VMworld 2012: VMware Announces vCloud Suite 5.1

On day one of VMworld 2012 VMware announced the release of their new vCloud Suite 5.1 product line to the more than 20,000 attendees in San Francisco's Moscone Center.  The vCloud Suite represents the next evolution of virtualization where virtualization moves beyond simple server virtualization into what VMware terms the software defined datacenter. The goal of the software defined datacenter is to make IT infrastructure more efficient and agile by extending virtualization and abstraction to the storage and networking portions of the datacenter.

Outgoing CEO Paul Martiz noted this is the next step in the evolution of the datacenter. Today over 60% of workloads are virtualization which means virtualization has become the default way for organizations to deploy servers. Over the next three to four years VMware expects this to increase to where 80-90% of all workloads will be virtualized. Martiz also officially handed over the reins of VMware to incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger.

Gelsinger, who brings his 30 years of experience with Intel and EMC to VMware, described the vCloud Suite as enabling the abstraction, pooling and automation on IT infrastructure.  To much popular applause he also noted that VMware is ending the unpopular vRAM licensing scheme it adopted with vSphere 5 and is moving to a much simpler per CPU licensing model.