Hello all,
There have been a lot of great announcements coming out of VMworld EU this week. Here are the exciting items that have been announced so far:
vSphere 6.5 vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)
A lot of great changes have happened to the vCSA over the past few years. It can now run significantly more hosts/vms. There are less steps involved in spinning it up as opposed to the Windows version. And NOW (finally!) one of the last reasons for keeping the windows version around has been addressed: vUM! VCSA 6.5 now has Update Manager integrated. You can now upgrade from 5.5 or 6.0 (windows OR appliance) to 6.5, including vDS configuration. It has a brand new HTML5 web client, though it doesn’t yet have feature parity with the old version, that will be addressed.
Cross-Cloud services
This is the thing that I’m the most excited about and the one that has me asking “What took you so long?”. Cross-cloud services will enable connectivity to public cloud providers for the “seamless integration of workloads”. It will enable you to (for example) run your DB on premises, your application tier in AWS, and your web front end in Azure. I asked some of the AWS guys here about the technical details but they haven’t been ironed out quite yet. This offering is slated to be available “Mid 2017” and will be purported to also have “Elastic DRS” – an ecosystem that allows you to burst across clouds. In the event of a workload spike, you would be able to provision more VMs locally via vRA and use Auto-Scale Groups to increase the number of EC2 instances in AWS to handle the increased demand. VMware also announced that NSX micro-segmentation would also function within the public cloud providers – this will give you additional security granularity on top of native firewalls, security groups and network access control lists.
More to come!