Highlights from VMworld Europe 2016

VMworld Europe for 2016 is well underway with almost 3 days behind us already. If you’re attending the conference and you feel like talking about backups, feel free to stop by our Booth B215 and say hey! We have a number of different team members in attendance, so feel free to stop by!

If you haven’t been able to attend the conference in person, there have been a number of interesting and exciting reveals and revelations, and I wanted to take a little time to discuss some of my favorite reveals and announcements thus far from the week.

vSphere 6.5

This likely comes as no surprise to most people. vSphere 6.5 has been waiting in the wings for some time, and while it could be argued that VMware doesn’t focus on vSphere as much as some of their new emerging products, this update certainly doesn’t disappoint. Let’s take a look at some of the enhancements contained in this release.

HTML5-Based vSphere Client – This has been available as a VMware fling for some time, but now it’s officially part of 6.5 and will no longer be in beta phases. This comes as welcome news to a number of administrators as the old Flash-Based web console was becoming a hassle to use and that’s not to mention the many MANY security vulnerabilities that come with using Flash. Even from a performance perspective the HTML5 web client is smooth, and snappy, so using it is truly an enjoyable experience.

VM-Level Disk Encryption – The problem with VMs has always been their mobility. It’s a blessing and a curse. On the one hand their mobility allows us to use features like vMotion, but at the same time if an attacker gains access to VM storage, they could copy off the VMDK and have pretty easy access to anything contained within it. VM-Level Disk Encryption addresses this in that the VMs are encrypted, making this type of attack a non-issue. A very nice feature!

Encrypted vMotion – While we’re on the topic of Security, encrypted vMotion was also announced as well. While VM-Level Disk Encryption will protect the data at rest, Encrypted vMotion will protect the VM from man in the middle attacks. In today’s IT environments, more security is a must.

vSphere Integrated Containers – This is VMware’s answer to the Containers game that everyone seems to be getting into. Every major virtualization vendor is generating capabilities to allow a micro-services application model via containers, and VMware delivers with vSphere integrated containers. They are managed much like VMs are and no additional tools are needed for their management according to VMware.

vCenter 6.5

The VCSA is IN – It’s amazing to me how many people still run vCenter on a Windows Machine. Not only does it eat up Windows and MSSQL licensing, it’s not as easy to manage. The VCSA is a FANTASTIC little appliance, and with vCenter 6.5 it’s almost impossible not to switch if you haven’t already. To make this migration even easier, VMware has released a nifty little migration utility to migrate from the Windows vCenter instance to the VCSA.

Built-In File-based backup and recovery of vCenter – This is a nice little feature add for those companies using vSphere that don’t have an easy way of backing up vCenter. With most VM based backup applications like our application Altaro VM Backup, you simply backup the vCenter VM, but what if you don’t have such a backup utility? Now with vCenter 6.5 there is built in Backup and Recovery capabilities for the VCSA. You simply select a storage device to use for the backup, and away you go.

Native vCenter High Availability – vCenter has always proven to be somewhat of a single point of failure when it comes to availability. Sure VMware HA will see the failure and bring the VM back online as needed, but there is still some limbo time associated with that while vCenter gets back on it’s feet. Well now with 6.5 the VCSA now has it’s own HA features. It can be paired with other VCSA nodes to provide a fault tolerant vCenter experience.

VSAN 6.5

iSCSI Access – You can now use VSAN as an iSCSI target for situations where the connecting workload must connect with an iSCSI initiator. While certainly not a game changer, this adds a lot of flexibility to your VSAN deployment.

2-Node Direct Connect – The previous VSAN requirements could be a bit cost prohibitive due to the number of required nodes as an entry point into the solution. Now you have the option of a 2-Node VSAN solution, which will be VERY useful for the SMB and smaller Mid-Market space.

All-Flash Capable – As Flash Storage gets cheaper, more people are starting to look at all flash solutions. Previously you needed a specialized storage solution to accommodate this, but now VSAN supports it directly, which allows you to reduce the complexity of storage, and minimize the number of vendors in your environment.

Amazon AWS & VMware Partnership

While not a feature enhancement or new product, this was certainly some interesting news. Basically this will allow customers to utilize familiar VMware technologies and capabilities on one of the largest public clouds in existence. This opens up a number of interesting options…

Hybrid Cloud – VMware states that with this solution, they now have an official hybrid cloud story. Customers will be able to seamlessly move workloads from on-premises to the AWS VMware Cloud with very little hassle. This has been something only Microsoft has been able to achieve to date with Azure and Hyper-V.

Operational Consistency – Management of the hybrid solution will utilize the same toolsets you’re used to using today. There is nothing more to learn and you’ll have single pane of glass management using technologies like vCenter linked mode.  

No Patching or Upgrades – Most IT Pros hate upgrades, so this is welcome news. Running your workloads on the VMware Cloud in AWS essentially removes to the upgrade burden off you. VMware will continue to keep the public cloud platform up to date, leaving you more time to work on other things in your environment.

Subscription Based Consumption – The industry is continuously moving to a operational expenditure model and away from large capital expenditures. With that in mind the subscription based usage of a public cloud is widely popular, so being able to purchase vSphere services with this model is highly beneficial.

Wrap-Up

So that does it for our VMworld Europe update. I hope you found this interesting and exciting, and be sure to keep an eye on our VMware blog in the coming months as we start blogging about all these new great features and capabilities. As always, if you had a particular favorites reveal or feature that was not discussed above, feel free to use the comments section below to let us know.

Thanks for reading!

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