VMworld 2013: Networking and storage take center stage

VMware opens the VMworld 2013 conference in San Francisco this morning with a flurry of product announcements that both underscore the company's leadership in virtualization and help to flesh out its concept of the software-defined data center (SDDC). Along with updates of the vSphere virtualization platform and the vCloud Suite for managing vSphere-based private clouds, VMware is unveiling a new software-defined storage solution called Virtual SAN and a new network virtualization solution called NSX.

Virtual SAN turns the local storage of multiple vSphere hosts into highly available, shared storage that supports SSD for read caching and policy-based provisioning of virtual machines based on performance and availability requirements. VMware says a public beta will be available in Q3 2013.

NSX is based largely on the network virtualization solution that VMware acquired with Nicira last year. Although optimized for vSphere in a number of ways, NSX also supports the KVM and Xen hypervisors (with Hyper-V on the road map) and works with third-party cloud management systems such as OpenStack and CloudStack. Aimed at large enterprises and service providers -- organizations with a significant stake in making network provisioning faster and easier -- NSX will be available in Q4 2013.

The Version 5.5 releases of vSphere with Operations Management and the vCloud Suite, both expected to be available in Q3 2013, incorporate a lengthy list of new features and improvements. These start with the new abilities to leverage flash in vSphere hosts for read caching and to bring high availability to certain monitored applications and extend to improvements in backup, replication, single sign-on, network troubleshooting, the Web client, and host hardware support.

Some of the improvements are designed to make virtualization more suitable for applications that continue to cling to bare metal. For instance, a new latency-sensitivity setting for virtual machines helps make the case for virtualizing low-latency applications such as stock trading, while new Hadoop virtualization extensions simplify the virtualization of Hadoop workloads and bring high availability to the entire Hadoop stack.

Incremental changes
The vSphere 5.5 release introduces incremental changes and updates across the board. At the VM level, virtual hardware Version 10 brings a number of new features. New AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) support enables multiple SATA devices on the same controller. New graphics features include support for Intel and AMD GPUs on Windows and Linux guests, along with support for OpenGL Version 2.1 for Linux guests. At the processor level you'll find new support for CPU-C states, which make it possible both to increase scale and conserve power. New hardware support includes hot-pluggable SSD PCIe memory devices, which now can be added or removed without taking the machine offline.

The new latency-sensitivity setting changes how the hypervisor handles the allocation of physical resources to the virtual machine, reserving memory, increasing vCPU ownership of the physical CPU, and bypassing CPU scheduling at the virtualization layer. This feature can significantly improve the response time of a typical virtual machine in order to meet the demands of latency sensitive applications.

VMware shows Microsoft Cluster Services some love in this release. Windows Server 2012 fail-over clustering is supported in vSphere 5.5 in the form of round robin path policy plus Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI protocol support.

The vCenter Server has seen a number of incremental changes as well. The vCenter Server Appliance now supports as many as 500 vSphere hosts and 5,000 virtual machines. The vSphere Web Client has been updated to support OS X for VM Console access, deploying OVF templates, and attaching client devices. On all supported Web browsers, the Web Client adds new drag-and-drop capability along with the ability to filter search list items and quickly access the 10 most recently accessed objects. VMware has also ironed out a number of wrinkles in vCenter Single Sign-On. The improvements include tighter integration with Microsoft Active Directory and a simplified installation process.

This new release of vSphere also brings the inevitable scalability increases to the ESXi hypervisor. Host configuration maximums increase from 160 physical CPUs to 320, 2TB of memory to 4TB, eight NUMA nodes to 16, and 2,048 virtual CPUs to 4,096.

Networking enhancements
VMware has placed a special emphasis on networking enhancements in this release. Some of them probably won't make headlines or turn many heads, but they will definitely make a difference to the people getting the job done. Diagnosing network problems often requires an analysis of the actual traffic on the wire. This takes both troubleshooting skill and the tools to get at the packets of interest. VMware vSphere 5.5 includes new packet capture functionality and a customized version of TCPDUMP to allow you to access host network traffic at the virtual NIC, virtual switch, or uplink level.

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Red Hat unveils new offerings, cloud certification at VMworld

With VMworld 2013 in full swing in San Francisco, Red Hat wasted no time today showing off its upcoming cloud and virtualization offerings. The open source solutions provider unveiled demos of its forthcoming CloudForms 2.1 cloud management technology, a new product designed to integrate Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server, and a new training and certification offering for deploying and managing OpenStack.

"We agree that an all-public cloud isn't the answer, as VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger acknowledges," says Bryan Che, general manager of Red Hat's Cloud Business Unit.

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"This is a conversation Red Hat has been leading for some time now. However, we do not buy into the premise that a private or a hybrid platform based on one vendor's technologies and products is the answer either, says Che That goes against the compelling industry trends of openness and choice that have increasingly put customers in control of their own destinies and strategic direction. Instead, we are focused on delivering what we believe customers really want: an open hybrid cloud."

For that to happen, Che says, a hybrid cloud can't just run on a homogeneous software stack. It needs to work across the enterprise's entire business and IT, spanning Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware and Amazon. That's where OpenStack comes in.

OpenStack is free open source software-actually a series of interrelated open source projects for controlling pools of processing, storage and networking resources through a datacenter-supported by a wide array of vendors, from Red Hat and IBM to Rackspace and HP.

CloudForms is Red Hat's answer to operating and managing an OpenStack environment. Its capabilities include a comprehensive cloud service catalog, chargeback and metering, service orchestration, policy and governance, reporting and forecasting and more. And, as Che notes, it can provide these capabilities from a diverse array of cloud environments-VMware, Red Hat, Amazon-all from a single pane of glass.

"This means, then, that with CloudForms, you can build and manage a hybrid cloud that spans not just Red hat technologies or VMware technologies but a choice and diversity of providers," he says. "And, you can do this all with a unified and interoperable set of tools and interfaces. In an open hybrid cloud, your cloud is not locked into a single vendor or technology stack; rather you can build and manage a cloud that spans all your important assets in an integrated and seamless way."

Red Hat also introduced a new product offering: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Promotional Offering. It integrates Red Hat's enterprise Linux platform with its virtualization management system for servers and desktops. The Enterprise Virtualization Promotional Offering will be made available as a single subscription offering in fall 2013.

The open source solutions provider also announced its Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), a class and certification intended to ensure that enterprise customers' IT professionals can deploy and manage OpenStack.

Red Hat says the class will cover essential OpenStack skills, including installing and configuring a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform deployment, configuring and managing images and managing storage using Object Storage (Swift) and Block Storage (Cinder).

"We built the industry's leading Linux certification program by focusing on rigorous, hands-on testing of real-world skills," says Iain Gray, vice president of Global Services at Red Hat.

"Our Red Hat Certified Professionals love this because it is a meaningful test of their skills. IT employers love it because it offers assurance that the certificate holders can apply their skills and knowledge in real-world situations, says Gray. We have applied these same principles to the Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure as a Service. Organizations are seeking capable professionals to help bring OpenStack into their IT environments. As with Linux, we expect to set the benchmark for a technology that is rapidly proving to be a game changer in the industry."

Thor Olavsrud covers IT Security, Big Data, Open Source, Microsoft Tools and Servers for CIO.com. Follow Thor on Twitter @ThorOlavsrud. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn. Email Thor at tolavsrud@cio.com

Read more about certification in CIO's Certification Drilldown.

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