VMware Elevates the Hybrid Cloud Experience with New Releases of vSphere and vSAN

SINGAPORE, April 17, 2018 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today unveiled new releases
of VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN–which power the industry’s
leading hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions–to help enterprises
securely run their business-critical and modern applications in the data
center, at the edge, in the public cloud, or in hybrid cloud environments.
VMware vSphere 6.7 and VMware vSAN 6.7 will both enhance user experience,
security, application support, and hybrid cloud management features.

Enterprises are faced
with increasingly complex technology environments made up of a growing
landscape of public cloud services as well as data center and edge resources.
To cope with this complexity and the growing rate of technological changes,
enterprises need to build on a digital foundation that provides consistent
infrastructure and operations and is secure by default. VMware’s software forms
an integrated digital foundation that powers the apps and services transforming
businesses and industries. For customers, this provides the broadest investment
protection by enabling a flexible and secure common operating environment from
the cloud to the data center to the edge.

“The continued
innovation in our award-winning compute and HCI portfolio makes the hybrid
cloud a reality for our customers,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, chief operating
officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware. “The rapid adoption of vSAN,
coupled with longstanding vSphere leadership is a testament to the importance
of a digital foundation that extends from on-premises to the public cloud.”

VMware vSphere and
VMware vSAN—building blocks of this digital foundation—both have leading
positions in their relative industries according to IDC. (1,2)

VMware vSphere 6.7
will introduce new capabilities and enhancements to help deliver an efficient
and more secure platform for hybrid cloud environments. The latest release will
feature simple and efficient management at scale, comprehensive built-in
security, increased support for more workloads, and further enable a seamless
hybrid cloud experience. VMware vSphere 6.7 will continue to offer customers a
universal application platform that supports workloads spanning artificial
intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Big Data, business-critical,
cloud-native, in-memory, and 3D graphics, among others.

New and enhanced
features in VMware vSphere 6.7 will include:

·  New vCenter Hybrid Linked Mode: Will enable unified visibility and
management across different versions of vSphere running on-premises and in the
public cloud such as VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Cloud and other VMware Cloud
Provider Program partner clouds. This will allow customers to maintain their
current version of vSphere on-premises as needed while enjoying the benefits of
new capabilities in vSphere-based public clouds.

·  New ESXi Single Reboot and vSphere Quick
Boot: Will significantly
reduce patch and upgrade times by halving the number of reboots required to
one, while vSphere Quick Boot will skip hardware initialization steps to gain
further re-start efficiencies.

·  New vSphere Persistent Memory: Will leverage the latest innovation around
non-volatile memory and significantly enhance performance for both existing and
new apps.

·  Enhanced NVIDIA GRID vGPUs Support for Modern
Workloads: Will improve host
lifecycle management and reduce end-user disruption via new suspend and resume
capabilities for VMs for GPU-accelerated environments. vSphere 6.7 will enhance
support for NVIDIA GRID Virtual PC/Virtual Apps (for knowledge workers) and NVIDIA
Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation (for design and engineering
professionals) to enable optimal management of VDI workloads as well as enable
administrators (admins) to run other NVIDIA GPU-enabled workloads, including AI
and ML.

·  New Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 Support and Virtual TPM
2.0: This combination
will significantly enhance protection and integrity for both the hypervisor and
the guest operating system (OS). Virtual TPM 2.0 will help prevent VMs and
hosts from being tampered or compromised, thwarting the loading of unauthorized
components and enable guest OS security features.

·  Enhanced VMware vSphere Client: This latest release of the HTML-5-based
vSphere Client will introduce new functionality to manage VMware NSX, vSAN and vSphere Update Manager
along with an increased support for third-party products.

The enhanced vCenter
Server Appliance will deliver an improved user experience made possible through
more efficient management capabilities and significant performance
improvements. It will deliver a faster experience for vSphere admins
(compared to vSphere 6.5), while delivering considerable time and cost
savings. Performance improvements will include:

·  200 percent faster performance in vCenter
operations per second (3)

·  300 percent reduction in memory
usage (3)

·  300 percent faster DRS-related operations
(e.g. Power-on, Placement of VM) (3)

VMware vSphere
customers can deploy VMware AppDefense to further secure
applications running in the data center or cloud. AppDefense leverages its
unique position in vSphere to understand what applications are intended to do,
monitor against that intended state, and automate response if anyone or
anything attempts to manipulate them.

Powering the largest
hybrid cloud ecosystem of any HCI vendor, vSAN enables customers to evolve their
vSphere environment on-premises or in the cloud with hyper-converged
infrastructure that lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) with efficient
operations and that easily scales to future demands. VMware vSAN 6.7 reduces
time-to-expertise with a new intuitive interface and accelerates
decision-making through advanced monitoring and analytics.

New and enhanced
features in VMware vSAN 6.7 include:

·  New VMware vSphere HTML5 Client Support: Will provide vSAN admins with a
unified, intuitive management experience using the HTML5-based vSphere Client
that introduces new functionality and optimized workflows for vSAN operations.

·  New Integrated vRealize Operations Healthchecks in vCenter Server: Will offer a single pane of glass to monitor
and control multiple HCI environments. vRealize Operations 6.7 will provide a global operations view of vSAN 6.7 environments with
six new dashboards embedded within vCenter Server 6.7 enabling customers to
monitor capacity, performance, KPIs and alerts, and more. This capability does
not require a separate vRealize Operations license and is available to anyone
with a vSAN Advanced or vSAN Enterprise license.

·  New Host-Pinning and iSCSI failover support: Will extend the suitability of HCI to
applications such as Cassandra, Hadoop and MongoDB as well as to clustered
Windows Server environments. New application support requires customers to
contact VMware for additional details.

·  New Intelligent Self-Healing Capabilities: Will mitigate the effects of disruptive events
such as hardware failures with smart resource allocation.

·  Enhanced vSAN Encryption: Will meet strict U.S. Federal government
security requirements with FIPS 140-2 validation to protect data from
disruptive events.

As part of today’s
announcement, VMware is also introducing vSAN ReadyCare to improve the support
experience for HCI environments. VMware will help customers maintain
performance by avoiding or quickly resolving issues and minimize downtime
through a combination of proactive telemetry capabilities from vSAN Support
Insight advanced analytics, and a broad investment in VMware support staff.

VMware is widely
recognized as the leading HCI software provider, and now delivers vSphere and
vSAN-powered HCI in two of the top four public cloud providers, including AWS
and IBM. Through an expansive partner ecosystem, VMware supports the broadest
set of consumption options for its HCI software from turnkey HCI integrated
systems such as Dell EMC VxRail and VxRack SDDC solutions to certified vSAN
ReadyNode hardware reference architectures to as-a-service consumption models
in public clouds.

“CenturyLink has
multiple cloud products providing world-class solutions to our customers built
on the power of VMware VSAN, a fundamental piece of the complete
software-defined data center (SDDC),” said Steve Nolen, senior lead product
manager – Private Cloud, CenturyLink. “vSAN has scaled flawlessly to over 11
petabytes of production data on high-performance all-flash devices that
provides a consistent application experience for the most demanding workloads,
from business-critical applications to cloud-native applications. The rapid
innovation in vSAN, as demonstrated by the most recent release, will further
help us deliver a robust platform with enterprise-class resiliency and
intelligent, self-healing capabilities to enable our customers to rely on a high
performance hyper converged infrastructure.”

VMware vSphere 6.7 and VMware vSAN 6.7 are
both expected to become available by the end of VMware’s Q1 FY19 (May 4, 2018).

·  Read “Introducing VMware vSphere
6.7!” in the vSphere blog

·  Read “Extending Hybrid Cloud
Leadership with vSAN 6.7” in the Virtual Blocks blog

·  Learn more about VMware vSphere

·  Learn more about VMware vSAN

·  Connect with VMware on Twitter and Facebook

About VMware
VMware software powers the world’s complex digital infrastructure. The
company’s compute, cloud, mobility, networking and security offerings provide a
dynamic and efficient digital foundation to over 500,000 customers globally,
aided by an ecosystem of 75,000 partners. Headquartered in Palo Alto,
California, this year VMware celebrates twenty years of breakthrough innovation
benefiting business and society. For more information, please visit https://www.vmware.com/company.html.