Designed to dramatically simplify the build out and ongoing operations of software-defined data centre at scale, VMware has announced VMware EVO SDDC and VMware Virtual SAN 6.1.

Serving as the foundation of VMware’s Unified Hybrid Cloud platform, the software-defined data centre extends the virtualisation principles of abstraction, pooling and automation across all data centre resources and services. As a result, a software-defined data centre is designed to be dramatically more efficient. By extending virtualisation across the data centre, IT organisations can slash CAPEX by as much as 49 percent while reducing deployment and provisioning time from days to hours.

With the introduction of VMware EVO SDDC, customers will be able to more easily deploy and operate virtual infrastructure as a service; providing efficiency, agility and control for building and operating private, public and hybrid clouds. VMware EVO SDDC will include foundational components of VMware’s hyper-converged infrastructure – VMware vSphere, VMware Virtual SAN and VMware NSX – which will enable the convergence of compute, storage and networking onto a single, integrated layer of software that can run on any commodity x86 infrastructure.

The easiest way to deploy and operate the software-defined data centre

VMware EVO SDDC will be a fully automated software suite for delivering the software-defined data centre as an integrated system. Enterprises and service providers will be able to use VMware EVO SDDC to deploy a software-defined data centre at scale. With VMware EVO SDDC, IT organisations can meet key data centre scale initiatives, ranging from application and infrastructure delivery automation to business mobility to high availability and resilient infrastructure, without compromising security, control or choice.

“Organisations have adopted the software-defined data centre architecture to become more agile, responsive and profitable,” said John Gilmartin, vice president and general manager, Integrated Systems Business Unit, VMware. “VMware EVO SDDC will bring to bear the entirety of our innovations across our software-defined data centre portfolio in a comprehensive and integrated system that will be easy to deploy, operate and scale.”

VMware EVO SDDC will include VMware EVO SDDC Manager, a new intelligent automation engine that will simplify and significantly reduce the time required for power-up, provisioning and monitoring of virtual and physical resources, including software, servers, top-of-rack and spine switches. The EVO SDDC Manager will pool resources across multiple racks as a single “virtual rack” and can dynamically carve out workload domain capacity based on availability and performance requirements. VMware EVO SDDC Manager will provide automated lifecycle management of the entire hardware and VMware integrated software stack, including:

• Compute – VMware vSphere, the industry-defining virtualisation solution, delivers a highly available, resilient, on-demand cloud infrastructure to run, protect and manage any application from business-critical to cloud-native applications.
• Storage – VMware Virtual SAN is the ideal storage platform for virtual machines, including business-critical applications. A 64-node VMware Virtual SAN cluster exceeds eight petabytes of storage capacity while delivering up to seven million input/output operations per second (IOPS) with nearly perfect linear scalability.
• Networking – VMware NSX is helping hundreds of customers realise the full potential of a software-defined data centre. Integrated within VMware EVO SDDC, VMware NSX reduces the time to provision multi-tier networking and security services from weeks to seconds, abstracting virtual networks from the underlying physical network. VMware NSX also brings security inside the data centre through micro-segmentation and automated fine-grained policies tied to the virtual machines.
• Cloud management – VMware vRealize Operations provides intelligent operations management across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures using predictive analytics and policy-based automation. The combination of VMware vRealize Operations and VMware vRealize Log Insight enables IT teams to combine and analyse structured and unstructured data for end-to-end operations management to help them improve overall performance and avert disruptions.

VMware EVO SDDC will also include Hardware Management Services to abstract the characteristics of heterogeneous switching, server and power distribution unit (PDU) hardware. Hardware Management Services will be responsible for executing hardware management tasks. VMware intends to offer this solution as open source code, enabling the company to work with a broad ecosystem of partners to drive ongoing development leading to broad hardware compatibility and improved technology.

VMware EVO SDDC customers will be able to easily add VMware Horizon virtual desktops and VMware vRealize Automation to enable infrastructure as a service. In addition, VMware is exploring future integration between VMware EVO SDDC and VMware vCloud Director and VMware Integrated OpenStack to support service provider environments.

Rack-scale offerings built and managed with VMware EVO SDDC will scale in capacity starting from one-third rack to multiple racks and thousands of nodes at single server increments. Each fully populated rack will support more than 1,000 infrastructure as a service virtual machines or more than 2,000 desktop virtual machines, delivering a highly efficient and scalable infrastructure for cloud and virtual desktop deployments.  

Initially, the solution will be available via branded, integrated system offerings direct from partners Dell, QCT (Quanta Cloud Technology) and VCE. Over time, customers will also have the option to purchase the software direct from VMware, and then work with a pre-qualified partner to integrate the software onto hardware.

Learn more about VMware EVO SDDC.

VMware Virtual SAN 6.1, the foundation of VMware’s hyper-converged infrastructure

VMware Virtual SAN 6.1 will increase data protection options for business-critical environments with the new Stretched Cluster Feature and enhanced VMware vSphere Replication providing five-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Additionally, the latest release enables new advanced management and monitoring through deep integration with VMware vRealize Operations and a new Health Check Plug-In for performance monitoring, root cause analysis and capacity planning.

VMware Virtual SAN is designed to be the optimal storage solution for VMware vSphere virtual machines. The software will enable core storage services for virtualised production environments, with greater performance, scalability, flexibility, and lower latency and cost. VMware Virtual SAN is ideal for a range of use cases including business-critical applications, virtual desktop infrastructure, remote IT, and test / development.

In 15 months since its initial release, more than 2,000 customers have adopted VMware’s industry-leading hyper-converged infrastructure stack globally. 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. 

“Customers have adopted VMware Virtual SAN because of the simple, high-performance storage it offers for VMware vSphere virtual machines,” said Charles Fan, senior vice president and general manager, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware. “The enhanced enterprise availability and data protection, new flash hardware device support, and advanced management and troubleshooting capabilities of VMware Virtual SAN 6.1 are examples of the rapid evolution of the storage software to meet the needs of enterprise customers.”

Learn more about VMware Virtual SAN 6.1.