EMC isn't the only company with some news to unveil at EMC World 2011. VCE has some announcements as well all revolving around the BRAND NEW VBLOCKS!
The first announcement that effects VCE is the unveiling of Unified Infrastructure Manager 2.1. UIM is standard with a Vblock and is the major hardware orchestration piece with many new road-map additions to tie it in with other VMware products. Check out Chad Sakac's post because he has already covered this really in depth EMC UIM v2.1 Provisioning and Operations.
The second announcement from VCE is the availability of the new VNX Based Vblocks. The original Vblock names are still there, and I've created a chart that help depict the new differences.
| Vblock Name | EMC Array | Other Notes and Features |
| Vblock 0 | NS-120 | NAS, SAN, or Both |
| Vblock 1 | NS-480 | NAS, SAN, or Both |
| Vblock 1U | NS-960 | NAS, SAN, or Both |
| Vblock 300 EX | VNX 5300 | SAN or Unified |
| Vblock 300 FX | VNX 5500 | SAN or Unified |
| Vblock 300 GX | VNX 5700 | SAN or Unified |
| Vblock 300 HX | VNX 7500 | SAN or Unified |
| Vblock 700 | VMAX | Former Vblock2. SAN or use NAS with Gateway. |
All new 300 series Vblocks come in SAN or Unified (SAN/NAS) configuratons. No longer can Vblocks be ordered as NAS only. Why? Vblocks boot from SAN. When a Vblock was shipped as NAS only, UCS blades had to be populated with internal hard drives. Boot from SAN gives a lot of flexibility in virtual environments. Less spinning media to have to worry about, less power consumption of blades, if a blade fails it's very easy to replace it and boot it up without moving hard drives or re-installing ESX, UCS profiles with SAN Boot makes VMware 4.1 seem stateless, and UIM can configure blades that boot from SAN.
The Vblock 300 EX is actually cheaper than the original Vblock 0 because of new hardware components.
Some other things you may want to know about Vblock 300 series are the mins and maxs. All new Vblocks have specific minimums that can be shipped out. The minimum on the compute side is atleast 4 blades. VCE has decided on 4 blades because that is the recommended bare minimum VMware cluster size to account for N+1+maintenance. All UCS blade upgrades can be done in packs of 2 to account for redundancy. On the storage side, a Vblock can be shipped with as little 18 drives. The maximums on both compute and storage depend on the Vblock type for the amount of chassis and drives depend on the array.
So what's going to happen with the original Vblock 0, 1, and 1U? Nothing. VCE still offers the original Vblocks and will continue to do so until EMC puts and end of life statement on the arrays.
Your last pondering statement might be, what's up with the branding of 300? Seeing as how there is just a single number, there will be room for newer Vblocks to fit in the range of 0-1000. I can't give any more details, but things are in the pipeline!
Lastly, if you happen to be at EMC World, you can take a glimpse at the new racks. VCE is now shipping brand new custom racks built by Panduit. Simply stunning. This looks like it's a Vblock 300 FX.
