#vmworld #MGT5962 What’s New and Next in VMware Cloud Suite

Every company wants to be faster and more agile without sacrificing their security policies to do so. Companies have been able to weather this pressure of leveraging disparate Cloud solutions by embracing the SDDC. vCloud Suite is made up of vRealize Business, Operations, Automation, vSphere, SRM, Virtual SAN and NSX (Note: Virtual SAN and NSX are add-on’s to the suite).

vSphere 6 delivered a platform for virtualizing any application. This includes the SQL, Exchange and Oracles of the world. In addition support has been added for containers as first class citizens. 6 delivered cross vCenter and cross switch VMotion. vSphere 6 enables the content library to synchronize templates between sites. vSphere 6 provided higher performance and improved scalability compared to 5.5.

The next update of vSphere comes out shortly (6.0 Update 1). In Update 1, the Web Client now supports Update Manager and provides a UI for the Platform Services Controller (PSC). The vCenter Server Appliance (VSA) in Update 1 provides more deployment options such as:

1. Deploying from another vCenter
2. Deploying from the CLI

With SRM 6.1 NSX is now integrated. SRM can recognized NSX networks so that it can reattach the recovered VM to the same logical network. SRM 6.1 now supports active-active storage provided by 3rd party vendors (EMC VPLEX, IBM SVC etc). SRM 6.1 respects storage policy management so that a VM is placed on the right storage. Finally the next release of SRM is integrated with vRealize Automation.

It the next release of vRealize Automation, a unified blueprint model is delivered. This means that all blueprints can be configured from a single pane of glass and that the Application Services VM has been fully integrated into the vRA VM. NSX services can also be defined within the unified blueprint.

The architecture of vRA has been simplified so that the vCO, App Services and Identity management has been integrated into a single appliance, dramatically simplifying the installation.

With the next release of vRealize Operations the Hyperic Application monitoring is now integrated into vR OPs through an native adapter.

vRealize Business Manager is also part of the suite so that you can analyze the cost of your SDDC infrastructure, meter the resource usage by a specific consumer and publish prices to a service catalog in vRealize Automation.

#vmworld #EUC5430 Why Everybody Needs VMware User Environment Manager UEM

UEM works with the wider ecosystem of EUC software partners as it ties to the application. UEM is user profile and user personalization driven by contextual policies. This means that if I launch an application, any settings that you configure will travel with the application. UEM allows you to break out User environment, app configuration and personalization metadata so that whenever you launch an application the configuration can be applied dynamically and consistently. This allows you to set the environment as the user logs in. For example changing the printers as the user logs in from different floors.

As with ThinApp there is no large backend infrastructure requirement only a file share, application profiler and the service itself. To create your configuration you launch the Application Profiler and configure the application. This creates a profile which is stored in an *.ini file containing the settings. The product scales from 100s  to 1000s of users.

Contrast this with the current approach in which all these settings are stored in one single profile. UEM compartmentalizes everything so that you only load a stripped out or base profile when you login. From there UEM injects very specific information (keyboard, mouse etc). As you launch applications additional settings are injected on an application by application bases. This leads to greater flexibility, efficiency and consisted settings across devices as you launch the application.

To conceptualize this, imagine simple adjustments such as resizing an application window between logins persisting no matter what device you log into. This is one example of the flexibility; in addition you can lock out different application settings so that users cannot change them and have them persist between application launches.

The session introduces project VERA which allows you to to apply policies to secure documents in real-time. In addition, access to documents is logged and users can apply and revoke their own policies. This is a collaboration between App Volumes, UEM and 3rd party vendors.

#vmworld #HBC5474 VMware vCloud Air Roadmap

vCloud Air is now 2 years old; VMware now has 11 datacenters located around the globe (including Europe UK, Germany, Australia South and through partnership, Western Japan). Additional services have been integrated such as Horizon Air (launched a year and a half ago).  There are two models; Dedicated Private Cloud and Virtual Private Cloud.

vCloud is bringing Autoscaling to vCloud Air (dynamically adding VMs or capacity to an individual VMs). It is currently in tech preview and is exposed through a rest API which allows customers to easily take advantage of the technology.

VMware offers data at rest encryption through a partnership with Hytrust within vCloud Air. New to the vCloud storage portfolio is Object Storage in addition to standard, SSD-accelerated, and guaranteed performance storage based on pure flash storage. The Object store supports files, backup and structured and unstructured data.

With object storage you need petabyte scale; vCloud Object Store will be delivered through partnership with Google Cloud Platform and EMC. The high performance storage actually exposes something VMware has been leveraging for a while for its DaaS solution so that customers can purchase high performance/flash storage.

vCloud Air Disaster Recovery adds easy failback and a multi-VM recovery plan option (being able to rollback to previous snapshot). vCloud Air will bring vCloud Air Site Recovery Plan which has been designed by the SRM team to provide full Cloud multi-site support (replication Cloud site to Cloud site) delivered as a SaaS service. In addition it will be released with an OnDemand cost model which provides a much more efficient price point for customers.

Networking has been beefed up by integrating NSX to deliver advanced Networking Services. This provides a mechanism to expose more NSX features to vCloud Air customers. vCloud Connector has been industrialized to provide much more robust ability to extend your Layer 2 network segments to a single Edge over one WAN connection. For migrations to Cloud, you can now prestage the VM to the Cloud before the final migration allowing a cutover to happen in seconds vs. being determined by the size and copy speed of the VM.

vCloud Air Monitoring Insight will expose performance to both a rich dashboard and API so you can plumb it to any monitoring and managing workloads. vRealize Operations will be extended to report on the advanced network and migration metrics to provide visibility on the migration and networking information between the enterprise and VMware’s cloud. In addition a vCloud Air Adapter will be available for visibility from vR Ops and Air.

vCloud Air SQL is a pay-as-you-go Database-as-a-Service for Microsoft SQL Server initially. All announcements including 600 dollars of free credits for all VMworld attendees can be found on http://vcloud.vmware.com.

VMware has natively integrated Kinvey software which manages reusable mobile application development building blocks to allow you to quickly develop mobile applications on vCloud Air.

#vmworld #EUC6807-S Future of End User Computing

This session will focus on the state of End User Computing from VMware’s perspective. VMware Workspace Suite brings together innovation in desktop, mobile and identity management space. VMware did a polling of their customers to understand what the focus is in the End User space. According to polling, customers are trying to shift from individual mobility, to team mobility and true business mobility. Most are still looking at individual mobility however 2/3rds are aggressively investing to achieve business mobility.

VMware talks about this as Desktop Virtualization Redefined. Historically this focus has been on desktop and application delivery. VMware believes in a hybrid End User Computing model. So within the portfolio Horizon 6 fits on-premise, Horizon Air off premise and Horizon Flex delivers distributed desktop virtualization but expect these to interoperate at some point in the near future.

VMware has seen tremendous adoption of DaaS which is available on every continent. The discussion moves to Project ENZO. The inspiration for ENZO was to fundamentally change the way that desktops and applications are delivered. The heart of ENZO is just in time desktops and apps (based on Fast Clone technology).

A video is shown which shows the ENZO appliance interface (ENZO is bundled software and hardware). When you login you have a getting started tab which steps you through what you need to do. You have the option of deploying applications or desktops (based on a pre-created catalog). Once you configure the appliance ENZO deploys the desktops and applications.

The presentation switches to a discussion on AirWatch. VMware has really seen the mobility and EUC discussion merge. It is not just the Operating System that is changing but also the Applications. Windows 10 is cited as an example of an OS that is designed to connect to both an On-Premise and Cloud domain.

A demo is shown of AirWatch delivering and applying policy to Windows 10 desktops. In addition with Windows 10 you can monitor all the primitives to ensure the user has not turned off a feature that violates compliance. If the user has violated the policy, applications can be removed in real-time from the OS.

#vmworld Ray O’Farrell and Kit Colbert and Cloud Native Applications

Cloud Native applications are the driver between digital transformation. The challenge is to deliver a single platform that can support in-house and cloud native applications. VMware is looking at two very different approaches; extending the existing vSphere platforms and introducing a brand new platforms. Ray introduces Kit Colbert to expand on this comments.

Kit starts with an argument that containers have the ability to rapidly evolve the development process, however it does not come without some management challenges. Kit starts with a demonstration of the deployment of several containers but highlights that these are transparent to the IT organization. The challenge is around partial visibility and security as it is hard to manage what you cannot see.

VMware vSphere integrated containers are introduced which make containers first-class citizens on vSphere. With vSphere Integrated Containers a micro hypervisor based on ESXi is used to enable visibility by delivering a virtual container host. From a VI admin perspective the containers are now visible within the vCenter management console. Kit extols the value as now all the lifecycle management tools built around vSphere work natively with containers.

Kit reintroduces Photon OS which provides the virtual container host as well as the instant Clone feature (this allows you to power-on a VM in less then 1 second). VMware refers to this as “Just enough Virtualization”

The second approach is a brand new platform which is focused on running a pure container environment. To deliver on this platform it must provide scalability, be API driven and be focused on containers and simple to run. Kit introduces the VMware Photon Platform which has been built API first as a scalable multi-tenant environment. This is a different stack form vSphere. The two components of the platform is the Photon machine. The Photon machine provides the micro-host hypervisor software for installing on the physical hardware. In addition a Photon Controller provides the API driven multi-tenant control plane.

vSphere integrated containers is targeted to customers running smaller developer shops. Photon Platform is designed for customers that have significant scale and need a fully optimized platform just for containers.

#vmworld #gs-mon Bill Fathers and Raghu Raghuram Cross-Cloud VMotion

Bill Fathers reminds the audience that VMware was all about hybrid cloud during VMworld 2014; but what exactly is it? Put practically, it is the combination of Private and Public Cloud to solve complex IT and business problems. Bill explains this using three examples DR, Application Scaling and Mobile Applications. Bill mentions quickly that SRM will be coming to vCloud Air before switching to an Application Scaling discussion. For application scaling to work seamlessly you need to look at your onsite and off-premise compute pools as one set of resources.

Bill runs through the challenge of mobile applications and securing and managing them across a hybrid platform. Bill introduces a new term, "Hybrid Applications" which are applications that span this hybrid platform. VMware believes they are ahead of the curve on considering this challenge. Bill introduces Reghu Raghuram and team who introduces the base components of the SDDC;vSphere, NSX, Virtual SAN and vRealize Suite.

They extend the discussion to EVO SDDC which was mentioned by Carl. EVO SDDC is a management solution that allows you to scale out the SDDC solution. This dramatically simplifies the deployment of the SDDC down to 2 hours vs. weeks of highly specialized resources. In addition it introduces lifecycle automation by allowing you to patch the software when updates occur.

A demo is keyed up showing the vSphere content library which allows you to sync templates between both the enterprise and vCloud Air. Once you complete an update within the content library in vSphere you switch to the vCloud Air portal and sync the template to the Cloud.

The last piece of the focus is on the networking; VMware introduces Hybrid Network Services which are based on NSX capabilities. This includes technologies such as VXLAN, Direct Connect, WAN Acceleration, Strong Encryption and Intelligent Routing make up VMware Hybrid Network Services.

The next demo shows a workload being VMotion'd from On-Premise vSphere to vCloud Air. You can do this from within the vCenter interface as vCloud Air has been added as a native target for VMotion. To reverse this process it is done again from within the vCenter interface through a wizard allowing you to migrate back. The Cross-Cloud vMotion capability is in tech preview at this moment. The secret sauce that enables this is VMware's Hybrid Network Services.

#vmworld #gs-mon VMworld Keynote 2015 Day 1

This years tagline is "Ready for Any"

Session begins with a video on looking after applications at the "Cloud Academy". Really a testimonial on the benefits of VMware's Hybrid approach over others. Carl Eschenbach (@carl_eschenbach) is introduced.

This year there are more than 23,000 attendees; a record for the event. In addition over 50,000 people are watching the event online. There are 6,000 VMUG members and 7,000 customers.

Carl explains the "Ready for Any" theme. In speaking to customers VMware recognizes the challenges for customers; go faster, drive productivity and become more agile and responsive. In addition customers need to curb costs and drive top line revenue growth. What if we could collectively deal with these challenges?

VMware wants to enable you to run a hybrid cloud platform, build and embrace traditional applications and containers, deliver any application from any device and last but not least, provide enhanced security. To do so we need to be able to accelerate security from the datacenter to the device.

Carl wants you to think of VMware as a platform; this platform has a south bound interface to run on any device and a north bound interface for integrating with any OS. VMware brings freedom, flexibility and choice within this platform.

VMware believes in One Cloud. This means that through VMware software you have seamless integration between enterprise, public or managed cloud. This is the idea of a Unified Cloud. Operations can now run as if they are managing one environment with the same toolset. For users the distinction between on and off premises is eliminated. A unified Cloud provides a common security layer such as NSX which spans enterprise cloud and federated models. In addition VMware strives to support any application which includes Cloud Native applications. The last piece of a unified vision is security to the device all the way through to the application.

Carl introduces the concept of the "Architecture for IT" which is unified hybrid cloud. This architecture can be built either "do-it-yourself", using converged or hyper converged infrastructure and managed by EVO SDDC.

Carl runs through the example of DirectTV leveraging VMware software to double capacity to meet demand and the introduces Ben Fathers and team.

virtualguru blogs the show!!!

VMworld 2015 brings together thought leaders, subject matter experts, and IT professionals to immerse themselves in the latest in virtualization and cloud technology. Attended by over 20,000 attendees from technical professionals to business decision-makers from organizations of all sizes, representing a wide range of industries.

 

This year, I am happy to be an official VMworld blogger for the 2015 event. Follow my updates on all the new announcements, exclusive interviews and technology updates released on http://virtualguru.org, twitter (@podoherty) and our rss feed.