VVD

VMworld 2017 US – VMware Strategy & My Thoughts

Chan 2 Comments

This is a quick post to summerise all the key announcements from VMworld 2017 US event and share my thoughts and insights of the strategy and the direction of VMware, the way I see it.

Key Announcements

A number of announcements were made during the week on products and solutions and below is a high level list of those to recap.

  • Announced the launch of the VMware Cloud Services which consists of 2 main components
    • VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC)
      • Consist of VMware vSphere + vSAN + NSX
      • Running on AWS data centers (bare metal)
      • A complete Public Cloud platform consisting of VMware Software Defined Data Center components
      • Available as a
    • A complete Hybrid-Cloud infrastructure security, management & monitoring & Automation solution made available through a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform
      • Work natively with VMware Cloud on AWS
      • Also work with legacy, on-premises VMware data center
      • Also work with native AWS, Azure and Google public cloud platforms
  • Next generation of network virtualisation solution based NSX-T (aka NSX Multi hypervisor)
    • Version 2.0 announced
    • Supports vSphere & KVM
    • Likely going to be strategically more important to VMware than the NSX-v (vSphere specific NSX that is commongly used today by vSphere customers). Think What ESXi was for VMware when ESX was still around, during early days!

 

 

  • Next version of vRealize Network Insight (version 3.5) released
    • Various cloud platform integrations
    • Additional on-premises 3rd party integrations (Check Point FW, HP OneView, Brocade MLX)
    • Support for additional NSX component integration (IPFIX, Edge dashboard, NSX-v DFW PCI dashboard)

 

  • VMware AppDefense
    • A brand new application security solution that is available via VMware Cloud Services subscription

 

  • VMware Pivotal Container Services (PKS) as a joint collaboration between VMware, Pivotal & Google (Kubernetes)
    • Kubernetes support across the full VMware stack including NSX & vSAN
    • Support for Sever-Less solution capabilities using Functions as a Service (Similar to AWS Lambda or Azure Functions)
    • Enabling persistent storage for stateful applications via the vSphere Cloud Provider, which provides access to vSphere storage powered by vSAN or traditional SAN and NAS storage,
    • Automation and governance via vRealize Automation and provisioning of service provider clouds with vCloud Director,
    • Monitoring and troubleshooting of virtual infrastructure via VMware vRealize Operations
    • Metrics monitoring of containerized applications via Wavefront.

 

  • Workspace One enhancements and updates
    • Single UEM platform for Windows, MacOS, Chrome OS, IOS and Android
    • Integration with unique 3rd party endpoint platform API’s
    • Offer cloud based peer-to-peer SW distribution to deploy large apps at scale
    • Support for managing Chrome devices
    • Provides customers the ability to enforce & manage O365 security policies and DLP alongside all of their applications and devices
    • Workspace One intelligence to provide Insights and automation to enhance user experience (GA Q4 FY18)
  • VMware Integrated OpenStack 4.0 announced
    • OpenStack Ocata integration
    • Additional features include
      • Containerized apps alongside traditional apps in production on OpenStack
      • vRealize Automation integration to enable OpenStack users to use vRealize Automation-based policies and to consume OpenStack components within vRealize Automation blueprints
      • Increased scale and isolation for OpenStack clouds enabled through new multi-VMware vCenter support
    • New pricing & Packaging tier (not free anymore)
  • VMware Skyline
    • A new proactive support offering aligned to global support services
    • Available to Premier support customers (North America initially)
    • Requires an appliance deployment on premise
    • Quicker time to incident resolution

Cross Cloud Architecture Strategy & My Thoughts

VMware announced the Cross Cloud Architecture (CCA) back in VMworld 2016 where they set the vision for VMware to provide the capability to customers to run & manage any application, on any cloud using any device. This was ambitious and was seen as the first step towards VMware recognising that running vSphere on premise should no longer be VMware’s main focus and they want to provide customers with choice.

This choice of platform options were to be,

  • Continue to run vSphere on premise if that is what you want to do
  • OR, let customers run the same vSphere based SDDC stack on the cloud which can be spun up in minutes in a fully automated way (IaaS)
  • OR, run the same workload that used to run on a VMware SDDC platform on a native public cloud platform such as AWS or Azure or Google cloud or IBM Cloud

During that VMworld, VMware also demoed the capability of NSX to bridge all these various private and public cloud platforms through the clever use of NSX to extend networks across all of those platforms. Well, VMworld 2017 has shown additional steps VMware have taken to make this cross cloud architecture even more of a reality. VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) now lets you spin up a complete VMware based Software Defined Data Center running vSphere on vSAN connected by NSX through a simple web page, much similar to how Azure and AWS native infrastructure platforms allows you to provision VM based infrastructure on demand. Based on some initial articles, this could even be cheaper than running vSphere on-premise which is great news for customers. In addition to this price advantage, when you factor in the rest of Total Cost of Ownership factors such as maintaining on premise skill to set up and manage the infrastructure platforms that are no longer needed, the VMC platform is likely going to be extremely interesting to most customers. And most importantly, most customers will NOT need to go through costly re-architecting of their monolithic application estate to fit a native cloud IaaS platform which simplifies cloud migration of their monolithic application stack. And if that is not enough, you also can carry on managing & securing that workload using the same VMware management and security toolset, even on the cloud too.

When you then consider the announcement of VMware Cloud Services (VCS) offering as a SaaS solution, it now enables integrating a complete VMware hybrid cloud management toolset in to various platforms and workloads, irrespective of where they reside. VCS enables the discovery, monitoring, management and securing of those workloads across different platforms, all through a single pane of glass which is a pretty powerful message that no other public cloud provider can claim to provide in such a heterogeneous manner. This holistic management and security platform allows customers to provision, manage and secure any workload (Monolithic or Microservices based) on any platform (vSphere on premise, VMC on AWS, native AWS, native Azure, Native Google cloud) to be accessed on any device (workstation, laptop, Pad or a mobile). That to me is a true Cross Cloud vision becoming a reality and my guess is once the platform matures and capabilities increase, this is going to be very popular amongst almost all customers.

In addition to this CCA capabilities, VMware obviously appear to be shifting their focus from the infrastructure layer (read “virtual machine”) to the actual application layer, focusing more on enabling application transformation and application security which is great to see. As many have already, VMware too are embracing the concept of containers, not only as a better application architecture but also as the best way to decouple the application from the underlying infrastructure and using containers as a shipping mechanism to enable moving applications across to public cloud (& back). The announcement of various integrations within their infrastructure stack to Docker ecosystem such as Kubernetes testifies to this and would likely be welcomed by customers. I’d expect such integration to continue to improve across all of VMware’s SDDC infrastructure stack. With VMware solutions, you can now deploy container based applications on on-premise vSphere using VIC or Photon or even VMC or a native public cloud platform, store them on vSAN with volume plugins on premise or on cloud, extend the network to the container instance via NSX (on premise or on cloud), extend visibility in to container instance via vRNI and vROPS (on premise or cloud) and also automate provisioning or most importantly, migration of these container apps across on-premise or public cloud platforms as you see fit.

NSX cloud for example will let you extend all the unique capabilities of software defined networking such as micro-segmentation, security groups and overlay network extensions to not just within private data centers but also to native public cloud platforms such as AWS & Azure (roadmap) which enriches the capabilities of a public cloud platform and increases the security available within the network.

My Thoughts

All in all, it was a great VMworld where VMware have genuinely showcased their Hybrid Cloud and Cross Cloud Architecture strategy. As a technologist that have been working with VMware for a while, it was pretty obvious that a software centric organisation like VMware, similar to the likes of Microsoft was always gonna embrace changes, especially changes driven by software such as the public cloud. However most people, especially sales people in the industry I work in as well as some of the customers were starting to worry about the future of VMware and their relevance in the increasingly Cloudy world ahead. This VMworld has showcased to all of those how VMware has got a very good working strategy to embrace that software defined cloud adoption and empower customers by giving them the choice to do the same, without any tie in to a specific cloud platform. The soaring, all time high VMware share price is a testament that analysts and industry experts agree with this too.

If I was a customer, I would want nothing more!

Keen to get your thoughts, please submit via comments below

Other Minor VMworld 2017 (Vegas) Announcements

  • New VMware & HPe partnership for DaaS
    • Include Workspace ONE to HPe DaaS
    • Include Unified Endpoint Management through Airwatch
  • Dell EMC to offer data protection to VMC (VMware Cloud on AWS)
    • Include Data Domain & Data protection app suite
    • Self-service capability
  • VCF related announcements
    • CenturyLink, Fujitsu & Rackspace to offer VCF + Services
    • New HCI and CI platforms (VxRack SDDC, HDS UCP-RS, Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX, QCT QxStack
    • New VCF HW partners
      • Cisco
      • HDS
      • Fujitsu
      • Lenovo
  • vCloud Director v9 announced
    • GA Q3 FY18
  • New vSphere scale-out edition
    • Aimed at Big data and HPC workloads
    • Attractive price point
    • Big data specific features and resource optimisation within vSphere
    • Includes vDS
  • VMware Validated Design (VVD) 4.1 released
    • Include a new optional consolidated DC architecture for small deployments
  • New VMware and Fujitsu partnerships
    • Fujitsu Cloud Services to delivery VMware Cloud Services
  • DXC Technology partnership
    • Managed Cloud service with VMC
    • Workload portability between VMC, DXC DCs and customer’s own DCs
  • Re-announced VMware Pulse IoT Center  with further integration to VMware solutions stack to manage IoT components

 

Cheers

Chan

VVDs, Project Ice, vRNI & NSX – Summary Of My Breakout Sessions From Day 1 at VMworld 2016 US –

Chan Leave a comment

Capture

Quick post to summerise the sessions I’ve attended on day 1 at @VMworld 2016 and few interesting things I’ve noted. First up are the 3 sessions I had planned to attend + the additional session I managed to walk in to.

Breakout Session 1 – Software Defined Networking in VMware validated Designs

  • Session ID: SDDC7578R
  • Presenter: Mike Brown – SDDC Integration Architect (VMware)

This was a quick look at the VMware Validated Designs (VVD) in general and the NSX design elements within the SDDC stack design in the VVD. If you are new to VVD’s and are typically involved in designing any solutions using the VMware software stack, it is genuinely worth reading up on and should try to replicate the same design principles (within your solution design constraints) where possible. The diea being this will enable customers to deploy robust solutions that have been pre-validated by experts at VMware in order to ensure the ighest level of cross solution integrity for maximum availability and agility required for a private cloud deployment. Based on typical VMware PSO best practices, the design guide (Ref architecture doc) list out each design decision applicable to each of the solution components along with the justification for that decision (through an explanation) as well as the implication of that design decision. An example is given below

NSX VVD

I first found out about the VVDs during last VMworld in 2015 and mentioned in my VMworld 2015 blog post here. At the time, despite the annoucement of availability, not much content were actually avaialble as design documents but its now come a long way. The current set of VVD documents discuss every design, planning, deployment and operational aspect of the following VMware products & versions, integrated as a single solution stack based on VMware PSO best practises. It is based on a multi site (2 sites) production solution that customers can replicate in order to build similar private cloud solutions in their environments. These documentation set fill a great big hole that VMware have had for a long time in that, while their product documentation cover the design and deployment detail for individual products, no such documentaiton were available for when integrating multiple products and with VVD’s, they do now. In a way they are similar to CVD documents (Cisco Validated Designs) that have been in use for the likes of FlexPod for VMware…etc.

VVD Products -1

VVD Products -2

VVD’s generally cover the entire solution in the following 4 stages. Note that not all the content are fully available yet but the key design documents (Ref Architecture docs) are available now to download.

  1. Reference Architecture guide
    1. Architecture Overview
    2. Detailed Design
  2. Planning and preperation guide
  3. Deployment Guide
    1. Deployment guide for region A (primary site) is now available
  4. Operation Guide
    1. Monitoring and alerting guide
    2. backup and restore guide
    3. Operation verification guide

If you want to find out more about VVDs, I’d have a look at the following links. Just keep in mind that the current VVD documents are based on a fairly large, no cost barred type of design and for those of you who are looking at much smaller deployments, you will need to exercise caution and common sense to adopt some of the recommended design decisions to be within the appplicable cost constraints (for example, current NSX design include deploying 2 NSX managers, 1 integrated with the management cluster vCenter and the other with the compute cluster vCenter, meaning you need NSX licenses on the management clutser too. This may be an over kill for most as typically, for most deployments, you’d only deploy a single NSX manager integrated to the compute cluster)

As for the Vmworld session itself, the presenter went over all the NSX related design decisions and explained them which was a bit of a waste of time for me as most people would be able to read the document and understand most of those themselves. As a result I decided the leave the session early, but have downloaded the VVD documents in order to read throughly at leisure. 🙂

Breakout Session 2 – vRA, API, Ci Oh My!

  • Session ID: DEVOP7674
  • Presenters

vRA Jenkins Plugin

As I managd to leave the previous session early, I manage to just walk in to this session which had just started next door and both Kris and Ryan were talking about the DevOps best practises with vRealize Automation and vrealize Code Stream. they were focusing on how developpers who are using agile development that want to invoke infrastructure services can use these products and invoke their capabilities through code, rather than through the GUI. One of the key focus areas was the vRA plugin for Jenkins and if you were a DevOps person of a developper, this session content would be great value. if you can gain access to the slides or the session recordings after VMworld (or planning to attend VMworld 2016 Europe), i’d highly encourage you to watch this session.

Breakout Session 3 – vRealize, Secure and extend your data center to the cloud suing NSX: A perspective for service providers and end users

  • Session ID: HBC7830
  • Presenters
    • Thomas Hobika – Director, America’s Service Provider solutions engineering & Field enablement, vCAN, vCloud Proviuder Software business unit (VMware)
    • John White – Vice president of product strategy (Expedient)

Hosted Firewall Failover

This session was about using NSX and other products (i.e. Zerto) to enable push button Disaster Recovery for VMware solutions presented by Thomas, and John was supposed to talk about their involvement in designing this solution.  I didn’t find this session content that relevent to the listed topic to be honest so left failrly early to go to the blogger desks and write up my earlier blog posts from the day which I thought was of better use of my time. If you would like more information on the content covered within this sesstion, I’d look here.

 

Breakout Session 4 – Practical NSX Distributed Firewall Policy Creation

  • Session ID: SEC7568
  • Presenters
    • Ron Fuller – Staff Systems Engineer (VMware)
    • Joseph Luboimirski – Lead virtualisation administrator (University of Michigan)

Fairly useful session focusing about NSX distributed firewall capability and how to effectively create a zero trust security policy on ditributed firewall using vairous tools. Ron was talking about various different options vailablle including manual modelling based on existing firewall rules and why that could potentially be inefficient and would not allow customers to benefit from the versatality available through the NSX platform. He then mentioned other approaches such as analysing traffic through the use of vRealize Network Insight (Arkin solution) that uses automated collection of IPFIX & NetFlow information from thre virtual Distributed Switches to capture traffic and how that capture data could potentialy be exported out and be manipulated to form the basis for the new firewall rules. He also mentioned the use of vRealize Infrastructure Navigator (vIN) to map out process and port utilisation as well as using the Flow monitor capability to capture exisitng communication channels to design the basis of the distributed firewall. The session also covered how to use vRealize Log Insight to capture syslogs as well.

All in all, a good session that was worth attending and I would keep an eye out, especially if you are using / thinking about using NSx for advanced security (using DFW) in your organisation network. vRealize Network Insight really caught my eye as I think the additional monitoring and analytics available through this platform as well as the graphical visualisation of the network activities appear to be truely remarkeble (explains why VMware integrated this to the Cross Cloud Services SaS platform as per this morning’s announcement) and I cannot wait to get my hands on this tool to get to the nitty gritty’s.

If you are considering large or complex deployment of NSX, I would seriously encourage you to explore the additional features and capabilities that this vRNI solution offers, though it’s important to note that it is licensed separately form NSX at present.

vNI         vNI 02

 

Outside of these breakout sessions I attended and the bloggin time in between, I’ve managed to walk around the VM Village to see whats out there and was really interested in the Internet Of Things area where VMware was showcasing their IOT related solutions currently in R&D. VMware are currently actively developing an heterogeneous IOT platform monitoring soluton (internal code name: project Ice). The current version of the project is about partnering up with relevent IOT device vendors to develop a common monitoring platform to monitor and manage the various IOT devices being manufacured by various vendors in various areas. If you have a customer looking at IOT projects, there are opportunities available now within project Ice to sign up with VMware as a beta tester and co-develop and co-test Ice platform to perform monitoring of these devices.

An example of this is what VMware has been doing with Coca Cola to monitor various IOT sensors deployed in drinks vending machines and a demo was available in the booth for eall to see

IOT - Coke

Below is a screenshot of Project Ice monitoring screen that was monitoring the IOT sensors of this vending machine.   IOT -

The solution relies on an Open-Source, vendor neutral SDK called LIOTA (Little IOT Agent) to develop a vendor neutral agent to monitor each IOT sensor / device and relay the information back to the Ice monitoring platform. I would keep and eye out on this as the use cases of such a solution is endless and can be applied on many fronts (Auto mobiles, ships, trucks, Air planes as well as general consumer devices). One can argue that the IOT sensor vendors themselves should be respornsible for developping these mo nitoring agents and platforms but most of these device vendors do not have the knowledge or the resources to build such intelligent back end platforms which is where VMware can fill that gap through a partship.

If you are in to IOT solutions, this is defo a one to keep your eyes on for further developments & product releases. This solution is not publicly available as of yet though having spoken to the product manager (Avanti Kenjalkar), they are expecting a big annoucement within 2 months time which is totally exciting.

Some additional details can be found in the links below

Cheers

Chan

#vRNI #vIN #VVD # DevOps #Push Button DR # Arkin Project Ice # IOT #LIOTA

VMworld Europe 2015 – Partner Day (PEX)

Chan Leave a comment

Quick post about the VMworld Europe day 1 (PEX day)….!! Was meaning to get this post out yesterday but there are too many distractions when you attend VMworld, let me tell ya….! 🙂

I arrived in Barcelona on Sunday and had already collected the access pass on Sunday evening itself. As such, I arrived at the venue on the Partner day on Monday around 9am and the venue was fairly busy with various VMware employees and partners.

As for my schedule for the day, I attended a VSAN deepdive session in the morning, presented by non other than Mr VSAN himself (Simon Todd @ VMware) which was fairly good. To be honest, most of the content was the same as the session he presented few weeks ago at VMware SDDC boot camp in London which I also attended. Some of the interesting points covered include

  • Oracle RAC / Exchange DAG / SQL Always on Availability Groups are not supported on VSAN with the latest version (6.1)
  • Always use pass through rather than RAID 0 on VSAN ready nodes as this gives full visibility of the disk characteristics such as SMART and removal of disks from disk groups causing less downtime with passthrough rather than RAID which makes sense.
  • Paying attention to SAS expander cards and lane allocation if you do custom node builds for VSAN nodes (rather than using pew-configured VSAN ready nodes). For example, a 12g SAS expander card can only access 8 PCI lanes where in an extreme case, can be saturated so its better to have 2 x SAS expander cards to share the workload of 8 channels each
  • Keep SATA to SSD ratio small in disk groups where possible to distribute the workload and benefit from maximum aggregate IOPS performance (from the SSD layer)
  • Stretched VSAN (possible with VSAN 6.1) features and some pre-reqs such as less than 5ms latency requirements over 10/20/40gbps links between sites, multicast requirements, and the 500ms latency requirement between main site and the offsite witness.

Following on from this session, I attended the SDDC Assess, Design & Deploy session presented by Gary Blake (Senior Solutions Architect). That was all about what his team doing to help standardise the deployment design & deployment process of the Software Defined Data Center components. I did find out about something really interesting during this session about VMware Validated Designs (VVD). VVD is something VMware are planning to come out with which would be kind of similar to CVD (Cisco Validated Design Document if you are familiar with FlexPod). A VVD will literally provide all the information required for a customer / partner / anyone to Design & Implement a VMware validated Software Defined Data Center using the SDDC product portfolio. This has been long overdue in my view and as a Vmware partner and a long time customer, would really welcome this. No full VVD’s are yet released to the public yet, but you can join the community page to be kept up to date. Refer to the following 3 links

I then attended a separate, offsite roundtable discussion at a nearby hotel with a key number of NSX business Unit leaders to have an open chat about everything NSX. That was really good as they shared some key NSX related information and also discussed some interesting points. Few of the key ones are listed below.

  • 700+ production customers being on board so far with NSX
  • Some really large customers running their production workload on NSX (a major sportswear manufacturer running their entire public facing web systems on NSX)
  • East-West traffic security requirements driving lots of NSX sales opportunities, specifically with VDI.
  • Additional, more focused NSX training would soon be available such as design and deployment, Troubleshooting…etc
  • It was also mentioned that customers can acquire NSX with limited features for a cheaper price (restricted EULA) if you only need reduced capabilities (for example, if you only need edge gateway services). I’m not sure on how to order these though and would suggest speaking to your VMware account manager in the first instance.
  • Also discussed the potential new pricing options (nothing set in place yet..!!) in order to make NSX more affordable for small to medium size customers. Price is a clear issue for many small customers when it comes to NSX and if they do something to make it more affordable to smaller customers, that would no doubt be really well received. (This was an idea the attendees put forward and NSBU was happy to acknowledge & looking in to doing something about it)
  • Also discussed some roadmap information such as potential evolution of NSX in to providing firewall & security features out on public clouds as well as the private clouds.

Overall, the NSX roundtable discussions were really positive and it finally seems like the NSBU is slowly releasing the tight grip they had around the NSX release and be willing to engage more with the channel to help promote the product rather than working with only a handful of specialist partners. Also, it was really encouraging to hear about its adoption status so far as I’ve always been an early advocate of NSX due to the potential I saw during early releases. So go NSX….!!!

Overall, I thought the PEX day was ok. Nothing to get too excited about in terms of the breakout sessions…etc, with the highlight being the roundtable with the NSBU staff.

Following on from the discussion with the NSBU, I left the venue to go back to the hotel to meet up with few colleagues of mine and we then headed off to a nice restaurant on the Barcelona beach front called Shoko (http://shoko.biz/) to get some dinner & plan the rest of the week… This is the 2nd time we’ve hit this restaurant and I’d highly recommend anyone to go check it out if you are in town.

Unfortunately, I cannot quite recollect much about what happened after that point… 🙂

Post about the official (customer facing) opening day of the VMworld event is to follow….!!

Cheers

Chan