What’s key in VMware’s new vSphere, vCenter, and vCloud

Today, EMC VMware has detailed a raft of new enhancements to its line of data center virtualization and cloud products at its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco: vSphere, vCenter, the vSphere Storage Appliance, and vCloud Director are all being revved to version 5.1. VMware is also introducing vSphere Data Protection Appliance. There are many more new capabilities than you would expect from a 0.1 version upgrade, although this isn’t vSphere 6.0 by any stretch.

Although VMware’s focus is on public and private cloud construction through its vCloud Director suite, it has not forgotten the core of its product stack: the vSphere hypervisor. With Microsoft’s virtualization-focused Windows Server 2012 hitting the market in just a few days, VMware is about to have much stiffer, low-cost competition on its hands. Introducing features like the ability to vMotion a virtual machine from one host’s local storage to another without any downtime are obvious reactions to Hyper-V’s ability to do the same.

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However, it’s not just about competing with Microsoft; many of the new features are aimed at retaining VMware’s long-held feature lead (and justifying its higher price) over the competition.

But to add new features, VMware can’t seem to help but duplicate features that well-known and well-liked partners have already developed and sell to VMware customers. Whether it’s moving Site Recovery Manager’s host-based replication into the vSphere product, implementing a new backup appliance based on parent EMC’s Avamar tech, or teaching the vSphere Distributed Switch to do new tricks, VMware’s 5.1 offerings could displace offerings from many close VMware partners. That’s not a new trend, but it does seem to be accelerating.

vSphere Replication

One of the more interesting features in vSphere 5.1 is that it now can migrate the host-based VM replication, a feature introduced in the separate Site Recovery Manager 5.0 but now part of vSphere. Because it will work across the bulk of the vSphere product line (from Essentials Plus up), this replication capability should be attractive to smaller businesses that can’t afford expensive array-based replication. It is also likely to be useful to larger enterprises as a remote-office disaster-recovery mechanism.

Including the migration technology into the core vSphere should increase the number of organizations that use it — but those same businesses typically already use third-party products such as Quest Vizioncore and Veeam to accomplish those goals. Will they jettison those vendors as a result?

vSphere Data Protection

A new addition in vSphere 5.1 is vSphere Data Protection (VDP), an appliance-based, deduplicating backup package integrated into VMware’s vCenter management framework. VDP completely replaces the previous (and frankly, not very good) vSphere Disaster Recovery appliance with deduplication tech borrowed from EMC’s Avamar backup line. Like many third-party backup suites, VDP uses vSphere APIs for Data Protection (VADP) to affect fast, efficient backups. It supports both full image-based restores and file-level restores for Windows and Linux VMs.

The fact that you see EMC intellectual property showing up in VMware products should surprise no one, given EMC owns VMware. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem VMware is simply packaging a crippled version of Avamar into its product stack, a common ploy that in this case would invite EMC’s sales folks to relentlessly upsell you on the real thing. Instead, VMware appears to be reusing some of Avamar’s technology in a completely new, purpose-built stack that stands alone from the EMC products.

Although I have yet to be able to put hands on VDP (stay tuned for that), if it’s any good, the same partners (Vizioncore and Veeam) that might stand to be hurt by the introduction of vSphere Replication will also take it in the teeth here.

vSphere networking

One of the areas of the core hypervisor to see a lot of growth in the 5.1 update is the vSphere Distributed Switch. This software-based switching architecture adds support for 802.3ad LACP load balancing, RSPAN and ERSPAN remote traffic monitoring, a slew of new automated configuration health checks, VXLAN support, and SR-IOV support. Many of these additions should facilitate software-defined networking initiatives happening in the vCloud Director — making it far easier and faster to deploy cloud-based services without having to touch physical network hardware.

However, that list of new features is almost exactly as what the fairly popular Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch gets you over the VDS present in previous versions of vSphere. From a straight-up capabilities and performance standpoint, the gulf between VMware’s VDS and Cisco’s is far narrower now. Unless Cisco comes out with a similarly interesting list of new features for its virtual switch platform, the only thing it’ll really be able to offer is the administrative control separation that many siloed IT departments need to keep the networking folks and server folks from stepping on each others’ toes.

Third-party products: Expect to be assimilated

Although it may sound like I’m complaining about VMware’s incursions into third-party product lines, I’m not. I believe it’s entirely logical for VMware to do what it’s doing — such expansion helps it compete and could make things easier for its customers. Building a more tightly integrated, single-source product that includes what everyone needs makes a great deal of sense.

That said, I’d be a little worried if I were a VMware software partner with the next great idea on how to fill a feature gap that VMware has left open. If a vendor does deliver on an idea that pays off, it’ll have just one, maybe two release cycles before it wakes up and finds some version of it built into vSphere proper. That may be one reason why you see companies like Veeam diversifying into support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V and focusing more heavily on virtualization-management challenges. If partners can stay a few steps ahead of VMware’s inexorable feature-set growth, they’ll stay relevant — otherwise, their days are numbered.

This article, “What’s key in VMware’s new vSphere, vCenter, and vCloud,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Matt Prigge’s Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in storage at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.