VMware vSphere 6.5 Helps Customers Achieve Digital Transformation

Companies know that digital transformation is critical to their ability to compete in today’s uber-dynamic and demanding economy, but they are learning that the transformation itself is not easy. MSPs can help smooth the path by providing insight into the technologies that will best support digital transformation—chief among them, virtualization.

Most companies are leveraging virtualization today, but true digital transformation typically requires that companies expand their use of virtualization on the network and in the cloud. This provides the ability to, among other things, develop, test, iterate, update and scale reasonably and rapidly. Virtualization will help MSPs enable customers to move more quickly and safely, bringing products—and profits—to market faster.

Some of the biggest challenges companies face as they digitally transform their business include environments that are becoming increasingly complex, growing IT security threats, and the need to support both existing and new apps and services.

Key to bridging the gap between where companies are on the road to digital transformation and where they need to be is VMware’s vSphere 6.5, which focuses on four areas of innovation directly targeted at mitigating the digital transformation challenges customers face.

1. Simplified customer experience

A technology’s potential is only as great as its usability. vSphere 6.5 is architected around the easy-to-use vCenter Server Appliance, which reduces operational complexity by embedding key functionality into a single location. This enables companies to channel their resources toward innovation and optimization, and provides the potential for a significant performance boost. vSphere’s API-first approach also simplifies the user experience by fostering a more business-centric and agile environment, and vSphere 6.5’s REST-based APIs for VM Management improve both the user and partner experience by enabling finer control of virtual infrastructure for apps.  Further, vSphere 6.5’s HTML5-based vSphere Client provides a modern user interface experience that is both responsive and easy to use. 

2. Comprehensive built-in security 

The evolution—let alone digital transformation—of any business requires secure data, infrastructure, and access at scale. To secure data, vSphere 6.5 offers a new VM-level disk encryption capability designed to protect against unauthorized data access. To assure the security of the underlying infrastructure, vSphere 6.5 adds a secure boot model to protect both the hypervisor and the guest operating system. vSphere 6.5 also delivers enhanced audit-quality logging capabilities that provide more complete information about user actions.

3. Universal app platform

vSphere is a universal app platform that supports both traditional and next-generation apps. To run any app, vSphere 6.5 expands its workload coverage model by focusing on both scale-up and scale-out next-gen apps that are increasingly built using evolving technology building blocks, such as containers. Additionally, Integrated Containers make it easy for vSphere users to bring containers into an existing vSphere environment. Providing an enterprise container infrastructure that supports both developers and vSphere operations teams, the vSphere Integrated Containers capability makes it just as easy to enable and manage containers as virtual machines. vSphere 6.5 also lets companies run apps from any cloud, including their own data centers or in public cloud environments.

4. Proactive data center management 

vSphere 6.5 offers monitoring solutions and predictive analytics to address potential issues before they become serious problems. For example, Proactive HA will detect hardware conditions of a host and allow data center managers to evacuate the VMs before the issue causes an outage.

Late last month, VMware announced the availability of Update 1 of vSphere 6.5. Update 1 adds:

• Expanded support for general workflows
• Expanded host support
• Support and interoperability across ecosystems

In addition, VMware has extended general support for vSphere 6.5 for five years and has added an upgrade path to vSphere 6.5 from vSphere 6.0 Update 3.

For more information, see this blog post.

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