Here’s a short video I did discussing how we’ve helped clients use the cloud as a disaster recovery site. This can be a less expensive option that allows for test fail over while guaranteeing resources. If you have any questions or would like to talk about disaster recovery in the cloud in more detail, please reach out!
Or click to watch on YouTube
By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect
VMware dropped some news this week regarding their product and licensing lineup. VMware announced the End-of-Life (EOL) of some familiar friends, slight additions to other products, and increasing and decreasing pricing. There are a lot of moving parts so sit tight and let me walk you through what’s going on.
Like rolling your pants and B.U.M. Equipment t-shirts, some things just go out of style, and the same holds true for vSphere Enterprise, vSphere Standard with Operations (vSOM) and vSphere Enterprise with Operations (vSOM.) VMware will no longer offer these three products starting June 30, 2016. So what are your options?
Cue the memorandum music. It was nice knowing you.
Price Increase to note: vSphere Enterprise Plus with Operations increasing by $150 per CPU
vRealize Suite is introducing a new flavor; vRealize Suite Standard Edition. Like vRealize Suite Advanced and Enterprise, vRealize Standard edition will include Operations Advanced, Log Insight Analyst, and vRealize Business for Cloud. vRealize Advanced adds Automation Advanced and vRealize Enterprise adds Automation Enterprise and Apps Monitoring.
vRealize is moving from a 25-Instance model to a per CPU license and will include a Portable License Unit (PLU.) PLU includes 15 OSI’s (Operating System Instances) to be used in the cloud (i.e vCloud Air, Amazon etc. allowing you to switch from on-prem hosts and public and non-public clouds).
vCloud Suite is releasing version 7 and the new suite will simply be two products. The new vCloud Suite 7 will include vSphere Enterprise Plus (like it always has) and one of the corresponding vRealize Suites:
vCloud will continue to be licensed by the CPU and it will also come with 15 PLU instances.
vCloud Enterprise will no longer include Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Enterprise, as this can be purchased a la carte via a 25-VM pack.
vCenter Standard Server and Log Insight are teaming up to form one product. Moving forward, vCenter Standard Server will include 25 instances of Log Insight for vCenter Server. There are no changes to vCenter Foundation Server, however, there will be a price increase of $1K for vCenter Standard. The new MSRP for vCenter Standard w/ Log Insight will be $5,995. Log Insight retailed for $5K, so the addition of it is actually a cost savings. Like Cognac, Cointreau and a touch of lemon, I hope the new vCenter Server leaves a good taste in your month.
All price changes effective March 1st.
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If you have any questions or are looking for more details, please reach out.
By Rob O’Shaughnessy, Director of Software Sales and Renewals
Photo Credit: blog.iheartradio.com
As you most likely know, vCloud Air is VMware’s offering in the hybrid/public cloud space. In my opinion, it’s a great offering. It allows you to take existing virtual machines and migrate those up to the cloud so that you can manage everything with your existing virtual center. It’s also a very good option to do disaster recovery.
I worked on a project recently where the client wanted to know what they needed to do with their infrastructure. They were looking for solid options to build a foundation for their business, whether it was on-prem, a cloud-based offering, or a hybrid approach.
In this project, we ended up taking their VMs and physical servers and put a brand new host on site running VMware that’s running a domain controller and a file server. We put the rest of the production servers and test dev environment in vCloud Air. Additionally, this helped them address their disaster recovery needs. It gave them a place where they could take their systems without a lot of upfront money and have a place where they could recover their VMs in case of the event of a disaster.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP3qO-SI6SY
Are you interested in learning more about vCloud Air? Reach out!
By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect
Following on from Chris Ward’s excellent blog coming out of VMware PEX 2015, I wanted to add some details to the recent VMware announcement (January 29, 2015) to partner with Google to “deliver greater enterprise access to public cloud services” via a combination of VMware vCloud Air and the Google Cloud Platform.
For those who are unfamiliar, vCloud Air (formally VMware vCloud Hybrid Service or vCHS) is a public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platform built on the same traditional VMware vSphere we are all used to but managed 24/7 by VMware and their public cloud partners. vCloud Air offers services such as infrastructure, disaster recovery and backups, and allows you to extend both your network and workloads from traditional on-premise to the cloud with relative ease.
For some time now, Google has offered broad cloud platform services in the following categories, but as part of the first wave of integration into the vCloud Air space, only the highlighted sub-set of (4) Google Cloud Platform services will be made available to existing VMware vCloud Air customers, using a PAYG consumption model:
Additionally, while Google offers their own management framework, there are some rumors that the partnership could eventually mature to include integration with VMware’s own vRealize Operations management solution. This will most likely be offered via VMware’s vRealize Air platform (in beta), which currently offers both Automation and Compliance programs. To quote our CTO, Chris Ward, “VMware vRealize Air checks a lot of boxes for customers of all sizes seeking multi-vendor, multi-cloud provisioning and management of their infrastructure services.
Industry experts, including GreenPages, Forrester and Gartner, are calling this partnership a big “win” for VMware customers, especially enterprise customers. This relationship will help to truly legitimize not only the cloud, but also the place of the enterprise customer in the cloud. Specifically, it will allow enterprise customers who are looking for broader database, analytics, and storage options and support, beyond the current vCloud Air portfolio, to find a suitable and scalable landing place for their applications and workloads. This will build on vCloud Air’s current support for over 5,000 applications and over 90 operating systems.
This is also a strong move for both VMware and Google. This relationship will give Google much needed enterprise IT exposure, something that VMware has deep roots in, and accelerates VMware’s ability to offer tools to manage a public cloud, an area in which Google has developed a global dominate position.
As with the vSphere 6 announcement, there is no “official” release date, but rumors are suggesting everything from the “first half of 2015” to availability “later this year.” Additionally, VMware had no details to share around pricing, but as soon as we know more and have had a chance to sample the integration ourselves, we will share more details. However, if history is anything to go by we should likely expect something in place by VMworld 2015.
If you have any questions or would like any additional details around this new partnership, email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com
By Tim Cook, Practice Manager, Advanced Virtualization
Video with DJ Ferrara, Vice President & Enterprise Architect
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn9-VJ92yxc
In this video, DJ discusses the pros and cons different cloud providers have to offer. When does it make sense to use vCloud Air (note: this was filmed right before VMware announced name change from vCHS)? What about Azure? How about Amazon?
If you’re interested in learning more, read this ebook about the evolution of the corporate IT department.