It’s been a little more than seven months since we announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 5. With almost 200 new and enhanced capabilities, vSphere 5 simplifies the lives of our customers and delivers quick and tangible value to their organizations. Simply put, with vSphere 5 and the VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite, we are enabling our customers to take advantage of the next era of IT.
Since we launched vSphere 5, the feedback we’ve been getting from our customers and partners has been really positive. I’d like to share some interesting insights from a recent TechValidate survey of more than 1,200 VMware beta customers and partners:
70% of respondents surveyed have downloaded and deployed vSphere 5 and are taking advantage of the great new features and capabilities that vSphere 5 has to offer.
82% of those respondents are using vSphere 5 to virtualize their business critical workloads and applications. vSphere 5 is designed to enable customers to run their business critical applications with confidence and this is made possible in part by the great availability features in vSphere 5. Customers and partners are excited about vSphere’s availability features and in particular are using vMotion (92%), High Availability (87%) and Storage vMotion (68%).
One of the significant advancements in vSphere 5 is all about automation, no more manual processes, it’s about automating everything. With vSphere 5, customers and partners have the ability to automate datacenter resource management to respond to the needs of their business faster and reduce operating expenses. More than 70% of respondents are achieving OpEx savings with vSphere 5.
Other key advancements of vSphere 5 are the storage enhancements we made to simplify the management of storage and automate load balancing capabilities. We found that 80% percent of respondents have upgraded to VMFS 5, and are able take advantage of the increased scalability and performance of this filesystem. Additionally, we found 52% of respondents are using Storage DRS and are able to take advantage of how this feature automatically manages the placement and balancing of a VM across storage resources. We are also seeing great uptick of new storage features including Storage I/O Control, which allows customers to configure rules and polices to specify the business priority of each VM and Profile-Driven Storage, which streamlines storage provisioning and ensures application services match the available storage.
We want to share some commentary from customers on their experiences, lets hear it in their own words:
“vSphere 5 is a game changing product. Much better product than anything else on the market. vSphere is 2 years ahead of the competition.”
“I have deployed vSphere 5 globally, upgrading from version 4. Being able to deploy Linux and Windows servers on ESXi reduces our cost of purchasing hardware globally. We also benefit from High Availability (HA), and other products, such as vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM).”
“I believe we will be able to accommodate larger workloads with more confidence using vSphere 5. The Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (Storage DRS) feature is fantastic as we migrate VMs for efficiency and refresh.”
“We’ve dramatically reduced timelines from first deployment to seeing relevant returns on investment, greater agility and better consolidation ratios including business critical workloads with vSphere 5.”
You can see the full results of the survey by visiting the TechValidate results page here.
-Michael Adams, Group Product Marketing Manager, vSphere
