VMware’s Largest Coordinated Software Release Focuses on Cloud Infrastructure

In its largest coordinated product release ever, VMware today unveiled VMware vSphere® 5 along with a comprehensive suite of cloud infrastructure technologies.

Flaunting nearly 200 new and enhanced capabilities, VMware vSphere 5 delivers improved application performance and availability for applications while automating the management of datacenter resources. The company also announced VMware vShield™ 5, VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5, and VMware vCloud® Director 1.5, products that together with VMware vSphere 5 will help customers realize additional value from virtualized resources by enabling cloud-scale operations.

VMware says its cloud infrastructure suite will help organizations build intelligent virtual infrastructures, which infuse highly virtualized environments with the automation, self-service and security capabilities customers need to:

• Move to Cloud Computing with Trust – VMware is evolving security from a physical model to a virtual software model, driven and managed by policy, enabling customers to trust in the security of their applications and data regardless of where they reside or how frequently they move across various private, public and hybrid cloud environments.

• Deploy Business-Critical Applications with Confidence – Dramatic performance and scalability gains in VMware vSphere 5 will enable customers to run even the most resource-intensive business-critical applications in virtual and cloud environments.

• Respond to the Needs of the Business Faster with Cloud Agility – From rapidly provisioning new resources to intelligently managing ongoing operations, VMware’s cloud infrastructure suite will radically simplify infrastructure management.

VMware vSphere 5: 
VMware vSphere, the most widely deployed virtualization platform in the world, forms the foundation of VMware’s cloud infrastructure suite. Architected to support the broadest range of virtual and cloud infrastructure needs, VMware vSphere is broadly utilized by enterprises, small and midsized businesses (SMBs), public cloud service providers and as the foundation for the growing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) market.

VMware vSphere 5 will support virtual machines (VMs) that are up to four times more powerful than previous versions with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs that will be able to process in excess of 1 million I/O operations per second. 

VMware vSphere 5 also introduces three new flagship features that extend the platform’s datacenter resource management capabilities, delivering intelligent policy management to support an automated “set it and forget it” approach to managing datacenter resources, including server deployment and storage management. Customers define policies and establish the operating parameters, and VMware vSphere 5 does the rest. VMware vSphere 5’s new Auto-Deploy, Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS features can save a customer with a 1,000-VM environment up to a full year of administrator time.

“The market has fully embraced virtualization as a key transformative technology at the heart of the next era of computing,” said Paul Maritz, VMware CEO. “With vSphere 5 and our cloud infrastructure suite, VMware is helping customers accelerate towards more efficient and automated cloud infrastructure, redefining how resources are managed and secured, and ultimately, driving a more productive relationship between IT and the businesses they serve.”