VMware has three targets user groups for V5:
- Very low-end users, where it faces increasing competition from Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization (no charge) functionality and storage cost reduction from Virtual Storage/SAN Appliances from HP(LeftHand), FalconStor, Gluster, NetApp, StorMagic, and many others, that work with VMware or Hyper-V;
- The Kernel has been reduced to 100K to reduce the memory and server resources required to run VMware;
- vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA), which includes the capability of creating a very low cost/low administration RAID 10 Virtual SAN across the storage on up to three servers;
- High-end users with VMware memory, server and/or storage constraints:
- vRAM support has been increased from 256GB to 1TB per VM;
- vCPUs support for vSphere increased from 8 to 32;
- Improved VMFS largest extent from 2 terabytes to 60 terabytes and increased number of files (100,000);
- Bespoke storage partner plug-ins into the kernel have been replaced by APIs, which simplifies and improves the performance of VMware, and removes the overhead and availability concerns with kernel plug-ins. This also makes it significantly easier for more storage ecosystem constituents to develop advanced functionality.
- New block-storage VAAI functionality includes quiescing VMs if there is an ‘out-of-space’ condition (Thin Provisioning ‘Stun’), and deleted storage space reclamation;
- VMware vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) is a new set of APIs that enable vCenter to see the capabilities of storage array; these replace the bespoke storage vendor plug-ins;
- Improved NFS-storage with support for full clones, lazy clones, extended statistics and space reservation (this is still not enterprise support of NFS)
- Improved HA availability, including disaster recovery;
- Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5 provides a fail-back capability, as well as failover;
- Improved host-based replication (HBR) within SRM proves “out-of-the-box” solution to replicate VMs natively with vSphere 5.
Low-end installations that want to grow will have more options with vSphere 5. There is a change in license pricing, with the introduction of an emphasis on virtual storage. For entry VMware sites, this is unlikely to make a significant difference in licensing costs, and the cost reductions from additional function and hardware will more than compensate. Wikibon recommends these organizations start planning to move to version 5 VMware software and migrate at a convenient time (e.g., avoiding year-end if there is a significant peak) to the new environment.
Higher-end organizations that have a plan to virtualize production systems will find they can virtualize more systems with VMware 5. Previous planning for VMware environments have stressed very large memory servers with the latest high-performance processors as a way of reducing VMware licensing costs. The new vRAM-based pricing will mean that it may make sense to have a greater number of smaller or older servers and reduce the cost of the servers and overall costs. Wikibon recommends that organizations moving rapidly to virtualize production systems should migrate to VMware 5 quickly.
IT organizations should also take the opportunity to look at the RPO and RTO requirements of systems. VMware offers some very attractive HA capabilities, and many of these capabilities can run with or without traditional storage arrays. It makes little sense to migrate existing array-based solutions; it is difficult to actually achieve cost savings from conversions. However, the availability requirements of new applications or major upgrades should be reviewed closely, and the default HA environment should be native VMware and VMware appliance capabilities. The lines of business should need to clearly justify the business benefits of array-based storage solutions and clustered database solutions.
Action Item: VMware V5 software offers significant additional capabilities to reduce IT operational costs and extend virtualization of production systems. Senior IT managers should focus on implementing V5 features that will reduce hardware and operational costs and move cautiously towards a private cloud with one or more virtualization technologies. Calls for strategic investments in so-called hybrid clouds should be ignored until virtualization and public cloud functionality is much more advanced and tested in data centers. The business case for private cloud and public clouds are very different and can be evaluated independent of each other.
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