Although cloud computing is on the rise VMware remains the core of the datacenter. A recent survey found that the hypervisor outperforms its closest competitor, Microsoft Hyper-V, which has a nearly twice as high adoption rate.
Do not think that public hosting will make all private data centers obsolete. VMware is making new developments that will position them for the future to be both an on-premises standard and fully leverage the cloud’s advantages.
Let’s take a look at what VMware has to offer for the new year.
VMware’s On-prem Products Line 2017
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Start training With the usual claims of Better! Faster! More secure It’s less likely to explode! The interface is the most important change admins will notice immediately.
The vSphere Windows client (also known as the thick client or C# client) is gone. It’s replaced by a sleek new HTML5 web client. This is a rebuild of the previous web client, which was Flash-based and cold-molasses-inspired for that “I hate it, give me whiskey” user experience.
(A side note: Many core functionalities are the same so you can still learn vSphere 6.5 from older training courses. We will keep you informed when the latest vSphere training is available.
VMware is pushing for a larger push to deploy your vSphere server as a prebuilt Linux appliance. Although support for Windows is still available, VMware has always emphasized major changes in one release and then deprecated the old way of doing it in the next.
Serving Windows Servers Some Competition
Your Windows server’s days may be over, but that’s a good thing. Why manage another Windows server with licensing, backups and AV? You can deploy the appliance in a matter of seconds. If you’ve ever had vSphere fail completely and need a reload (So. Many. Prerequisites. ), you’ll feel both pain and relief.
Fusion and Workstation also received updates. These apps can be thought of as mini-hypervisors on your desktop or laptop (Workstation and Fusion for Windows hosts, respectively). You want to test Windows 2016? Do you need a Linux environment to test Windows 2016? Do you long for the days of Windows 3.1 or SkiFree? Fusion and Workstation can do it all, but you won’t be able to escape the Yeti.
September saw minor updates that added support for Server 2016 and Windows 10 Anniversary editions. There were also a host of security and performance improvements. Unity mode allows you to run an app on the guest’s desktop directly from your host machine. This means that you can run XP-only apps on Windows 10 for example. You can also export your guests and import them directly into vSphere from Workstation/Fusion.
Let’s now switch gears. You want to learn all about massive, global, highly-available, highly scalable networks and NASA robots? The keynote address from the recent Amazon re-invent conference is where to spend the next 93 minute. We’ll wait.
VMware Cloud on AWS
Do you need to plan for one, three, or ten years of growth in the future? AWS makes it easy to spin up more VMs, and then go. On-prem servers require you to budget, buy, provision and test hosts, backup guests, and buy more racks and switches to complete the task.
AWS can reduce weeks of work and thousands upon thousands of dollars in infrastructure costs by several factors. This is why the cloud is so important. It’s good for morale to keep the coffee budget.
This is a terrible news for our VMware environment on-prem. NOPE! VMware Cloud on AWS (ESXi environment running natively in AWS) is currently in preview and will go live in 2017. You can manage both your cloud-hosted and on-prem guests.