Despite the massive inroads that other virtualization providers have made into the market VMware still stands out as the king of the enterprise space. Part of this is due to the maturity of their toolset which is able to accommodate a wide variety of guests and configurations but they’ve also got the largest catalogue of value adds which helps vastly in driving adoption of their hypervisor. Still the asking price for any of their products has become something of a sore point for many and their proprietary platform has caused consternation for those looking to leverage public cloud services. With their latest release of their vSphere product VMware is looking to remedy at least the latter issue, embracing OpenStack compatibility for one of their distributions.
The list of improvements that are coming with this new release are numerous (and I won’t bother repeating them all here) but suffice to say that most of them were expected and in-line with what we’ve gotten previously. Configuration maximums have gone up for pretty much every aspect, feature limitations have been extended and there’s a handful of new features that will enable vSphere based clusters to do things that were previously impossible. In my mind the key improvements that VMware have made in this release come down to Virtual SAN 6, Long Distance vMotion and, of course, their support for OpenStack via their VMware Integrated OpenStack release.
Virtual SAN always felt like a bit of an also-ran when it first came out due to the rather stringent requirements it had around its deployment. I remember investigating it as part of a deployment I was doing at the time, only to be horrified at the fact that I’d have to deploy a vSphere instance at every site that I wanted to use it at. The subsequent releases have shifted the product’s focus significantly and now presents a viable option for those looking to bring software defined datacenter principles to their environment. The improvements that come in 6 are most certainly cloud focused with things like Fault Domains and All Flash configurations. I’ll be very interested to see how the enterprise reacts to this offering, especially for greenfields deployments.
Long Distance vMotion might sound like a minor feature but as someone who’s worked in numerous large, disparate organisations the flexibility that this feature will bring is phenomenal. Right now the biggest issue most organisations face when maintaining two sites (typically for DR purposes) is the ability to get workloads between the sites, often requiring a lengthy outage process to do it. With Long Distance vMotion making both sites active and simply vMotioning workloads between sites is a vastly superior solution and provides many of the benefits of SRM without the required investment and configuration.
The coup here though is, of course, the OpenStack compatibility through VMware’s integrated distribution. OpenStack is notorious for being a right pain in the ass to get running properly, even if you already have staff that have had some experience with the product set in the past. VMware’s solution to this is to provide a pre-canned build which exposes all the resources in a VMware cloud through the OpenStack APIs for developers to utilize. Considering that OpenStack’s lack of good management tools has been, in my mind, one of the biggest challenges to its adoption this solution from VMware could be the kick in the pants it needs to see some healthy adoption rates.
It’s good to see VMware jumping on the hybrid cloud idea as the solution going forward as I’ve long been of the mind that that will be the solution going forward. Cloud infrastructure is great and all but there are often requirements it simply can’t meet due to its commodity nature. Going hybrid with OpenStack as the intermediary layer will allow enterprises to take advantage of these APIs whilst still leveraging their investment in core infrastructure, utilizing the cloud on an as-needed basis. Of course that’s the nirvana state but it seems to get closer to realisation with every new release so here’s hoping VMware will be the catalyst to finally see it succeed.
