing a more cost-effective, reliable and easy-to-use solution to protect VMware environments.

T-Systems Becomes the Latest VMware vCloud Datacenter Partner

T-Systems has joined forces with VMware to provide customers with easier, quicker and more manageable access to the cloud, with AutoScout24 and Actum/G2 already reaping the benefits of this strategic partnership.

According to Mathew Lodge, “T-Systems will broaden its VMware expertise by adding this cloud service offering to its existing and highly capable VMware consulting and integration practice, giving customers outstanding options for their cloud deployments.”

Watch the VMworldTV Day One Recap

Catch a recap of the the first day of VMworld 2012 with VMworldTV

More announcements are sure to come during VMworld 2012 – follow us @VMwareTAM Twitter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Google+ for to-the-minute updates!