VMware boosts virtualisation tools

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 13 July 2011 11:53

Business IT - Technology

VMware has released VMware vSphere 5, the latest version of it flagship virtualisation platform, saying it comes with almost 200 new and enhanced capabilities. VMware also announced new versions of other key virtualisation tools: VMware vShield 5, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5, and VMware vCloud Director 1.5.

According to VMware, vSphere 5 will support virtual machines that are up to four times more powerful than those supported by previous versions with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs and able to process in excess of 1 million I/O operations per second: a figure that VMware says "will far surpass the requirements of even the most resource-intensive applications."

vSphere 5 comes with "three new flagship features that extend the platform's unique data centre resource management capabilities, delivering intelligent policy management to support an automated 'set it and forget it' approach to managing data centre resources including server deployment and storage management."

According to VMware, "Customers define policies and establish the operating parameters, and VMware vSphere 5 does the rest." It says these features can save a customer with a 1,000 virtual machine environment up to a full year of administrator time.

vShield 5 includes new data security capabilities that "will enable IT to quickly identify risk exposures resulting from unprotected sensitive data, isolate applications with different levels of trust and migrate security policies as data and applications move between different virtual systems and apply the same policies in public clouds."
It is able to scan files for sensitive types of information, such as ABN, credit card and bank account numbers and ensure that these files, and the applications using them are appropriately secured.

vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 doubles the number of protected applications for the same cost and supports heterogeneous storage configurations in the primary and backup sites. It also comes with new automated failback and planned migration capabilities that allow customers to orchestrate migrations for disaster avoidance and to support planned maintenance activities and data centre consolidations.

vCloud Director 1.5 enables a self-service model for provisioning infrastructure services across internal and external sources.It is claimed to enable IT to dramatically reduce the time required to provision new servers, to as little as five seconds, while also reducing storage costs by as much as 60 percent.