VMworld US 2013 Predictions!!!
We’ve now gone screaming into August and VMworld US is just around the corner. Although I’m not attending VMworld US this year – need to work on my funding for US, I will be attending the Europe VMworld later in the year.
VMWorld US has always been the place where all of the most important announcements have been made, with this being the 10th Anniversary of VMWorld, there is a strong possibility that the announcements will be bigger and better… well at least the parties will be.
I thought that it would be a good idea to let people know my thoughts around what I believe will be announced at VMWorld… please remember that I do not have any insider knowledge but these are items that I believe should be announced at VMworld:
- Next Release of vSphere
It’s not really big news, but working on previous years and the fact that one is due, I would expect to see a new release of vSphere. Some people are predicting this to be a version 6 release but I don’t think that this is likely at this stage, more likely is that the version that will be released will be version 5.5. I believe that this version will be mainly bug fixes, with further improvements being made to SSO and the web interface. As you’ll see from my other predictions, other items will also be included in the vSphere suite. There may also be some increases on the memory that can be allocated to virtual machines etc. I think that a major release like version 6 (expected next year) will see wholesale changes to the maximum size of VMDK files, memory, and CPU options… but we’ll have to wait and see for that. We could also see the first inclusion of the Nicira virtual switches into the vSphere portfolio, automatically being included under the Enterprise Plus licensing model. - vSphere Data Protection
vSphere Data Protection is likely to get an improvement as part of the latest vSphere release and is likely to see the maximum size for the appliance increase from 2TB to 4TB – in line with the recent release of the EMC Avamars virtual appliance which is now available as 4TB… since vDP is based on the Avamar technology, we should see this increase either this year or next year. - vCloud Suite
The big announcements over the last couple of years have seen more suites being released, VMware taking their individual products and releasing them as a competitively priced bundle of software instead. I believe that this will become more apparent this year, as I believe that we are likely to see the vCloud Suite becoming the way to purchase vSphere. This would therefore see a renaming of the vCloud Suite editions from Standard, Advanced and Enterprise to Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus (in line with the current vSphere offerings now). - Site Recovery Manager
Site Recovery Manager is a very good product but I believe that there are some improvements that are required, and I believe that these will appear as an announcement at VMworld, where I believe that SRM will be released as version 5.5 in line with vSphere. The big key thing with this release of SRM will be the fact that it will now be a plugin to the Web Interface rather than the traditional client as it currently is. - Horizon Suite
I think that we will see a version 5.5 release of the Horizon suite but the big announcement could be the inclusion of the Horizon suite as part of the main vCloud suite… could we see the Horizon element appear as part of the Enterprise Plus version of the vCloud suite with the existing suites staying pretty much the same as they current are.
If I manage to get some of these predictions correct, I will be impressed but we’ll find out later in the month.