As expected, VMworld 2014 has underlined VMware’s ambitions to move away from its hypervisor roots and embed its ecosystem deeper into the enterprise. That much was evident in a string of new product announcements and rebranding efforts on days one and two of the event.

VMware has generated a lot of hype about its new products and partnerships – so much that customers could be forgiven for being swept away by it. With that in mind, SiliconANGLE brings to you a quick rundown on VMware’s new and repackaged products, and the role they’ll play as it bids to cement its place in the software-defined data center (SDDC).

EVO : RAIL

Perhaps VMware’s most compelling new offering is EVO:RAIL, a solution designed for converged infrastructures that delivers appliances with the help of strategic partnerships. Described by Wikibon’s Dave Vellante as “VMware’s play at mid-market converged infrastructure – simplify deployment and enable SDDC,” the software can be preinstalled on hardware and is designed for customer that want a “hyper-converged” building block for building out virtualized environments.

EVO:RAIL was born out of VMware’s Project Mystic, and combines four servers, direct-attached storage, vSphere, VSAN around a discrete package of commodity hardware from its manufacturing partners. VMware says that a single EVO:RAIL can support up to 250 virtual desktops or 100 server images, and can currently be stacked together with as many as three for a 16-node cluster, although this range will increase with future releases.

EVO:RAIL is a bit like competing hyper-converged solutions offered by Nutanix Inc., and SimpliVity Inc., as individual hardware elements can be treated as a single unit, as opposed to provisioning each unit separately. It’s far simpler than something VCE’s Vblocks, which combines compute, storage and transport capacity into a single box. That VCE is a subsidiary of company EMC might make it seem like VMware wants to compete, but Vblocks consist full racks of servers; VMware’s EVO:RAILs are fractions of racks: four server nodes sliding into the 2U space of a 42-space rack.

SAN Ready Nodes

In the lead up to VMworld, VMware announced the launch of 24 new Virtual SAN Ready Nodes from its OEM vendors, including Dell (3 Ready Nodes), Fujitsu (5 Ready Nodes), HP (10 Ready Nodes) and SuperMicro (6 Ready Nodes).

VMware’s SAN Ready Nodes are hyper-converged building blocks designed for large datacenter environments with strong automation and a need to customize hardware and software configurations. An extension of VMware’s vSAN product line, the company describes them as a “hyper-converged ready-to-go hardware solution sold by server OEMs which has been pre-configured to run the Virtual SAN in a certified hardware form factors”. The SAN Ready Nodes come with a unique combination of hardware components that are unique to the OEM’s server offerings and may also include software for Virtual SAN and vSphere.

VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO)

Currently in beta, VMware Integrated OpenStack is scheduled for delivery in the first half of 2015 and is being slated as a cost-effective way for developers to use open APIs to access VMware infrastructure. In a nutshell, VIO is the open-source OpenStack code with VMware drivers, plus an OpenStack-specific management tool and reference architecture.

Explaining the move, VMware said that the OpenStack framework has emerged as the tool of choice for IT to provide application development teams with programmatic access to the infrastructure, but OpenStack can be tricky to deploy and maintain, and the underlying infrastructure does not always meet enterprise requirements for security, resilience and performance.

OpenStack is rapidly becoming critical to VMware’s hybrid cloud push. Wikibon analyst David Floyer spoke about this during an analyst segment on theCUBE, saying that the key for VMware is to cover all types of workloads at a cost that’s commensurate with the workload.

“You want to be able to use OpenStack when it’s cheapest, and use Vmware for the high end stuff,” explained Floyer. “You want an open environment to use Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services (AWS), OpenStack, and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure as part of a hybrid cloud, not just VMware.”

vCloud Air

In another big move, VMware announced a number of upcoming features for vCloud Air, formerly known as vCloud Hyrbid Service, the most important of which is a new cloud storage-as-a-service offering that’s set to arrive in Q3.

Called VMware vCloud Air Object Storage, there’s a choice of two block storage tiers – Standard and SSD-Accelerated, which both appear like block volumes to a virtual machine. “Object Storage acts as low-speed, long-term storage for buckets of unstructured data and isn’t associated with any specific virtual machine,” wrote Mathew Lodge, Vice President of Cloud Services at VMware, in a blog post.

vCloud Air Object Storage is built using EMC’s ViPR technology, and offers an S3 API that includes lifecycle management and versioning features designed to reduce and simplify management overheads.

The service is designed as a reliable, highly-scalable and cost-effective cloud storage offering that can rapidly be scaled up to petabytes of data as needed. Customers will only be charged for the storage they actually use.

VMware said vCloud Air Object Storage will be availabile in beta from Q3.

Vrealize

Last but not least, VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger announced a rebranding of the company’s Hybrid Cloud solutions under the vRealize banner. Formerly known “vCOPS”, VMware’s offering is somewhat similar to Microsoft’s System Center Suite, packaging several products into one to provide end-to-end management and monitoring of its Hybrid Cloud implementations.

Gelsinger pointed out during his keynote that numerous Microsoft customers have been put off by the Redmond firm’s diminishing love for IT pros who select and manage its on-premise offerings. In response, VMware has taken up the mantle with a range of products targeted at solutions the same IT pros should love and use.

These include the vRealize suite, VMware’s full Hybrid Cloud management product that wraps delivery, provisioning, optimization, costing, monitoring and metering into a single package. Then there’s its vRealize Air Automation (SaaS) tool, currently available in beta, which is the provisioning and delivery application for deploying private and public clouds.

Finally, we have vRealize Operations Insight, a monitoring solution that provides OS monitoring, health and performance management, plus capacity planning and modeling, log analytics in real time, compliance and security hardening, application dependency management and mapping, and storage and network visibility.

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