4.17.18
VMware, Inc. today unveiled new releases of VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN–which power the industry’s leading hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions—to help enterprises securely run their business-critical and modern applications in the data center, at the edge, in the public cloud, or in hybrid cloud environments. VMware vSphere 6.7 and VMware vSAN 6.7 will both enhance user experience, security, application support, and hybrid cloud management features.
Enterprises are faced with increasingly complex technology environments made up of a growing landscape of public cloud services as well as data center and edge resources. To cope with this complexity and the growing rate of technological changes, enterprises need to build on a digital foundation that provides consistent infrastructure and operations and is secure by default. VMware’s software forms an integrated digital foundation that powers the apps and services transforming businesses and industries. For customers, this provides the broadest investment protection by enabling a flexible and secure common operating environment from the cloud to the data center to the edge.
“The continued innovation in our award-winning compute and HCI portfolio makes the hybrid cloud a reality for our customers,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, chief operating officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware. “The rapid adoption of vSAN, coupled with longstanding vSphere leadership is a testament to the importance of a digital foundation that extends from on-premises to the public cloud.”
VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN—building blocks of this digital foundation—both have leading positions in their relative industries according to IDC. (1,2)
VMware vSphere 6.7: Efficient and Secure Platform for the Hybrid Cloud
VMware vSphere 6.7 will introduce new capabilities and enhancements to help deliver an efficient and more secure platform for hybrid cloud environments. The latest release will feature simple and efficient management at scale, comprehensive built-in security, increased support for more workloads, and further enable a seamless hybrid cloud experience. VMware vSphere 6.7 will continue to offer customers a universal application platform that supports workloads spanning artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Big Data, business-critical, cloud-native, in-memory, and 3D graphics, among others.
New and enhanced features in VMware vSphere 6.7 will include:
• New vCenter Hybrid Linked Mode: Will enable unified visibility and management across different versions of vSphere running on-premises and in the public cloud such as VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Cloud and other VMware Cloud Provider Program partner clouds. This will allow customers to maintain their current version of vSphere on-premises as needed while enjoying the benefits of new capabilities in vSphere-based public clouds.
• New ESXi Single Reboot and vSphere Quick Boot: Will significantly reduce patch and upgrade times by halving the number of reboots required to one, while vSphere Quick Boot will skip hardware initialization steps to gain further re-start efficiencies.
• New vSphere Persistent Memory: Will leverage the latest innovation around non-volatile memory and significantly enhance performance for both existing and new apps.
• Enhanced NVIDIA GRID vGPUs Support for Modern Workloads: Will improve host lifecycle management and reduce end-user disruption via new suspend and resume capabilities for VMs for GPU-accelerated environments. vSphere 6.7 will enhance support for NVIDIA GRID Virtual PC/Virtual Apps (for knowledge workers) and NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation (for design and engineering professionals) to enable optimal management of VDI workloads as well as enable administrators (admins) to run other NVIDIA GPU-enabled workloads, including AI and ML.
• New Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 Support and Virtual TPM 2.0: This combination will significantly enhance protection and integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system (OS). Virtual TPM 2.0 will help prevent VMs and hosts from being tampered or compromised, thwarting the loading of unauthorized components and enable guest OS security features.
• Enhanced VMware vSphere Client: This latest release of the HTML-5-based vSphere Client will introduce new functionality to manage VMware NSX, vSAN and vSphere Update Manager along with an increased support for third-party products.
The enhanced vCenter Server Appliance will deliver an improved user experience made possible through more efficient management capabilities and significant performance improvements. It will deliver a faster experience for vSphere admins (compared to vSphere 6.5), while delivering considerable time and cost savings. Performance improvements will include:
• 200 percent faster performance in vCenter operations per second (3)
• 300 percent reduction in memory usage (3)
• 300 percent faster DRS-related operations (e.g. Power-on, Placement of VM) (3)
VMware vSphere customers can deploy VMware AppDefense to further secure applications running in the data center or cloud. AppDefense leverages its unique position in vSphere to understand what applications are intended to do, monitor against that intended state, and automate response if anyone or anything attempts to manipulate them.
VMware vSAN 6.7: Elevates the HCI Experience On-Premises and in the Cloud
Powering the largest hybrid cloud ecosystem of any HCI vendor, vSAN enables customers to evolve their vSphere environment on-premises or in the cloud with hyper-converged infrastructure that lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) with efficient operations and that easily scales to future demands. VMware vSAN 6.7 reduces time-to-expertise with a new intuitive interface and accelerates decision-making through advanced monitoring and analytics.
New and enhanced features in VMware vSAN 6.7 include:
• New VMware vSphere HTML5 Client Support: Will provide vSAN admins with a unified, intuitive management experience using the HTML5-based vSphere Client that introduces new functionality and optimized workflows for vSAN operations.
• New Integrated vRealize Operations Healthchecks in vCenter Server: Will offer a single pane of glass to monitor and control multiple HCI environments. vRealize Operations 6.7 will provide a global operations view of vSAN 6.7 environments with six new dashboards embedded within vCenter Server 6.7 enabling customers to monitor capacity, performance, KPIs and alerts, and more. This capability does not require a separate vRealize Operations license and is available to anyone with a vSAN Advanced or vSAN Enterprise license.
• New Host-Pinning and iSCSI failover support: Will extend the suitability of HCI to applications such as Cassandra, Hadoop and MongoDB as well as to clustered Windows Server environments. New application support requires customers to contact VMware for additional details.
• New Intelligent Self-Healing Capabilities: Will mitigate the effects of disruptive events such as hardware failures with smart resource allocation.
• Enhanced vSAN Encryption: Will meet strict U.S. Federal government security requirements with FIPS 140-2 validation to protect data from disruptive events.
As part of today’s announcement, VMware is also introducing vSAN ReadyCare to improve the support experience for HCI environments. VMware will help customers maintain performance by avoiding or quickly resolving issues and minimize downtime through a combination of proactive telemetry capabilities from vSAN Support Insight advanced analytics, and a broad investment in VMware support staff.
VMware is widely recognized as the leading HCI software provider, and now delivers vSphere and vSAN-powered HCI in two of the top four public cloud providers, including AWS and IBM. Through an expansive partner ecosystem, VMware supports the broadest set of consumption options for its HCI software from turnkey HCI integrated systems such as Dell EMC VxRail and VxRack SDDC solutions to certified vSAN ReadyNode hardware reference architectures to as-a-service consumption models in public clouds.
Supporting Quote
“CenturyLink has multiple cloud products providing world-class solutions to our customers built on the power of VMware VSAN, a fundamental piece of the complete software-defined data center (SDDC),” said Steve Nolen, senior lead product manager – Private Cloud, CenturyLink. “vSAN has scaled flawlessly to over 11 petabytes of production data on high-performance all-flash devices that provides a consistent application experience for the most demanding workloads, from business-critical applications to cloud-native applications. The rapid innovation in vSAN, as demonstrated by the most recent release, will further help us deliver a robust platform with enterprise-class resiliency and intelligent, self-healing capabilities to enable our customers to rely on a high performance hyper converged infrastructure.”
Product Availability
VMware vSphere 6.7 and VMware vSAN 6.7 are both expected to become available by the end of VMware’s Q1 FY19 (May 4, 2018).
