What You Missed at VMworld 2014

by Kevin O’Connor

One of the most important tech events this year was VMworld 2014, a gathering of VMware employees, IT pros, thought leaders, and industry experts to discuss the latest advances in virtualization and cloud technology. If you were unable to attend, you missed a number of big announcements from VMware. PC Connection’s VMware team was out in full force at VMworld, and we’re here to share with you some of the biggest announcements. For the fullest experience, watch our webinar recap of the whole show.

Their first big announcement was in the area of software-defined data centers:

vCloud Suite 5.8 brings new features in site recovery manager and user data protection, plus improved interoperability with NSX, allowing you to customize the provisioning of NSX firewall routing services using vCloud Suite technologies. And it features vSphere Support Assistant, which is a free vCenter plugin you can use to identify issues before they become actual problems.

The next big announcement was of the EVO offerings. EVO is VMware’s brand for their hyper-converged infrastructure technologies, and VMware announced two versions of EVO converged infrastructure solutions: EVO Rail and EVO Rack. EVO Rail is a 2U 4-node rack appliance that you can purchase directly from your server hardware vendor with VMware technologies fully enabled on it. It’s the easiest way to roll out a software-defined data center. EVO Rack delivers a full hyper-converged infrastructure used to build and operate a high performance software-defined data center.

The third big announcement was the convergence of VMware’s management products into the vRealize line of offerings. The vRealize Suite includes vRealize Cloud Management Platform and vRealize Operations Air, vRealize Automation Air, and vRealize Business Air. The vRealize Suite will greatly help clients manage the delivery of IT services whether they are hosted in their data center or from an external cloud provider all under one unified management experience.

Those are just a taste of the announcements that came out of VMworld 2014. For a deeper dive on these and other items from VMworld, check out our webinar with Sam Tessier, technical partner manager at VMware, where he goes through all the details of this year’s show.

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