The IT Nerd

I have three significant announcements from VMWare Canada today:

VMWare announced the industry’s first unified platform of virtualized compute, networking and storage for the hybrid cloud. Defined in software, VMware’s platform will enable customers to create one consistent environment across the private and public cloud to run, protect and manage any cloud-native or traditional application. The platform also offers openness and choice in how customers can build and manage applications and cloud environments based on their specific needs.

VMware vSphere 6 – The Foundation for One Cloud 

Featuring more than 650 new features and innovations, VMware vSphere 6 delivers breakthrough new capabilities to address the unique needs of business-critical and cloud-native applications with higher performance, scale and consolidation ratios. VMware vSphere 6 also re-defines infrastructure and application service-levels and availability. Read more about VMware vSphere 6.

VMware Integrated OpenStack – A Simpler Path to OpenStack 

VMware Integrated OpenStack is an OpenStack distribution that will enable organizations to quickly and cost-effectively provide developers with open APIs to access VMware’s enterprise-class infrastructure. VMware packages, tests and supports all components of the distribution, including the open source OpenStack code, and will provide the distribution free of charge to VMware vSphere customers. Read more about VMware Integrated OpenStack.

VMware Virtual SAN 6 and vSphere Virtual Volumes – A New Generation of Enterprise Storage 

Designed to enable mass adoption of software-defined storage, VMware Virtual SAN 6 will introduce significant scalability and performance enhancements to the company’s award-winning hypervisor-converged storage solution. Additionally, VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will offer a new level of storage integration to make external arrays natively aware of virtual machines. Read more about VMware’s software–defined storage strategy and solutions.

VMware vCloud Air Hybrid Networking Services powered by VMware NSX

Expanding on integration work announced earlier this year, VMware revealed vCloud Air hybrid networking services – a technology preview that will help customers bridge VMware’s vCloud Air public cloud service and VMware vSphere-based private clouds to enable a single, secure network domain through a gateway appliance. VMware NSX is a network virtualization platform that delivers the entire networking and security model from L2-L7 in software. VMware NSX is being deployed as the networking foundation for VMware vCloud Air. With vCloud Air hybrid networking services, customers will be able to maintain hundreds of virtual networks spanning the private cloud and vCloud Air over a single WAN connection, and share the same fine-grained “zero trust” security policies and network isolation for applications, unchanged.

VMware’s unified platform includes advanced virtualization support for developers and system administrators who are leveraging continuous delivery and container-based distributed application technologies. Businesses rely on VMware’s industry leading compute, networking and storage innovations, integration with the OpenStack framework, and integrations with containers and Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration project initiated and managed by Google. This support helps customers achieve fast, flexible and reliable development, deployment and consumption of businesscritical and cloud-native applications across the hybrid cloud.

VMware vSphere 6, VMware Integrated OpenStack, VMware Virtual SAN 6 and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes are expected to become available in Q1 2015.

VMWare also announced VMware vSphere 6, the newest edition of the industry-defining virtualization solution for the hybrid cloud and foundation for the software-defined data centre. With more than 650 new features and innovations, VMware vSphere 6 will provide customers with a highly available, resilient, on-demand cloud infrastructure to run, protect and manage any application. VMware vSphere 6 will be complemented by the newest releases of VMware vCloud® Suite 6, VMware vSphere with Operations Management 6, and VMware Virtual SAN 6.

VMware vSphere 6 will deliver breakthrough new capabilities to address the unique needs of business-critical and cloud-native applications, and drive higher performance, scale and consolidation ratios. VMware vSphere 6 will also re-define infrastructure and application service-levels and availability. New capabilities and features include:

• Broad Application Support– VMware vSphere 6 will address the specific challenges of cloud-native applications, including agile development cycles and multiple application instances. With VMware vSphere 6, organizations will be able to manage thousands of component instances of a single cloud-native application. New scale, performance and availability capabilities also make vSphere 6 the platform of choice for virtualizing scale-up applications such as SAP HANA, scaleout workloads such as Hadoop, and business-critical applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, and SAP ERP. 

• New Long-Distance Live Migration Capabilities– VMware vSphere 6 introduces Long-Distance vMotion, which will enable zero downtime live migration of workloads over long distances such as New York to London. With multi-processor fault tolerance, another industry first, customers will benefit from continuous availability for larger virtual machines up to four virtual-CPUs.

• Instant Clone Technology– Introduced as Project Fargo, a technology preview at VMworld 2014 San Francisco, VMware’s Instant Clone technology will make it possible to rapidly clone and provision thousands of container instances and virtual machines to make new virtual infrastructure available in sub-second timeframes.

• 3D Graphics for Desktop Virtualization– VMware vSphere 6 will enable enterprises to deliver high-end workstation and graphics-intensive applications to virtual desktops such as VMware Horizon 6 for industries such as engineering, automotive, education and architecture. Using NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology, immersive 3D graphics can be delivered from the cloud enabling greater density, scalable performance and increased cost-savings. Read the NVIDIA and VMware joint announcement.

• Enterprise-Class Hypervisor-Converged Storage– VMware’s flagship  will provide enterprise-class scale, performance and new data services making it the ideal storage platform for virtual machines including business-critical applications. Read more about VMware Virtual SAN 6.

• Virtual Machine-Awareness for Third-Party Storage– VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes is the industry’s first solution that will enable native virtual machine awareness on a wide range of third-party storage systems, extending VMware’s software-defined storage control plane to the ecosystem. Read more about VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes.

Customers can optimize the performance, capacity and configuration health of VMware vSphere 6 with the newly introduced VMware vSphere with Operations Management 6. An integrated platform and management solution, VMware vSphere with Operations Management 6 simplifies infrastructure management with predictive analytics as well as automated recommendation and remediation capabilities. The solution delivers value from day one by helping customers proactively identify and remediate emerging performance and configuration issues and to reclaim any overprovisioned virtual machines along with associated compute, memory and storage resources.

VMware vSphere 6, VMware vSphere with Operations Management 6, VMware vCloud Suite 6 and VMware Integrated OpenStack are expected to be available in Q1 2015.

Finally, VMware Virtual SAN 6 will introduce significant scalability and performance enhancements to the company’s award-winning hypervisor-converged storage solution, and VMware vSphere® Virtual Volumes will offer new levels of storage integration to make third-party arrays natively aware of virtual machines.

To achieve the full potential of the software–defined data centre, a new software-defined storage approach is required to address storage-related operational complexity and cost challenges. VMware’s software-defined storage strategy leverages the hypervisor to advance storage in the cloud era and deliver the kind of operational efficiency that server virtualization brought to compute.

Radically simple, VMware Virtual SAN 6 introduces double the scalability and up to four-and-a-half times greater performance while adding several new enterprise-class capabilities, making it the ideal storage platform for virtual machines, including business critical applications. The release will feature:

• New all-flash architecture – VMware Virtual SAN 6 will enable a two-tier all-flash architecture in which flash devices are intelligently used for both caching and data persistence. The new all-flash architecture will provide more than four-times increase in input/output throughput per node compared to VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 while delivering predictable sub-millisecond latency.

• Maximum throughput of seven million IOPS / cluster – A 64-node VMware Virtual SAN cluster will deliver up seven million input/output operations per second (IOPS) with nearly perfect linear scalability.

• Scalability increased to 64 nodes / cluster – The new release will double scalability to 64 nodes per cluster enabling customers to achieve up to 6,400 virtual machines per cluster and exceed eight petabytes of storage capacity from a cluster.

• New enterprise-grade snapshots– The release will introduce a high-performance and efficient snapshot capability increasing the snapshot depth to 32 per virtual machine while minimizing the performance overhead.

• New Rack-awareness – VMware Virtual SAN 6 will enable intelligent placement of virtual machine objects across server racks for enhanced application availability even in case of complete rack failures.

• Expanded support for blades – With new support for direct-attached JBODs, customers will be able to scale VMware Virtual SAN 6 clusters to large capacity in server blade environments.

Built into VMware vSphere, VMware Virtual SAN delivers radically simple, hypervisor-converged storage for virtual machines. Featuring storage policy-based management, VMware Virtual SAN shifts the management model for storage from the device to the application, enabling administrators to provision storage for applications in minutes. In just nine months since its initial release, more than 1,000 customers have purchased VMware Virtual SAN. Customers have selected VMware Virtual SAN because of its ease of management, its deep integration with the VMware stack, and its high-performance with elastic scalability, and its ability to lower total cost of ownership. VMware Virtual SAN helps customers to reduce Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) by leveraging server-side storage economics to deliver savings in comparison to traditional SANs.

With this release, VMware will solve a long-standing industry issue by enabling storage arrays to become virtual machine-aware. VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes is a set of storage APIs that will enable a more granular integration between storage and VMware vSphere at the individual virtual machine level. This enables the storage array to dynamically provision capacity and data services for each virtual machine resulting in more agile, cost-efficient and simpler to manage storage infrastructure. Storage arrays featuring VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will be managed through a common control plane – extending VMware’s software-defined storage vision of application-centric, policy-based automation across heterogeneous storage.

VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes has received strong, widespread support from the VMware storage ecosystem. VMware worked closely with five design partners – Dell, EMC, HP, IBM and NetApp – that were instrumental in defining the direction of the technology. The initial set of VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes-enabled storage products, expected to become available in first-half of 2015, will be delivered by Atlantis Computing, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, NEC, NetApp, NexGen Storage, Pure Storage, Symantec and Tintri.

Beyond this initial set of partners, a total of 29 storage partners are engaged in the program with the intention of introducing their own VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes enabled storage including CommVault, NEC, Nimble Storage and SolidFire.

VMware Virtual SAN 6 and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes are expected to become available in Q1 2015. VMware Virtual SAN is priced at US$2,495 per CPU. VMware Virtual SAN for Desktop is priced at US$50 per user. The new All-Flash architecture will be available as on add-on to VMware Virtual SAN 6 and will be priced at US$1,495 per CPU and US$30 per desktop. VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will be packaged as a feature in VMware vSphere Standard Edition and above as well as VMware vSphere ROBO editions.

VMware took the latest shot this week in the Mac virtualization war by announcing VMware Fusion 3.0. According to their press release, here’s why you should pay attention:

VMware Fusion 3 will include more than 50 new features and enhancements, delivering a better-than-ever Windows on Mac experience.  Key highlights include:

• Optimized for Snow Leopard. Built from the ground up for the Mac, VMware Fusion 3 leverages Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s advanced architecture with a new 64-bit core engine and native support for the 64-bit kernel, delivering even better Windows on Mac performance.
• Ultimate Windows 7 Experience. VMware Fusion 3 will be the first to enable the full Windows 7 experience, side-by-side with your Mac, complete with Windows Aero and Flip 3D.
• Switching Made Easy. VMware Fusion 3 will make it easy for users to bring their entire PC to their Mac in a few easy steps – wirelessly or with a simple Ethernet cable – allowing customers to protect investments in existing Windows software, and to keep using the programs they still need.
• Best-in-Class 3D Graphics. Support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 will enable users to run their favorite 3D Windows games and applications – all without rebooting.

Okay. I was all set to be impressed by this, but if I look at their chief rival Parallels Desktop and compare features between the two, this is what I see:

Optimized for Snow Leopard – Parallels Desktop had support for Snow Leopard when Snow Leopard shipped back in August. But they shipped an update a day or two after Snow Leopard shipped (Build 3846 of Parallels Desktop 4.0) to ensure that you’re covered.

Ultimate Windows 7 Experience – Okay, they’re one up on Parallels Desktop there since the current version of Parallels Desktop doesn’t do Aero or Flip 3D.

Switching Made Easy – Parallels came out with a special version of Parallels Desktop (called the “Switch To Mac Edition”) that did exactly this back in August.

Best-in-Class 3D Graphics – The current version of Parallels Desktop with support for DirectX 9.0, DirectX Pixel Shader 2.0 and OpenGL 2.0 is close to what VMware Fusion 3 is going to support. Let’s agree to call this a tie.

So it seems to me that some of the new features in VMware Fusion 3 are meant to catch up to Parallels Desktop 4.0. While they have made a jump with support for Aero and Flip 3D, I’m having a hard time getting excited about this announcement. I guess I’ll have to wait until October 27 when the product ships to really get a handle on where this stands compared to their chief rival.

VMWare ESX and VMWare ESXi are used to run virtual machines in a bunch of corporate environments all over the world. A lot of this stuff is mission critical as you can imagine. So the suits in these companies must just be freaking out because of a rather major bug in the VMWare license management code which stops virtual machines from powering on as of today if you are running ESX or ESXi 3.5 Update 2. Apparently the bug is that VMWare ESX and ESXi will shut down as of today because the licesnse management code thinks it should expire today (as opposed to when your license actually expires). There is a rather “lively” discussion about it on the VMWare Communities about this issue.

For its part, VMWare has an alert on it’s website that they are working on a fix that should be out in 36 hours. In the meantime, they suggest NOT upgrading to the affected version. Which implies that if you have, it sucks to be you.

With thousands (if not millions) of lines of code, bugs will pop up. That’s just the nature of software. The unique thing about this one is that it’s happening in some code that exists for no reason other than to harm their own customers. It is the intent of the code is to make the software fail if the code thinks you’re a software pirate. I’ll stick my neck out to say that 90% (or higher) of VMWare customers are not pirates (seeing as they have released some of their products for free. VMWare ESXi is an example of this). In fact I would say that in any major corporation, fear of massive fines and prosecution is enough to stop them from pirating software. So, If I were a VMWare customer I would be beyond pissed at these guys.

UPDATE: Ironically, there’s a press release on the VMWare site that says “VMware ESX Hypervisor is Hands-Down Product of Choice for Windows Administrators.” I’m guessing that some Windows Administrators wouldn’t agree with that right now.

UPDATE #2: “Express Patches” are now available that apparently fix this issue. That was quick damage control. There’s also this posting from VMWare CEO Paul Maritz. He doesn’t look happy.