Every VMworld so far has carried out an over whelming number of innovative announcements that hit us over a short period of few days, & this VMworld is no exception. In this post, I have decided to summarize the top announcement made at VMworld 2012. I will start by pointing the ones announced today, & will add to them if I find more announcement to make it to my top announcements list. I believe just the ones announced today will be a total game changer and will leave us with a lot to play with till the next VMwolrd and maybe beyond that. That have been said, let’s look at some of these great announcements:

vSphere Related Announcements:

– vSphere 5.1 is here with many enhancement and new features. For the full list of enhancement and features of vSphere 5.1, you might want to check out: https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsphere/vmware-what-is-new-vsphere51.pdf

– vSphere Enhanced VMotion: Share Storage was always one of the requirements to run VMotion. Not any more with the announcement of Enhanced VMotion today, you no longer need a shared storage to be able to benefit of VMotion. I can see many customers looking forward to this, specially smaller customers who could not afford a shared storage. Further, I can see this a great step forward toward being able to move VMs across datacenters without requiring super expensive hardware to enable it, which is what Cloud Computing is all about. Imagine in the future, if you will be able to move your VMs freely between your different datacenters as well any public cloud with ease and without downtime. I can see us one step closer to that day, which make me super exciting.

– An Enhanced vSphere Web Client: While vSphere had a web client for a while, it was not comparable to the vSphere standard client. The new enhanced client will change this story for ever, where most of the features available in the standard client is available today in the vSphere web client. Actually I can see many admins in the near future getting it to replace their standard vSphere client. Further with the integration of the new vSphere web client with the vCloud Director web interface, I can see it getting more adoption per day.

– Zero Downtime VMware Tools Upgrade: I believe this is one demonstrate how VMware is committed to eliminate downtime. It will leave no admin an excuse of not updating their VMware tools. Hopefully you will be ready for my next health check with all your VMware tools up to date, as the excuse of it requiring downtime is gone for ever after you upgrade to vSphere 5.1 VMware tools.

– vSphere Replication: Now you can use the built-in vSphere replication to achieve RPOs as low as 15 minutes at no additional cost.

– vSphere Distributed Switch Enhancements: Network Health Check, Configuration Backup and Restore, Roll Back and Recovery, and Link Aggregation Control Protocol support

– No More vRAM: VMware has dropped vRAM not only from its licensing, but as well from its dictionary. That mean you will have a much easier licensing schema per physical CPU without any vRAM or cores restriction. I believe many customers will celebrate this new level of freedom they have been requesting for a while, where VMware competitors will have it tougher by day.

vCloud Related Announcements:

– VMware vFabric Application Director enhanced integrations with vCloud Director. vCloud is no longer limited to deploying VMs, but the vision to get it to be able to deploy applications as well.

– Dynamics OPs were demoed as well an explanation of how VMware future vCloud & management Solution will be able to integrate with other hypervisors opening up the eco-system.

– VXLAN were announced and how they will help in virtualizing the network layer as well resolve issues cloud computing faced when utilizing traditional VLANs. Further, it will be utilized to help expand L2 networks across the WAN with ease.

As the VMworld curtain has been dropped, and the NDAs have been waived many blog posts have been made & more to come. Below are few to start with & please leave a comment if you find more interesting ones to be added. I will as well add few more as I find them:

• VMware What’s New Document Index from Yellow-Bricks.com (Seems some temporary issue with it & Duncan working on fixing it)
• Jason Nash What’s New in the vSphere Distributed Switch?
• New 5.1 vDS Feature Deep Dive – Network Health Check
• New 5.1 vDS Feature Deep Dive – Configuration Backup and Rollback
• New 5.1 vDS Feature Deep Dive – Port Mirror and Netflow Enhancements
• New 5.1 vDS Feature Deep Dive – LACP, SR-IOV, Elastic Ports, and More
• vSphere Data Protection Overview at 2vcps and a truck
• Setting the record straight on VMware vSphere Data Protection
• VMworld 2012: VMware vSphere 5.1 Delivers New Features for SMBs