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VMware has announced its latest update to version 5.5 of its global virtualisation powerhouse, vCloud Suite.

I would say that this is an evolutionary rather than revolutionary update being the third major release in the vSphere 5 family (5.0,5.1,5.5).

There are however some significant storage additions such as Virtual SAN (VSAN) and VMware Virtual Flash (vFlash) as well as a new vSphere App HA to provide application software high availability which is in addition to vSphere HA.

VMware has also responded to the customer frustration over Single-Sign on (SSO) which is an authentication proxy for vCenter and made some changes to SSO to hopefully make it easier to deploy. Every component of the suite has been updated in some way which is an impressive undertaking to get everything in sync.

Here are all the details:

1. What’s New in vCloud Suite 5.5: Introduction
2. What’s New in vCloud Suite 5.5: vCenter Server and ESXi
3. What’s New in vCloud Suite 5.5: vCenter Server SSO fixes
4. What’s New in vCloud Suite 5.5: Virtual SAN (VSAN)
5. What’s New in vCloud Suite 5.5: VMware Virtual Flash (vFlash)
6. What’s New in vCloud Suite 5.5: vCloud Director
7. What’s New in vCloud Suite 5.5: vCenter Orchestrator
8. What’s New in vCloud Suite 5.5: vCloud Networking & Security
9. What’s New in vCloud Suite 5.5: vSphere App HA
10. What’s New in vCloud Suite 5.5: vSphere Replication and vCenter Site Recovery Manager

VMware is certainly evolving their strategy of the software defined data center, this release puts software defined storage (SDS) on the map at least from a VMware perspective, a multi-year project. VMware vVolumes hasn’t made it into this release which shows what a major undertaking it is, we will have to wait for vSphere 6!

SDS is going to have a huge push this year from VMware and of course all the other storage vendors, expect some exciting innovation.

Software defined networking is the next traditional IT infrastructure piece to “Defy convention” and is arguably by far the hardest one to change. Another multi-year project is just beginning.

VMware has released its latest update to vCenter Operations Manager Suite with some notable changes.

First of all there is now a vCenter Operations Manager Foundation edition which is included with every vSphere edition from Standard free of charge.

The Foundation edition includes basic vSphere Performance and Health monitoring just as Proactive Smart Alerts, Intelligent Operations Groups (New), vSphere Health Monitoring and Self-learning Performance Analytics. It’s a start to at least get you monitoring your environment but for any of the clever analysis and recommendations or capacity management you will need to look at a more feature rich edition or get it included as part of the VMware vCloud Suite.

There are 4 editions and they have had a feature list move around, the above mentioned Foundation (vSphere Performance and Health), Standard (vSphere Monitoring, Performance and Capacity Optimization), Advanced, (Virtual and Physical Infrastructure Operations including Monitoring, Performance, Capacity and Configuration Management) & Enterprise (Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Operations including OS- and Application-level Monitoring, Performance, Capacity and Configuration Management)

The features of the old Advanced edition have now been incorporated into the Standard edition, the old Enterprise edition is now called Advanced and the old Enterprise Plus is now called Enterprise.

vCOPS 5.6 includes plenty of new integration including being part of the new Web Client which is a great (inevitable obviously) change.

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VMware’s US mega conference, VMworld kicks off in San Francisco in just over 2 weeks time. 19000 people attended in Las Vegas last year (we will have to see whether the choice of venue affects the numbers for this year!)

This will be my first time attending VMworld US as living in London I have attended VMworld Europe previously so am excited to see the differences, enjoy the bigger conference and meet some more fellow vExperts and other community members.

There’s obviously a huge amount that goes on at the conference from the keynote speaches, breakout sessions, panel discussions, labs, formal and informal meetings, and general networking so working out what to actually see with so much going on is harder than many people would assume.

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VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite has been released today. This was the major announcement and focus of VMworld Europe 2011 which was billed as “The Biggest VMware Management Launch Ever”.

To recap, the new vCenter Operations Management Suite is made up of two major components:

• vCenter Operations Manager 5.0
• vCenter Infrastructure Navigator 1.0 which is a new product

The suite aspect means there is tight integration between the two components. There are workflows to analyse performance which span both components. The suite now also allows seamless upgrades between different suite editions which are Standard, Advanced and Enterprise.

• vCenter Operations Standard: Performance management with capacity and change awareness for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.
• vCenter Operations Advanced: Adds more advanced capacity analytics and planning to vCenter Operations Standard’s performance management for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.
• vCenter Operations Enterprise: Performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities for both virtual and physical environments and includes customizable dashboards, smart alerting and application awareness.

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