How vSphere 6 Shifts Your Cloud Into a Higher Gear

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The Software-Defined Data Center: A Brief Primer

The Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) is an open architecture

that extends the main characteristics of virtualization—abstraction,

pooling, and automation—to all the resources in your data

center. This includes compute, storage, and networking, as well as

management and orchestration tools. All of this exists in software

only, delivering greater levels of efficiency and control.

The result? A new kind of data center run by people who can

act with agility, speed, and security to meet or exceed the demands

of the business.

Reduced CapEx

Reduced OpEx

Better Security

Higher Availability

Faster Delivery

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Focus on Solving Business Challenges, Not Keeping the Lights On

IMMEDIACY

Why the Software-Defined Data Center? The

business demands it. Today, IT spends up to 80

percent of its time simply keeping the lights on and

putting out fires. But thanks to expectations raised

by consumer technology, users are used to getting

their needs met immediately—which requires IT to

take a proactive stance that immediately meets the

needs of users as well as of the business.

BETTER PROCESS

With the SDDC, IT no longer needs to manually

provision the compute, storage, and network

portions of the stack, freeing up time for

application and business process improvements

that directly benefit users.

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vSphere 6: Foundation of the SDDC

VMware vSphere 6, the industry-leading server virtualization

platform, serves as the foundational building block of the

Software-Defined Data Center.

vSphere 6 is optimized for the next generation of applications,

and empowers IT to achieve three important goals:

Virtualize any scale-out or scale-up application with confidence

Redefine availability

Simplify management of the SDDC

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Goal 1: Virtualize Any Scale-Out or Scale-Up Application With Confidence

vSphere 6 is the platform for both new and existing applications—including scale-up and scale-out applications that were previously thought

to be un-virtualizable.

SCALE-UP

vSphere 6 can support SAP HANA, which requires

massive scalability to house the huge footprint of the

in-memory database. Less-demanding business-

critical applications will see enhanced performance.

SCALE-OUT

Hadoop/Big Data workloads benefit tremendously

from vSphere 6 enhancements. Increased scale

and configuration maximums enable larger cluster

sizes, greater consolidation ratios and improved

performance.

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NVIDIA GRID™ vGPU™ Provides Exceptional Graphics Performance For Virtual Desktops

Desktop virtualization allows users to access their workspace on any device,

anywhere, and anytime. Users can choose their devices, and companies get

centralized management of the desktop image, application, and data. But with

traditional approaches to desktop virtualization, the user experience can include

sluggish screen refreshes and poor performance.

In vSphere 6, VMware partners with NVIDIA to deliver NVIDIA GRID vGPU.

With GRID vGPU technology, the graphics commands of each virtual machine

are passed directly to the GPU, without translation by the hypervisor. This allows

the GPU hardware to be time-sliced to deliver the ultimate in shared virtualized

graphics performance.

vSphere 6+

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Goal 2: vSphere 6 Redefines Availability

vSphere 6 redefines availability to ensure that application uptime

remains high, even as data centers increase in size, complexity, and

span geographies.

Uptime for these workloads is maintained through new availability

features in vSphere 6 that have been aligned with the needs of

customers and their application demands.

99.999%uptime

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Move VMs from New York to London Without a Hiccup

Given today’s heightened emphasis on global business continuity planning,

data centers are often located close enough to employees and customers

to enable speed and efficiency, while simultaneously ensuring they’re far

enough from each other to mitigate the risk of disasters.

vSphere 6’s Long-Distance vMotion capability allows IT to satisfy these

seemingly contradictory demands by enabling the migration of live VMs

across physical servers that are separated by large geographic distances

—without any application downtime.

Now it’s possible to perform long-distance vMotions of distances up

to 100ms round trip time (RTT). This means IT can migrate live workloads

between data centers physically located in New York and London

—something that would previously have been unimaginable.

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The Value of Multi-Processor Fault Tolerance

vSphere 6 will now support fault tolerance for up to four vCPUs

with 64GB RAM. This means that you can protect VMs against host

failures and achieve zero downtime in the face of a catastrophe.

Multi-processor fault tolerance works differently than fault tolerance

for single CPUs. IT benefits from a new fast check-pointing

mechanism that keeps the primary and secondary VMs in sync.

Previously, vSphere used a “Record-Replay” sync mechanism

that limited the fault tolerance to a single vCPU, but with the new

check-pointing mechanism, the primary and secondary VMs execute

the same instruction stream simultaneously.

vSphere

FastCheckpointing

Failover

Instantaneous

VM4 vCPU

VM4 vCPU

Primary Secondary

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Goal 3: Simplify the Virtual Data Center

Finally, vSphere 6 makes it simple for these new

workloads (and other content) to be managed and shared

in a consistent and seamless manner across the virtual

data center.

Managing a virtual data center becomes a challenge as

companies grow in size and complexity. Creating, sharing,

and migrating virtual machines and other content (such as

VM templates, ISO images, and OVFs) become cumbersome

without a central repository and processes to facilitate these

actions. Additionally, managing content can be extremely

inefficient, especially if that content is shared among many

users and sites.

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Content Library Provides Simple And Effective Management For Content

With Content Library, it is now possible to store and manage

content from a central location. Once the content is stored, it

can be easily shared through a publish/subscribe model, even for

VMs that span the boundaries of vCenter servers.

Finally, the stored content can be quickly deployed from the

Content Library directly onto a host or cluster. This means that it

is now possible for a single administrator to manage content for

many users. Users can now subscribe to content, access it when

it is ready, and deploy it from the Content Library directly into

their environments.

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Crossing vCenter Server Boundaries

Also new in vSphere 6: Cross vCenter vMotion, which enables

moving resources between vCenter Servers. What’s more, you can

do this simultaneously across all the different migration types:

• vMotion—Migrates VMs across compute hosts.

• Storage vMotion—Migrates VM disks across datastores.

• Cross vSwitch vMotion—Migrates VMs across different virtual switches.

This functionality will be useful when IT migrates workloads to a

different vCenter Server instance, or when migrating workloads to a

different location.

VMVMVM

vMotion

vMotionNetwork

vDS A vDS B

VM Network (L2 Connectivity)

vCenter Server

vCenter Server

VM

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Seeking More Efficient vMotion

If you have set up active-active replication—which allows for replication going in both directions between two data center sites

—you can use Replication-Assisted vMotion in vSphere 6 to perform much more efficient vMotions.

The result: enormous time and resource savings. Depending on the size of the data involved, Replication-Assisted vMotion can make

your vMotion as much as 95 percent more efficient.

Replication-Assisted vMotion

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Making External Storage Devices VM-aware

Virtual Volumes transforms external storage that works with virtual environments by eliminating inflexible physical characteristics.

Basically, it make external storage arrays VM-aware. This enables much more flexible and dynamic storage automation, and gives IT

much more granular control over its external storage resources.

Simplifies storage operations

Simplifies delivery of storage service levels

Improves resource utilization

Automates manual tasks and eliminates operation dependencies

between the vSphere and storage administrators through

policy-driven automation

Provides administrators with finer control of storage resources and data

services at the VM level that can be dynamically adjusted in real time

Enables more flexible consumption of storage resources with greater

granularity, and eliminates overprovisioning

Benefit How It Works

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Instant Clone Delivers Faster Deployments of Scale-Out Applications

Instant Clone, coming soon to vSphere 6, will lay the foundation for IT to rapidly clone and provision thousands of VMs in

just minutes. This technology will make it possible to clone and deploy a virtual machine up to 10 times faster than what is

possible today, and lays the groundwork for building future scale-out applications—including Hadoop/Big Data workloads.

10XFASTER

Discover More About the SDDC and vSphere 6

In an era of rapid change and increasingly agile competition,

organizations need a smarter architecture rather than the legacy one of yesterday.

A software-defined data center simplifies business operations, enables business

agility, and maximizes successful business outcomes.

vSphere 6 makes the software-defined data center possible by providing the

virtualization technologies that enable you to transform physical resources into

those defined entirely by software.

Discover more about vSphere 6 Click here for more information about the SDDC