Well hopefully you got a chance to see the largest VMware launch in history this past week. If you missed the big event and would like to see it, you can click here to watch! We announced vSphere 5, vShield 5, Site Recovery Manager 5, and vCloud Director 1.5. The amount of exciting technology features and updates are really going to dramatically change the way we run our datacenters. Awesome stuff, I am very excited and just think what will we be announcing at VMworld?
Some fun stats from the launch event:
· 153 Journalists and Analysts were pre-briefed globally before the official launch.
· 1,000 pages on www.vmware.com were updated globally in 16 languages
· For the Americas region we deployed emails in English, Portuguese and Spanish yesterday to our customer base
· Over 36k people registered globally for the webcasts that happened in the US and APJ – I believe just over 10,000 attended the US version…not sure about the APJ version
· There were over 100 press articles written about VMware in just 24 hours.
There were just too many blog posts in the past 7 days for me to only choose 5 posts to highlight so this week I am going to select 10 posts that are above and beyond the rest that you should really read. Here we go:
Duncan Epping – vSphere 5.0: Profile-Driven Storage, what is it good for? – By now most of you heard about this new feature called Profile-Driven Storage that will be introduced with vSphere 5.0, but what is it good for? Some of you, depending on the size of the environment, currently have a nice long operational procedure to deploy virtual machines. The procedure usually contains gathering information about the requirements of the virtual machine’s disks, finding the right datastore to meet these requirements, deploy the virtual machine and occasionally check if the virtual machine’s disks are still placed correctly. This is what Profile-Driven Storage aims to solve.
Simon Seagrave – VMware vSphere 5.0 – What’s New & Exciting – After much anticipation VMware vSphere 5.0 has now officially been announced with a release date in the not so distant future (still TBC). It is safe to say that this is definitely one of the most significant vSphere/ESX/ESXi updates to date with a whole range of feature improvements, enhancements and all new capabilities. In fact it is VMware’s largest co-ordinated release of products to date according to VMware’s CTO Steve Herrod. It’s been a busy week since the launch though the dust is finally settling after the excitement surrounding the online announcement event hosted by VMware’s CEO, Paul Maritz and CTO, Steve Herrod. So it’s a good time to review what vSphere 5.0 has to offer.
Alan Renouf - vSphere 5 License Entitlements – A somewhat surprising popular topic at the moment considering the amazing features announced by VMware this week is vSphere 5 Licensing, I have seen a lot of people talking about this and a lot of confusion and misunderstanding of the new licensing model announced by VMware in vSphere 5. Hopefully this post and my script below will help people work out what their v5 License entitlements will be.
Chad Sakac – Raising the Bar V = vSphere 5! – Ah – I always love this period :-) Finally, I can speak freely about things that have been cooking for a long time (years!) This may sound whiny, but it’s actually hard keep a lid on things this cool, to participate in the alpha and beta cycles, and to be one verbal misstep from getting the NDA police on you is not easy. One gets good at the NDA tapdance. Today, July 12th, VMware has launched vSphere 5 and the related wave of surrounding releases: Site Recovery Manager 5, vShield 5, and vCloud Director 1.5! Note that the GA date is still a little out – but not much. While I’m sure there will be broad and deep coverage across the blogosphere, Here’s my 2 cents.
Duncan Epping – vSphere 5.0: Storage vMotion and the Mirror Driver – There’s a cool and exciting new feature as part of Storage vMotion in vSphere 5.0. This new feature is called Mirror Mode and it enables faster and highly efficient Storage vMotion processes. But what is it exactly, and what does it replace? Prior to vSphere 5.0 we used a mechanism called Change Block Tracking (CBT), to ensure that blocks which were already copied to the destination were marked as changed and copied during the iteration.
Andre Leibovici – vSphere 5.0 Datastore Clusters & VDI – I have been fortunate enough to be part of the vSphere 5 Beta program. vSphere 5 really raise the bar and implement a number of new features; mostly around automated management. I’m sure there will be many blog posts listing those new features, so I decided to show some screenshots of those features.One of the cool new features is the ability to create Datastore Clusters that enable the use of Storage DRS (the long waited Automated Storage vMotion) based on user’s defined criteria.
Eric Sloof – vSphere 5 What’s New – Storage Appliance (VSA) – In vSphere 5.0, VMware has released a new storage appliance called VSA. VSA is an acronym for “vSphere Storage Appliance”. This appliance is aimed at our SMB (Small-Medium Business) customers who may not be in a position to purchase a SAN or NAS array for their virtual infrastructure, and therefore do not have shared storage. Without access to a SAN or NAS array, SMB customers are unable to implement many of vSphere’s core technologies, such as vSphere HA & vMotion. Customers who decide to deploy a VSA can now benefit from many additional vSphere features without having to purchase a SAN or NAS device to provide them with shared storage.
Dave Lawrence – VMware vSphere 5: The BIG feature list – As I was wading thru all of the new materials from yesterday, I thought it would be helpful to create a big list of all of the new features in vSphere 5.0. There were really only a few named in the presentation (or else the preso would have been 3 hours and put the analysts to sleep). While we wait for the release notes, I put together this list for you. This is not every new feature, but rather as many as I could find or remember.
Eric Sloof – VMware View for Android – Tech Preview – Android tablets now have an awesome view, VMware View.
Tedd Fox of VMware demonstrates VMware View Client for Android. Available on the Android Market and Cisco AppHQ, the VMware free Android client enables you to access your virtual Windows desktops, applications and data from anywhere. Addition information can be found on the VMware End-User Computing blog at: this link and the bits are available for download at this link.
Hugo Phan – vSphere 5 vCenter Server Vir
tual Appliance Quick-Start Guide – The vCenter Server Linux Virtual Appliance is a preconfigured Linux-based virtual machine that is optimized for running vCenter Server and associated services. This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to deploy the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance, configure networking, authentication, database and vCenter services. The following table lists the required files that you will need, gather these files before proceeding.
