VMware Products and Technologies 2016: Overview

In early February on the Enabling the Digital Enterprise online-event, VMware announced the new versions of its products and technologies planned for release in 2016:
• VMware Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode – Enterprise VM management via VMware public cloud
• Change in licensing for VMware vSphere, effective from June 30, 2016
• VMware Horizon 7 – countless new opportunities
• New capabilities of VMware Virtual SAN 6.2
• Workspace ONE solution announcement
• New versions of VMware vCloud Suite 7 and VMware vRealize Suite 7

Below is all the main info from the latest news on future VMware releases and its technology development vector.

VMware Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode

Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode service is based on Project Enzo solution. It enables unified management of on-premises virtual desktops and cloud environments through a single web console.

This solution is oriented on management of hyper-converged infrastructures (meaning those, where all component management tools are aggregated), built on the software and hardware solutions from VMware partners. Naturally, Hybrid-Mode will support all new capabilities of VMware Horizon 7, such as Instant Clone Technology and App Volumes 3.0.

Changes in VMware vSphere licensing for June 30, 2016

Let us take a closer look:

vSphere Enterprise edition goes EOL. In order to simplify the licensing, there will be only 2 editions, namely vSphere Standard and vSphere Enterprise Plus. Moreover, license for VMware vSphere with Operations Management will be available only in Enterprise Plus edition.
Free licenses for 25-OSI pack of vRealize Log Insight

All current and new users of VMware vCenter Server Standard will receive free licenses for 25-OSI pack of vRealize Log Insight for vCenter.

New prices

The price of VMware vSphere with Operations Management Enterprise Plus will be $4,395 per CPU. VMware vCenter Server Standard will cost $5,995 per instance.

VMware Horizon 7 – the new opportunities

Let us find out more about the new features in Horizon 7, according to the preview:

The full implementation of Instant Clone Technology. As the name suggests, it allows “on the fly” VM cloning. It means that you can deploy new virtual desktop almost instantly, each reusing data from parent VM (shared read memory). Combined with the functionality of VMware App Volumes 3.0 and User Environment Manager, the Instant Clone Technology allows users to instantly access their data, while the parent VM doesn’t get bloated with unnecessary programs and registry keys.
Smart user device policies that depend on login conditions. VMware Horizon View 7 gets Smart Policies. They allow the user to apply special rules, depending on his login conditions. For example, when user logs in through WAN, it is better to disable USB-device write access, keyboard redirection and printing, for security reasons.
Better access to VM console for mobile devices and Blast Extreme protocol. Blast Extreme, the technology of web-access to VM console is now fully incorporated into the stack of access protocols, along with PCoIP and RDP. With this technology you can have a high-performing device with virtual desktop console for resolution up to 4K.
Horizon Access Point capabilities. This is an alternative to Security Server in VMware View. It allows you to protect VMware Horizon View infrastructure during external access. It can be configured for the RADIUS or RSA SecurID protocols.
Support of vSGA for AMD adapters. Following support for NVIDIA technology, VMware is gradually adopting support for AMD adapters. vSGA mode is now supported for AMD adapters.

VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 new capabilities

Let us see the new features in VSAN 6.2:

Deduplication and Compression. Both of these technologies are enabled together to optimize storage cost-efficiency. Data deduplication on disk group level comes first, and then data is compressed.
Erasure Coding technology (error correction – “RAID of hosts”). Like RAID 5 / 6 and other types of striped RAID, Virtual SAN 6.2 is a “RAID of ESXi hosts”. Thus, it is possible to use 3+1 or 4+2 configurations. It will allow to utilize only 1.3 times more physical space (considering the first pattern) than the resulting usable capacity.
Quality of Service (QoS). IOPS-level adjustment is now available for every VMDK file.
Software Checksum technique. This technique allows the timely error detection for hardware and software components during read and write operations.
Performance monitoring service. This service allows the user to monitor Virtual SAN cluster performance from vCenter server side. It is not necessary to use vRealize Operations console to solve basic problems any more.

Workspace ONE solution announcement

VMware announced the upcoming availability of VMware Workspace ONE. This solution is tightly integrated with AirWatch for managing mobile devices across the enterprise. It also utilizes the recently released VMware Identity Manager features and the new Cloud hosting service for virtual desktops and applications – VMware Horizon Air.

It is a global platform for user management and their access to data, using different devices inside the company:

By integrating VMware Identity Manager, which is one of the Workspace ONE components, with Active Directory (for different domains and forests configurations), it is possible to build password-less access architecture to the company’s services.

The main task of Workspace ONE is to unify user interface for data, applications and desktops access not depending on the accessing device, operating system or the environment. The administrator gets full control of all devices and environments to synchronize them with the corporate policies.

New versions of VMware vCloud Suite 7 and VMware vRealize Suite 7

vRealize Suite 7 is now available in three editions: Standard Edition, Advanced Edition and Enterprise Edition. vCloud Suite is synchronized with vRealize Suite in terms of editions, so VMware customers will understand what vCloud Suite edition they need, already having vRealize Suite, and vice versa.

A new licensing unit is introduced – PLU. It is designed to unify licensing for different infrastructures, which can be built on-premises or in public Cloud, using solutions from different vendors. One PLU license allows to use unlimited number of Operating System Instances (OSIs) / Virtual Machines (VMs) on one processor (CPU) if it is running on vSphere hypervisor, or 15 OSI / VM in other infrastructures.

Also, there will be new versions of vCloud Suite 7 and vRealize Suite 7, and new versions and features for the following products:

VMware vRealize Automation 7.0
vRealize Business for Cloud 7.0
vRealize Operations 6.2
vRealize Log Insight 3.3

In general, these were almost all products and features that were announced at Enabling the Digital Enterprise event. We will soon see them in VMware product portfolio.

Preview of VMware Products and Technologies for 2016. Here is what you need to know