Technology update – VSAN 6.2, NSX vRealize Suite 7 and vCloud Suite 7

Wow! Last week, was a week full of announcements. Several announcements were made by VMware, the NLVMUG published the agenda of the annual user conference and my co-worker Ronald de Jong also published a nice article on Software Defined Networking/VMware NSX. Veeam announced version 9 of their availability suite, and don’t forget ZertoCon, an event all about Disaster Recovery matters.

In this article a short summary of all the announcements.

Announcing VSAN 6.2

As you probably noticed VMware announced VSAN 6.2! Most important improvements are:

• Deduplication and Compression
• Quality of Service / Limits
• Enhanced Health Service
• RAID-5/6 (Erasure Coding)
• Sparse Swap Files
• Checksum / disk scrubbing
• In mem read caching
• Integrated Performance Metrics
• Application support

There are lot of articles available on the internet, I would recommended to read Duncan’s VSAN 6.2 What’s new article. My colleague Herman Rutten is already working on an update of his SDS/HCI comparison at WhatMatrix.com. This update will include VSAN 6.2.

Network revolution with VMware NSX

My colleague Ronald de Jong published read worthy article on Software Defined Network (SDN) with VMware NSX.

The article is in Dutch and talks about the advantages of SDN, explains how NSX works and includes some details on the integration of NSX with solutions from HPE and Palo Alto.

VMware heeft hierin met NSX een product gebracht dat voor netwerken is wat ESX ooit was voor servers. Een revolutie in netwerkland, die zijn weerga niet kent. PQR ziet VMware NSX als dé oplossing voor het verhogen van security en flexibiliteit in de automatisering.

The full article is available here. If you want to know more SDN in general or have specific questions about VMware NSX, you can contact Ronald through twitter.

Announcing vRealize Suite 7 and vCloud Suite 7

This week VMware unveiled vRealize Suite 7 and vCloud Suite 7. Both suites contain the latest versions of the vRealize cloud management products. Included are vRealize Automation 7.0, vRealize Business for Cloud 7.0.1., vRealize Operations 6.2 and vRealize Log Insight 3.3.

vRealize Suite Standard has now been added as a new option; vRealize Suite Standard lacks vRealize Automation but includes vRealize Operations, vRealize Business For Cloud and vRealize Log Insight. vRealize Suite Advanced & Enterprise include vRealize Automation. You need vRealize Suite Enterprise for application level monitoring and automating application level deployment. More details are included in the next figure:

VMware vCloud Suite is now aligned with vRealize Suite which means that the vCloud Suite contains the same CMP products as vRealize Suite, on top of the vSphere Enterprise Plus license. This means vRealize Log Insight is now added to the vCloud Suite.

Also notice the new Portable License Unit (PLU).

On top of this, we’ve introduced a new licensing metric called Portable Licensing Unit (PLU) that will help you protect your future investments in VMware.  It’s a new licensing unit that gives you the flexibility to utilize vRealize Suite to manage workloads regardless of whether they are on vSphere on-premises, third-party hypervisors, physical servers, or supported public clouds.

This means it’s now possible to convert per socket licenses to Operating System Instance (OSI) based licenses and back. This will give you flexbility in the way you want to use your license (and what you want to manger). Sound like a great option for customers.

Veeam availability suite version 9

Also announced this week: Veeam availability suite version 9. More information on the Veeam website.

ZertoCON, May 23-25 2016

If you’re into disaster recovery be sure to attend ZertoCON (May 23-25 2016, Boston, MA). This is the event to learn more about Zerto solutions, learn about their roadmap and get hands-on experience.

NLVMUG UserCon, March 17 2016

The guys of the NLVMUG published the agenda for this year’s event. It’s available here. Be sure to attend and register at the NLVMUG website. This year I will present at the NLVMUG UserCon and discuss different DR and DRaaS options. My session is scheduled at 11:30.