Today, VMware is introducing 2nd version of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. Back in August 2008, VMworld, Pat Gelsinger announced Project Dimension in technical Beta to bring the cloud on customer’s premises. The service has been generally available last year, let’s have a look on the new features this second release has to offer.
VMware Cloud on Premises product line
For VMware, the message is clear, bring the cloud services into the datacenter. The chosen and first partnership to achieve that is Dell EMC, using VxRAIL, leader in HCI Solutions. Indeed, VxRAIL is the only fully integrated, pre-configured and pre-tested VMware HCI offer on the market.
The offer consists in delivering cloud model to the data center. To start with, there’s no software to install or manage, this is true SaaS. The platform is fully 24/7 supported & managed by VMware teams, including a complete lifecycle management.
This means, customers can quickly provision the initial rack or add new nodes, without the need to setup anything on site. The related hardware is prepared and configured upfront on Dell EMC’s facilities. Everything is ready to go, as soon it’s on premises.
These services address some of the challenges faced by system administrators, having to deal with security & vulnerabilities, requiring to detect and patch the entire stack, servers & devices firmwares, network equipment, storage systems, etc.
VMware takes care of everything, customers have “only” to focus on their mission critical applications, benefiting from the best of both worlds:
This offer can help customers to accelerate their transformation with newest solutions like project Pacific. In many cases, they are slowed down in their transition, mainly because it takes a while for them to even go through the cycle of upgrading the required softwares.
Introducing Next Generation (D3 Release)
New: Capacity and power for the most advanced workloads
You have now the possibility to opt for a Full height rack, the “R2” Rack provides a full 42U rack, that has multiple power supplies, single and three-phase power choices. The included blades can go from 3 to 16, updated in terms of increased capacity and performance:
However, the nodes models cannot be mixed, this possibility will be supported in a near future. A new model is introduced in this release, the M1d.medium, bringing a lot more capacity and performance, with more cores, doubled RAM, doubled secondary storage, NVMe and 25GbE uplinks.
The preliminary benchmarks announced a doubled VM density and the ability to support memory intensive workloads like SAP HANA:
New: Integrated back up and disaster recovery with industry leading solutions
Whatever moving to the cloud or having on premises systems, backup is still a mandatory topic. For that reason, in addition to the performance improvement, VMware worked together with Dell EMC to bring Backup & Recovery solution to VMC. As a result, VMC on Dell EMC comes now with 2 validated Backup & Recovery solutions.
Both are now certified to ensure the actual data is correctly & securely backed-up.
New: Optimized for the most advanced and distributed VDI workloads
VMC on Dell EMC has now 100% certified support for Horizon View, with enterprise class security and being compliant with organisational requirements.
It delivers high performance for heavy duty workspace density and end user experience for the most demanding applications.
New: Automatic Expansion of capacity as customer needs grow
VMware introduces a Self-service ordering. Customers have now the possibility to expand to 16 additional hosts through a self-service portal.
The additional node ordering triggers a preparation from Dell EMC, a configuration in their facilities, everything shipped and arrived up & running, it is literally ready to go when it’s on site.
Another improvement is bulk migration with the use of HCX. An Automatic Workload Migration in technical preview, through HCX, allows migrating hundreds live workloads at once, no downtime, bringing increased simplicity and reduced operational complexity.
This feature might be Generally Available in the next release and is already tested with some customers.
More details and informations to come on May 21st – 8 AM PDT (5 PM CET) with Kit Colbert VP & CTO – https://bit.ly/2AHePDN
In the meantime, check-out our last articles:
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