VMware vSphere updated in big cloud play

VMware has looked to solidify its place as the number one virtual machine player with a plethora of updates to its vSphere virtualisation management range of products.

Chief executive (CEO) Paul Maritz said VMware was hoping to make businesses' physical infrastructure "disappear," with what it believes is the industry's first Cloud Infrastructure Suite.

Hypervisor vSphere 5 is included within that suite alongside four other VMware products: vCenter SRM for business continuity needs, vCenter Operations for monitoring of virtual machines, vShield for security, and vCloud Director for policy and reporting.

The suite is expected to be available in the third quarter of this year.

Fresh features

VMware claimed vSphere 5 would be four times more powerful than previous versions, able to process more than one million I/O operations per second.

Chief technical officer (CTO) Stephen Herrod said vSphere 5 had been dubbed the "monster VM," due to its ability to support a VM with up to 1TB of memory and 32 virtual CPUs.

One notable addition is the replication in software in vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5, allowing companies without storage replication to duplicate their environments for their recovery needs.

When quizzed why companies would want this feature, VMware said that particular feature would appeal more to small and medium-sized businesses who would not enjoy such replication functions.

The latest version of vCloud Director has been given "linked clone capabilities" to reduce provisioning time to as little as five seconds and cutting storage requirements by as much as 60 per cent, according to VMware. Linked clones are copies of an original virtual machine.

In a separate announcement, VMware launched its vSphere Storage Appliance, aimed at the SMB market.

The appliance lets users create a single pool of storage across multiple servers containing direct attached storage, up to a limit of three hosts, our sister site Cloud Pro reported.

Licensing shift

VMware has also altered its licensing arrangements for vSphere. Users will now pay for the amount of pooled virtual memory they use, rather than per CPU or per core. Pooled vRAM is the total amount of memory configured to all VMs in a customer infrastructure.

This altered licensing structure will "lay the foundation for customers to adopt a more cloud-like IT cost model based on consumption and value rather than physical components and capacity," VMware said.

Rival Citrix made a big announcement yesterday, with the acquisition of Cloud.com.