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VMworld Europe 2012 kicks off in Barcelona

VMworld Europe 2012 opens with updates from VMware on the cloud and new management suites

By
  • Kayleigh Bateman and Cliff Saran
Published: 10 Oct 2012 9:00

VMworld Europe 2012 has kicked off in Barcelona, with 11,000 attendees expected to descend on the Fira Gran Via over the next four days.

VMware’s annual European event was opened with keynotes from VMware senior executives giving an overview of VMware at present and its plans for the future. The supplier covered the notion of multi-clouds, updates in it cloud suite and a new management suite.

In his IT transformation as the enabler of business transformationkeynote, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled how the virtualisation company would build software-defined datacentres using IT management and automation tools.

“There has been an increase in IT that is ready – an increase in on-demand and self-service,” he said.

Gelsinger, who spent 30 years at Intel, explained a new phrase which is circulating the industry – software-defined datacentres: “All infrastructure is virtualised and delivered as a service, and the control of this datacentre is entirely automated by software.”

“We need to make all aspects of infrastructure flexible. Although virtual machines can be provisioned in days, software-defined datacentres should be able to provision them in minutes. The premise behind a software-defined datacentre is that all infrastructure, including networking, storage and security, is virtualised and can be delivered and managed entirely by software,” he said.

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Gelsinger said this means one common platform for all services and new and existing applications. “This is made a reality for the first time through our vCloud Suite,” he added.

VMware’s vCloud Suite 5.1 was announced at VMworld US. The suite is designed to simplify the adoption of cloud technologies by integrating VMware’s virtualisation and cloud solutions into a single SKU.

VMware IT management

Gelsinger said the software-defined datacentre would enable IT departments to support both private and public cloud systems using the same management tools.

However, he admitted the company had not delivered on management, although he said that through effective IT management tools, IT departments could become brokers of services for the cloud.

Software-defined datacentres will enable IT departments to support both private and public cloud systems using the same management tools

But the company is aiming to tackle IT management with a new version of vCloud Suite, based on vSphere virtualisation, to ensure applications such as SAP, Oracle, SharePoint and Exchange run well on VMware systems.

Steve Herrod discussed how VMware would address network and storage virtualisation, such as enabling Hadoop to run on virtual machines by providing a virtual SAN capability in VMware, where local server storage is treated like a SAN. This is something he said benefits Hadoop, which needs local storage to run effectively.

Other areas of IT management include managing Microsoft HyperV from the VMware vCloud Director tool and vFabric Application Director. With vFabric Application Director, IT administrators use blueprints to deploy applications on VMware-based infrastructure.

Herrod said VMware has created a blueprint marketplace called the Application Management Marketplace, which is now in beta, to enable third-party software providers to add their own blueprints.

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