eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
1Enhanced Disaster Recovery to the Cloud
Disaster Recover to the Cloud with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) gives customers the benefits of SRM without the need for a secondary data center for failover protection. By partnering with a VMware certified cloud service provider, customers now have a cost-efficient (pay-per-use), automated (automatic failover and failback) and simple way to ensure applications stay up and running even during the worst disasters.
2The vCloud Connector Delivers Hybrid Cloud Portability
The enhanced VMware vCloud Connector gives customers the ability to extend the logical boundaries of their virtual data center across hybrid clouds over a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN tunnel. Customers can now transfer and manage workloads across a hybrid cloud while keeping the same IP/MAC address.
3Taking vCloud Director Snapshots
Via vCloud Director Snapshots, customers can create, revert back to or remove a virtual machine snapshot with ease, whether with individual VMs or vApps. This enables destructive testing and other operations without the risk of losing a clean version, in addition to accelerating the ability to perform destructive tests without requiring new virtual machines or provisioning additional vApps.
4Creating vFabric Application Director Blueprints
With vFabric Application Director, customers benefit from the simplified, accelerated build and release of applications by creating logical application blueprints. Customers can create application blueprints by leveraging pre-approved, standardized OS and middleware components. Once created, application blueprints can be saved and later deployed onto any cloud with fine-grained control over installation dependencies, configuration changes and editable scripts.
5vCenter Operations Management Suite Intelligent Operations Groups
With the vCenter Operations Management Suite feature, Intelligent Operations Groups, customers gain operational insights into health, risk and efficiency of resources by application, line of business, production workload, configuration types and other relationship types. Group memberships are updated to reflect changes in the environment dynamically to display accurate information in real time, enabling customers to better align with business teams and operations.
6New vSphere Web Client
VMware’s vSphere 5.1 now offers a new browser-based Web client built for improved scalability, performance and extensibility. The vSphere Web Client exposes common administrative actions in a more intuitive way, increasing the number of managed objects—from 100 in the previous version to 300—without sacrificing speed. It is easy to upgrade and gives customers the freedom to manage a virtual environment from any machine regardless of operating system. The new Web client also stores workflow and task state on the server, allowing users to start a complex task sequence at work and continue it later from home without losing their place.
7vSphere Distributed Switch
The vSphere Distributed Switch now delivers network health-check capabilities to give customers a window into the operation of both physical and virtual networks. With the addition of configuration backup and restore, users can also recreate network configuration seamlessly, giving them a means of restoring full functionality in instances of network settings failures or vCenter Server database corruption. Rollback and recovery monitors the state of management network connectivity from vCenter Server and rolls back to the previous state if connectivity is lost during a configuration change. The vSphere Distributed Switch also now supports Link Aggregation Control Protocol to enable dynamic failover and enhanced link utilization.
8vSphere vMotion Without Shared Storage
New to vSphere 5.1, live migration of a virtual machine without the need for shared storage extends VMware’s technology for automated virtual machine movement. This provides customers with zero downtime during a migration, allows for no requirement for shared storage, lowers operating costs, and helps meet service-level and performance agreements.
9vCloud Networking and Security Abstract and Pooling
The Abstract and Pooling feature of the vCloud Networking and Security allows customers to create a giant pool of resources that spans all the physical network’s boundaries. This simplifies the operation of a virtual network and optimizes compute resource utilization across clusters, pods and even geographically separated data centers. Users can carve pools up into logical networks attached to specific applications and then accelerate application provisioning and easily scale the application.
10vCloud Automation Center Policy Management
Using the vCloud Automation Center console, users can configure business-centric and user-specific policies that control the delivery of cloud services. An IT administrator can deliver different cloud services to multiple parts of the business without writing any additional code. IT administrators can leverage multivendor interoperability and business-aware policies to define cloud services that meet the unique needs of diverse groups such as development and test, production and desktop operations.