VMware Pushes Software-Defined Data Center

From a business software perspective, this week’s biggest announcements came from VMware,
which hosted its annual VMworld conference. While there were a lot of specific product
announcements, what I found most interesting was the concept of the software-defined data
center.

CEO Paul Maritz, who is retiring as VMware CEO, said the big trend is moving IT from the
physical world to the virtualized world to a cloud world. In 2008, Maritz said, 25 percent of
applications were running on virtualized servers; now about 60 percent are.

Incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger expects that in a few years, more than 90 percent of workloads
will be virtualized, but that provisioning of new services needs to be much faster, not only for
deploying servers but networking and storage. He talked about creating “the virtual data center
of the future” that would include all of the features needed for an application. Today’s data
centers involve silos of equipment and the big vendors are in fact trying to create new silos.

To do this, Gelsinger announced vCloud Suite 5.1, which integrates the company’s
virtualization, cloud infrastructure, and management portfolios into a single offering. This
is meant to be a comprehensive solution designed to simplify the adoption of cloud-based
technologies. As part of this, the company launched a new version of its vSphere 5.1, a new
version of the company’s virtualization platform. This includes support for virtual machines with
up to 64 virtual CPUs, and improvements to its VMotion package to enable live migration of
VMs without the need for shared storage.

Also at the conference, the company announced the alpha version of the Horizon suite
designed to help mobile workers connect from anywhere using any device. This is aimed at the
growing number of companies that support Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, enabling
IT departments to better manage such devices and access. The company also demonstrated
how a combination of VMware View and Wanova Mirage will allow better access to Windows
desktops from multiple devices.

Data Center Talk updates its resources everyday. Visit us to know of the latest technology and standards from the data center world.

Please leave your views and comments on DCT Forum