#VMworld Architecting VSAN the VCDXway @simonlong_ & @rayheffer

Great Session presented by Simon Long and Ray Heffer. Before getting into VSAN you need to understand some basic terms:

1. FTT - Failures to Tolerate - How many hosts needed to tolerate failures
2. Flash Read Cache Reservation - SSD capacity reserved as read cache for the virtual machine object
3. Object Space Reservation - the reserve specified as a percentage of the total object address space
4. Failure Tolerance Method - can be set to either performance or capacity
5. Witness - ESXi host used for tie breaking
6. Sparse Swap - provisions VM without space reservation for VM swap

VSAN Objects are all files that make up a VM such as the VMDK and snapfile. When an object is deployed on VSAN it will have related items distributed across hosts. These related items are referred to as Components and are the building blocks of all Objects.

In addition you have SAN Disk Groups that are used to pool flash and magnetic disks. Disks groups are composed of 1 cache disk and at least 1 capacity disk.

VSAN supports View Storage Accelerator. View Storage Accelerator stores commonly used read blocks in DRAM on the ESXi hosts. The Minimum number of Hosts is for VSAN is 2 while the maximum is 64. 2 does not include the witness host. There is a branch architecture that can be done with a 2 host configuration with the witness located elsewhere. VSAN does not support SIOC, Storage DRS or SE Sparse Disk.

When integrating Horizon it will automatically create different VSAN Storage policies based on the Desktop Pool type deployed. If you manually change the Storage policies then a Refresh, Recompose or Rebalance will switch them back to the defaults.

There are 6 default VSAN Storage Policies such as Dedicated Linked Clone, Floating Full Clone, Replica and Persistent Disk that are created by Horizon. It is a good idea to change the FTT setting for the Replica Policy to 2. Is is also a good idea to create a Golden Master VM and Default SAN policy as well.

There is a good whitepaper on Horizon 7 on VSAN 6.2 All-Flash (http://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vsan/VMware-Horizon-7-on-VMware-Virtual-SAN-6.2-All-Flash.pdf).

When you are building out a Horizon environment it is important to understand the business requirements as well as the constraints. In addition use should look to remove all your Single Points of Failures "SPOF" in your design.

While you can deploy View on a Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster, you do have to be careful as the java connection service communication between Connection servers is not latency tolerant. It may be better to have separate View Pods using version Horizon 7 vs. a single Pod depending on the latency between datacenters.

 

 

 

 

#VMworld How to Deploy VMware NSX with CISCO Infrastructure

This session is presented by Ron Fuller @ccie5851 and Paul Mancuso @pmancuso

NSX has over 1700+ customers and growing. A few common usecases are micro-segmentation, remote access and IT automation. The sesison will focus on how to integrate Cisco Nexus/ACI and UCS environments. 

NSX provides a faithful reproduction of networking services and infrastructures in software. It is a distrubuted architecture so as you scale out compute you scale out capacity. In addition there is an Firewall component and an integrated API for automation.

NSX Manager is the centralized management plane. Three NSX controllers make up the control plane. In addition the distributed Logical Router "dLR" controls adjecency.

NSX requires three clusters; an infrastructure and management cluster, compute cluster and an Edge cluster. These can be rack servers or integrated UCS blades. On the Edge cluster we would deploy Edge services like the dLR.

We suggest in the logical segmentation of traffic; Management, vMotion, VXLAN and storage networks for standard virtualization. NSX introduces two new VLANs, a transit network for VXLANs and one for Software Bridging between the virtual and physical network. We recommend that the software bridiging is done on the Edge cluster.

In a standard configuration, you end up with 3 IP stacks; Management, VXLAN and the VMotion network. VMware's VXLAN is multicast free. You can use either unicast or a hybrid mode. This is done through L2 frame encapsulation and VXLAN Tunnel EndPoints of "VTEP's". 

VXLAN can be segregated by creating a Transport Zone which is a collection of VXLAN prepared ESXi clusters. Only 1 vDS per ESX cluster can be enabled for VXLAN. Note: if you are running NSX on those ESX clusters you do not need vSphere Enterprise to create a vDS. You get that capability through NSX licensing. Only the VMware vDS is supported so you cannot use Nexus framework.

NSX creates dvUplink port-groups for VXLAN enabled hosts. This uplink carries the VXLAN traffic. NSX Switching requires only two things: an MTU of 1600 and IP Connectivity. NSX is truely agnostic from an underlying switch perspective. 

It is easy to say configure MTU 1600 in your environment put it does take some planning to ensure it is configured on your Cisco framework. VXLAN encapsulation traffic is a 1600 UDP frame. All links belonging to fabric mut be enabled with Jumbo MTU. The risk is that if it is not configured properly you could black hole network traffic so ensure you plan accordingly.

When we look at common Cisco Datacenter Pod topologies, NSX is agnostic. It is important however for VXLAN transport that the VLAN is common between Cisco Pods. For UCS Blades VMware does have some tuning guides for both the B series and C series blades to help you properly tune for NSX\VXLAN traffic. In addition there are NSX Design Guides for the NSX and Cisco UCS and Nexus 9000 infrastructure.

#VMworld VMworld General Session Day 2

Sanjay Poonen @spoonen is introduced 

Sanjay wants to discuss the world going digital. For example Sanjay talks about his kid’s education being transformed through after-hours learning like https://www.khanacademy.org/ @khanacademy. Three years ago the end user computing industry was a small part of VMware's business and now it is a huge part of their portfolio.

If we think about the Apps today, there is approx. 50% of the world that is still client-server today. In addition some are web and the others are truly Mobile apps. We have brought this world together in Workspace One. This allows you to marry consumer simplicity with enterprise security.

Sanjay will cover how apps and identity work together as well as desktop and mobile and the underlying security principals. Sanjay transitions to a live demo of Workspace One. Research has shown that users pull their phone out of their pocket 90 times a day for approx. 100 seconds at a time. End User solutions have to provide value under those conditions.

The first thing that is show is single sign-on "SSO" providing simple access to all your business applications. Client-server, web and mobile apps are shown is a single pain of glass, In addition through the integration of boxer (the email application that was acquired by VMware). Integration is shown with AirWatch providing security across different storage repositories such as Google drive. In addition a swipe approval component was built into Workspace One. The integration of Horizon is shown by accessing a desktop through Workspace One.

Sanjay introduces Stephanie Buscemi @sbuscemi the Executive Vice President of Saleforce. Stephanie talks about the partnership with VMware and Saleforce One. Stephanie shows Salesforce wave and the ability to see how sales are doing over the quarter is, look at opportunities along with the opportunity data. In addition all the deal dynamics are available to move the deal forward on your mobile device. The SSO for Saleforce One is all provided through Workspace One.

Sanjay mentions that through the VMworld App you get a free license for VMware Workstation or Fusion. The VMware Horizon team has been innovating like crazy. Sanjay mentions the IBM Softlayer agreement enabling them to bring Desktop as a Service "DaaS" to more customers. According to IDC Horizon leads the market. AirWatch also leads both the IDC and Gartner magic quadrants.

VMware is building out an entire IoT platform that is on display on the show floor. Sanjay transitions to Windows 10 and Workspace One integration. Sanjay shows a demo where a user tries to copy sensitive data from O365 and pasting to twitter. Through Secure Conditional Access the cut and paste is prevented. Now conditional access is shown through the perspective of a user attempting to open data on a spreadsheet on a Horizon desktop. Through the application of NSX security policies the ability to access that data is removed demonstrating micro-segmentation. 

VMware Tanium TrustPoint ( http://www.vmware.com/radius/introducing-vmware-trustpoint-powered-tanium/ ) is demo'd onstage which enables human like queries to see live data in the environment. For example the demo looks for a specific MD5 hash running. The interface brings up every process in the environment that is running the hash. TrustPoint Trace is demo'd which provides deep analytics for what is happening in the environment on the endpoint. You can then look for anything malicious and see if it is running across the environment. Most organizations would take weeks to provide this information while VMware Tanium Trustpoint is doing it in seconds.

Ray O'Farrell @ray_ofarrell the CTO of VMware is introduced. Ray talks about Cloud-Native applications which is a fundamental shift in management frameworks. With a container strategy it is often confusing to understand who you are serving; developers, operations or the end users? The truth is that with Cloud-Native applications, it is all of them.

Kit Colbert @kitcolbert the CTO of the Cloud Platform Business Unit is introduced. Container usage is moving from the early adopters to the enterprise. The speed of containers makes the value evident for developers. From an IT perspective it is much more difficult to manage. Really since VMware does this with VMs it is easy to extend this approach to Containers. This is done through VMware Enterprise Container Platforms. 

vSphere Enterprise Containers are designed for customers that are running a mix of containers and VMs. Within vSphere there is a Docker compatible API. This was ok for the initial release but a Container registry and a developer based portal was required. These have now been integrated into vSphere Enterprise Containers. This is demo'd live onstage along with the ability to enable certain developers and deploy the container through the new portal. From a VM admin perspective all the containers are shown as individual VMs. 

The demo moves to the integration of the Service Composer using NSX security groups being applied to containers. The management of these containers are fully integrated to vRealize Operations Manager. The demo works up the vRealize Suite showing integration of container deployment through vRealize Automation. The Container management portal in vSphere Enterprise Containers is also built into vRealize Automation.

Kit switches gears to the Photon Platform. Photon Platform is geared towards the scaled-out enterprise container workload. The demands for speed and elasticity in these types of platforms are very complex problems to solve. The Photon Platform is open sourced like vSphere Enterprise Containers; a commercial offering called VMware-Pivotal Cloud Native Stack is also available. Kit reiterates that no matter where you are on the adoption of containers VMware has a solution. 

Rajiv Ramaswami the EVP/GM Networking and Security is introduced. The average cost of a data breach is $4 million dollars. With NSX micro-segmentation you can solve this problem by applying a per app firewall through policy. Using NSX your security is always on. 

Rajiv mentions that vRealize Network Insight is free to run an assessment to understand the current security profile of your organization. After an assessment, you need to install NSX. To simply the creation of policies, an early tech-preview is shown of the Micro-segmentation planner. The Micro-segmentation planner allows you to visualize and automatically create Security Policy rules. Once they are created you can push a button to apply these rules.

Yanbing Li @ybhighheels is introduced to talk about Virtual SAN. Virtual SAN is directly implemented as part of vSphere. It is Software Defined Storage. Since Virtual SAN launched they have grown to 5000 customers. VMware is adding 100 Virtual SAN customers a week. Virtual SAN is now becoming mainstream. 40% of the fortune 1000 companies have deployed Virtual SAN today. 64% of these customers are using Virtual SAN for business critical workloads. Several service providers are also looking at Virtual SAN such as IBM and OVH.com. 

An early tech-preview is shown of Virtual SAN capacity planning in which the analytics predict a performance problem is coming, leveraging vRealize Automation a policy is applied which moves the workloads to a 3rd party cloud (no info on how this was done under the covers, maybe Virtual SAN stretched cluster..).

Ray finishes with VMware Cloud Foundation which is a hyper-converged software platform for Private and Public Cloud. VMware's vision recognizes that you will have to deal with a multi-cloud environment with many types of applications from traditional, SaaS and cloud native delivered to any device.  Ray challenges the audience to learn the cross cloud products, engage with VMware and be a leader in this new era.

#VMworld VMworld General Session: Day 1

Theme for this year’s session is Be Tomorrow

Pat Gelsinger is introduced as the CEO

Pat challenges the audience to determine which way they will go in the future. VMware is helping customers and partners face forward to deal with the challenges in a digital world. Digital Transformation is the buzz word of 2016. Digital Transformation implies that it needs different management frameworks. VMware says nonsense to this as all business today is digital.

One of the important questions to ask with Digital Transformation is "Is it real?” Pat sites GE as being the only company still part of the Dow industrial average after 12 decades. This is because they are constantly innovating. The next company Pat mentions is CVS and their mobile application that helps track everything they do for the company and their customers.

IDC says that approx. 20% of business are leading in digital transformation. 8 of 10 however don't get it. Are the companies that are not moving forward leaning on their traditional IT methods? What VMware is building is transformational. 

In 2006 Amazon started their Cloud Platform. In 2006 98% where running in traditional IT. 2% where in Public Cloud which was largely salesforce. In 2011 7% of workloads where in Public Cloud with 6% in Private Cloud. In 2016 15% in Public and 12% in Private Cloud. In 2021 according to VMware data will be split 50/50.

When does Public Cloud exceed Private Cloud? The estimate is 2030. There is also a shift in where customers are running their workloads. Managed Cloud Services are growing by 18%. The dominant shift is customers Private Clouds running in someone else's datacenter.

Device proliferation is making end user devices a replacement market. But IoT is exploding and in 2019 it is expected that devices will exceed the number of human devices connected to the web. VMware believes that in this new world as Cloud takes route IT expands not decreases.

VMware and IDC looked at the industries that are embracing cloud such as the construction, professional services, securities, insurance and transportation industries. One major increase in the use of Cloud is through the business units in an organization. Business usage is increasing by through Shadow IT. In an average industry there are cloud, SaaS and mix personal of devices. IT is typically in charge of security in this environment. Ironically IT is responsible for everything but control very little. This sets up a struggle of freedom vs control.

VMware has been working on this through the SDDC. The datacenter will be software and programmable. NSX and Virtual SAN are in the rapid adoption phase "the tornado phase" described in the book "Crossing the Chasm".

VMware Announced today vCloud Air 0 downtime migration to their Cloud. But VMware is not stopping there. VMware Introduces the VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture. VMware Cloud Foundation is the name of this solution. This is not just new pricing and packaging, the foundation extends management and security to Public Cloud. The first partner in this model is IBM.

Robert Leblanc the Sr. VP of IBM is introduced. Robert mentions that they have 500 clients in the cloud with 50% growth month over month. In addition to providing software defined datacenters they also provide desktops as a service. IBM and Cloud Foundation provides the vRealize software as a service.

VMware Cloud Foundation provides visibility in both VMware and Non-VMware Private and Public Clouds. Guido Appenzeller the Chief Technology Strategy Office at VMware is introduced. Guido asks "is IT necessary with Public Cloud?” Even in an age with mega clouds IT is required but the way we manage is different. Citi Bank takes the stage to describe their cloud strategy. The challenge for the bank is can an automated self-service environment be hybrid, leverage commodity components and be secure?

How will the bank deal with the complexity of bursting to Cloud? One of the Banks challenges is automating in a standard way across different Cloud APIs. In addition security is absolute and has to function in a multi-jurisdictional and complaint manner.

Guido asks if VMware can VMotion and manage across multiple hardware providers, why not multiple Public Clouds? VMware Cloud Services is introduced and it will be delivered as a SaaS offering. The demo is started through the VMware Cloud Services management interface. Guido adds a developer users Public Cloud credentials. The tool then sucks up all the resources the user has been developing. Now we can see all the instances the user is running. We can now look at this by application. In the demo the tiers are exposed as well as the costs of the workloads. Guido opens up Security Services to look at the network traffic flow to see if it is secure. This looks to be an Arkin vRealize Network Insight integration.

Part of the suite is NSX; they switch back to VMware's Cloud Services interface. They then deploy the application with an NSX cloud gateway as part the application in the Amazon Public Cloud. The demo switches back to vRealize Network Insight "Security Services" to show that the insecure network traffic flow is now closed.

Guido reiterates that they have done micro-segmentation and secure policy in the Public Cloud. The demo now migrates the workloads between different geographies to different Public Cloud environments (Azure and AWS in the demo). Guido reiterates that they cloned and migrated different workloads across Public Clouds. This is an early tech preview at this time.

Pat returns to stage with Michael Dell who explains how Dells Converged Infrastructure approach is complementary to VMware's Private Cloud Strategy. Pat challenges everyone to take the time to learn these new technologies at the show.

What is new with vCloud Suite - Presented by Karthik Narayan and GS Khalsa

The vCloud Suite consists of many products; this session will only cover the major ones. The presenters start with a definition of what "vCloud Suite" is:

"It is an integrated offering based on SDDC architecture for managing a vSphere environment."

The main components are: vCAC, SRM, ITBM, and vCNS (NSX and virtual SAN can be used to extend the suite but are not a part at this time)

Karthik introduces the SDDC framework. The foundation is based around defining business and investment priorities leading to key infrastructure initiatives. It is based on certain IT outcomes such as standardized, streamlined, secure, resilient infrastructure as well as automated services. The benefit of the SDDC framework is driving savings, providing quality control and finally to deliver speed and agility.

What is new in the basic vSphere and vCenter stack is vCenter Support Assistant; it is a pluggin which alerts you before a problem, directs you to KB (knowledge base) and allows you to file a SR (support request) easily. It is targeted for administrators and managers to provide status and information on what is going on in the environment.

GS Khalsa is introduced to talk about vSphere Replication. vSphere replication is VMware's host based replication which means it does not require any special storage. The RPO is 15 minutes up to 24 hours. The configuration is very simple. It is included in essentials plus and higher licensing and is fully supported on virtual SAN. You can use it as an alternative or enhancement for backup or DR. There is no automation so a recovery is done on a VM by VM bases. Once you get beyond 10 - 15 VMs you probably want to look at SRM. In 5.5 you can replicate to a VMware Service Provider or vCloud Air. In addition with vSphere Replication you get improved reporting.

SRM is a DR orchestration solution. It will turn up and down VMs in a certain sequence and create a runbook for recovery. In addition SRM integrates with over 50 storage vendor products. Most customers use SRM to do disaster avoidance or a planned migration from one-site to another.

With SRM the test functionality you can create an exact copy that can be used for testing patching for example. In SRM 5.8 their is a vCAC\vCO workflow plugin. Allot of work has been done on scale and simplification. With the workflows in vCO, you can build SRM into a service blueprint. You can also use this outside of vCAC within the vSphere client.

In addition anything you can do with the vCO plugin you can also do with PowerCLI. SRM will protect 5000 VMs (formerly 1500) and will do concurrent recovery of 2000 VMs (from 1000). To accomplish this enhancements were done on vSphere and SRM. Batch commands are now sent for a protection group vs. one command at a time. SRM has been fully integrated into the vSphere Web Client. You can also now map entire subnets rather than individual addresses vs. mapping an IP to an individual VM or importing an excel spreadsheet. In addition SRM now has the option of an embedded vPostgres database which simplifies the installation.

VMware has also revised the documentation for the Cloud Suite so it is focused at the suite level addressing things like the order to install the products vs. treating each product individually.

VMworld General Session (Day 2) - Live from VMworld

Ben Fathi VMware's Chief Technology Officer takes the stage.   Ben reiterates Pat's message on a liquid world that requires a friction free IT system.  In todays session they will be delivering some demos of the product announcements yesterday.  Ben introduces Sanjay Poonen the Executive Vice President and General Manager, End-User Computing.  

Sanjay mentions that they have done 3 aquisitions.  Sanjay says the world is changing and sites the fact that their is more technology in todays automobile than in some of the original rocket ships.  VMware's mission is Secure Virtual Workspace for Work at the Speed of Life.  Sanjay is here to explain what VMware is doing in three key areas: Desktop, Mobile and Content.  In each category the software must be world class but tie into a SDDC architecture.  VMware is bringing the entire stack together.

Sanjay mentions that with Horizon 6 they delivered unified VDI and App Publishing on a single platform.  In addition they have launched DaaS using DeskTone and today are announcing Application as a Service from VMware vCloud Air.  He teases a CloudVolumes demo.  A video is shown of google chrome users leveraging View desktops on the NVIDIA grid to deliver a rich 3D user experience.

Sanjay introduces Kevin Ichhpurani the SVP from SAP to discuss the VMware and SAP partnership.  Kevin explains that mobility is key in their customer base.  Through the partnership SAP is integrating their APIs with VMware AirWatch to deliver seamless management.  The benefit for customers is with preintegrated solutions their is less TCO.  

Sanjay mentions United Airlines who is one of Apples largest iPad customers who are managing the devices through AirWatch for security.  Sanjay announces a new suite which is is modelled after the vCloud Suite.  Sanjay mentions that they have leap frogged the competition and are now number one according to the analysts. 

Sanjay introduces Kit Colbert (@kitcolbert) the CTO of End User Computing who is going to dive into some sample use cases.  Kit mentions healthcare and works through a day in the life of a doctor.  It begins with VMware workspace portal for using applications.  The doctor then moves to his iPad with no loss of applications.  Then the doctor leverages a View desktop for high resolution imaging and finally the secure content locker is used to transfer files through AirWatch.  The final piece is a demonstration of both doctors collaborating on the shared image.  In the end this is about more time to focus on treating patients.

Kit then shows a demo of CloudVolumes.  From within the CloudVolume Admin UI the user is entitled to an application enabling the application to integrate into a View desktop.  CloudVolumes leverages hypervisor technology to deliver the applications vs. streaming or pushing.  The old delivery methods are not very scalable.  Kit mentions project Fargo which clones a running virtual machine is about a second.  Project Fargo will be used to clone a virtual machine while CloudVolumes delivers the applications in seconds.  The desktop is then destroyed when the user logs out.  This really simplifies management and provides tremendous cost reduction along with better secure.  This wholestic approach to "just in time desktops" is under development and is called project meteor.

Sanjay summarizes with the value message which provides customers with a complete stack from SDDC to EUC.

Raghu Raghuram the Executive VP of the SDDC and Ben return to stage to demonstrate EVO:Rail.  EVO rail is a 2 U form factor built from 4 independant nodes runing compute, storage and networkinig (leveraging virtual SAN).  It can perform a rolling upgrade so that maintenance can be done in realtime. It can scale upto a 16 node cluster.  The web UI has been simplified but allows some customization.  The entire process to stand it up is 15 minutes.  

EVO Rack is the second member of this family and comes vCloud Suite, Virtual SAN and NSX.  It is built to be deployed within 2 hours.  It also includes rack management and 20% of the labs at vmworld are running on EVO Rack. 

Raghu mentions that VMware has put in a tremondous amount of effort in Openstack since joining the Openstack project.  Raghu believes that the best way to run Openstack is on VMware.  This will be a fully supported offering from VMware.  The benefit from an IT perspective is that you do not need new skills to run Openstack.

Raghu goes on to mention the vSphere 6 beta which will provide 4 vCPU support for FT.  In addition vSphere 6 will have cross vCenter vMotion or the ability to migrate VMs from one vCenter datacenter to a second vCenter datacenter.  In addition with long distance vMotion you can literally migrate a VM from coast-to-coast.  With NSX you can also ensure that none of the network properties change irrespective of the distance between networks.

Ben explains that VMware is working very hard to deliver "Containers without Compromise" by running them in VMs.  Ben makes the point that Containers on their own don't offer many management points however running them on VMs does.  VMware is working to make containers a first class citizen on their virtual infrastructure.  Ben announces that they are working with Pivotal, Google and docker to run containers on SDDC.

Raghu highlights the vRealize Suite which provides management of the SDDC.  You can sign up for the vRealize beta now.  

VMworld General Session - live from VMware

"The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond the limits"

Robin Matlock the Chief Marketing Officer takes the stage.  Over 22,000 attendees representing 85 countries around the world are in attendance. Robin explains that change is either a barrier or an opportunity.   This week is about pushing boundaries.  This week the SDDC will be covered indepth.  In addition Hybrid Cloud and End-User Computing will be a major focus.  

Robin introduces Pat Gelsinger Chief Executive Officer.  Pat mentions that he has been the CEO for two years now.  Pat describes a liquid world where static structure is giving way to the dynamic.  He uses the anology of education nolonger taking place in a classroom but extending to where you are.  Work, retail and all aspects life are becoming more fluid and dynamic.

He mentions serveral customers including the Ministry of Education in Malaysia pushing curriculum through the remote areas of Borneo using View and virtualization.  He mentions the advent of companies like Uber having a higher market capitilization than traditional brick and motor companies.

In this new world the brave will survive.  He sits several examples of bravery.  Pat mentions however that bravery is seldom a solo act.  When Pat talks about bravery he thinks about his team of engineers and software delivering the next generation of software.  Everyday Pat challenges this group of engineers to be disruptive for the benefit of VMwares customers.

Pat mentions that they are eating their own dog food at VMware, their internal ERP system is migrating to vCloud Air, in addition Airwatch will enable their own BYOD program at VMware.

Pat mentions Apollo Education Group who delivers university curriculum over the internet who have migrated from public to private cloud and reduced costs while improving services.  He all introduces Tim Garza from the California department of water resources who have become IT leaders using VMware software.

Pat explains that right now the discussion is locked in "or" i.e. on premise or off.  VMware believes that they can be the bridge between these two and deliver the "and" vs. "or" delivering on a hybrid cloud model.  VMware is executing on the SDDC, Hybrid Cloud and End-User computing.

The announcements around the products begin with a focus on vSphere.  Pat mentions that they are announcing vCloud Suite 5.8  and are in beta with vSphere 6.0 beta which adds increase scale.  In addition virtual san 2.0 beta is in the works.  In addition with vSphere 6.0 they are delivering virtual volumes.  He mentions that vCenter Operations Suite will be VMware vRealize Suite.

Pat mentions that their are 3 wasy to deliver SDDC 1) build your own, 2) Converged Infrastructure and now Hyper-converged infrastructure and VMware EVO. EVO is SDDC is packaged with hardware in a single solution delivered through VMware's OEM partners.  VMware EVO Rail is profiled. designed for SMB for deployment in 15 minutes based on a physical appliance that will run 100 VMs and sold in clusters of 4.  The second member of EVO is EVO rack which is designed to scale data centers in two hours.  Another component is that EVO will be part of the open compute project as well.

But why do infrastructure?  To deliver applications.  Pat announces VMware OpenStack which is a openstack and VMware integrated product that delivers VMware APIs and OpenStack APIs.  This enables OpenStack development native on VMware.

Pat then announces a common platform for all applications based on containers:  Docker, Google and Pivotal container constructs will be fully supported on VMware.  This will be done through the OpenContainer API.  They are demonstrating "VMware Fargo" which enables containers to be delivered on VMware with little or no overhead.

Pat then uses the anology of an egg which is hard and brittle on the outside and soft on the inside.  This is similar to way datacenters are designed.  This means that once breached you are vulnerable.  Pat explains that with NSX and SDDC micro segmentation is possible and is a fundamental shift in how security is applied.  Pat explains that VMware was positioned in the magic quadrant by Gartner of networking which is the first time a software company has appeared in this quadrant.

Pat shifts to EUC.  Pat explains the number of innovations and aquisitions including the recent aquisition of CloudVolumes.  In tomorrows session we will hear from Sanjay on how this vision is evolving. 

Pat then announces that vCHS is now vmware vCloud Air and a commitment to bring all their products to Air.  Pat then introduces Bill Fathers the Executvie Vice President and General Manager of Hybrid Cloud.  Bill says that they launched Air 1 year ago.  

vCloud Air is based on compatability with the enterprise.  If you do not have compatability then you get a very fragmented cloud.  But if you think about if from the perspective of the enterprise applications.  Like SAP and Oracles of the world it is very important for the infrastructure to be the same.  vCloud Air has a distinct advantage as you can easily meld the application with the pieces and data that live in the enterprise.  In addition, because this is the foundation you can quickly add value services ontop.  

Bill then annoounces, Devops as a Service, Database as a services (including DR), Object Storage or Cloud storage (based on EMC ViPR), Mobility Services (based on AirWatch) and Cloud Management (Based on VMware vRealize Suite).  In addition vCloud Air ondemand is highlighted based on true pay-as-you go service.  You can try the beta at http://vmware.com/go/ondemand

Pat concludes with a summation of the announcements and how VMware provides choice without compromise, opportunities to build the Hybrid Cloud of the future and the ability to connect users securely to the datacenter.  Pat then challenges the audience to go bravely into this new future and introduces Carl Eschenbach, President and Chief Operating Officer.

Carl explains that the current presures on IT trying to provide end user freedom while maintaining control is very high.  In order to enable transformation we need to take a different approach through software and automation.  We need to automate IT so that IT can thrive and support the business.  

Carl introduces Medtronic's vice presedent who explains that they leveraged the VMware Accelerate Consulting Services to transform their IT.  They have implemented the SDDC model to fully automate the server build process while maintaining their corporate standards.  In addition they are an AirWatch customer for enabling mobile device management.  The next phase for Medtronic is Hybrid Cloud through integration of NSX and vCloud Air.     

Carl then profiles MIT who is 99% virtualized and is looking to put openstack ontop of VMware.  MIT has also adopted NSX for network virtualization to provide a secure multi-tenant environment.  In addition some of the faculty is testing VMware Air.

The last guest, Ford Motor Company is introduced.  Ford has also adopted a SDDC model as well.  Carl wraps up with a video profile of the companies that have been part of the EVO Rail beta trail.  The theme was the time to value and lower overall cost of the solution.  

 

    

 

VMworld 2012: Cisco Virtual Networking and Security Announcement

CISCO has aggressively virtualized their product line which they refer to as the vStack. They have introduced new Nexus 1000v products at the show. These will be supported on Hyper-V and Opensource hypervisors like KVM. The products are:

ASA 1000v - a virtual Adaptive Security Appliance
Nexus CSR - a virtualized Nexus router
vWAAS - a virtual appliance for providing WAN acceleration
VSG - Virtual Security Gateway

CISCO is promoting VXLAN which allows you to overlay a layer 2 (L2) network over a layer 3 network (L3). CISCO developed the technology and shared it with their partners like VMware and Citrix. This made setting the standard easier as there was widespread support for VXLAN. It is based on providing a tunnel through the network so it requires gateways. This has some implications on the underlying network.

The L2 frame is encapsulated in UDP. It uses a 24-bit VXLAN identifier so it is possible to provide 16 million networks. The virtual machine is unaware that they are actually passing between L3 networks. It believes it is on the same L2 network.

VXLAN uses IP multicast to understand the network. The underlying physical hosts join multicast groups. Multicast groups can be shared for VXLANs so the networks (16 million) are not limited by the number of multicast groups. Packets are filtered to prevent sharing multicast groups from becoming similar to one large broadcast network (example: one multicast group being used for all potential 16 million networks). In addition learning is done by multicast but packets are sent by unicast.

On the physical switches you need to have IP Multicast turned on and Proxy ARP. From a Layer 2 perspective you have to turn on IGMP Snooping (the default on Cisco switches). You also need to ensure UDP port based load distribution is enabled.

In vCloud Director 5.1 the integration of Nexus 1000v is available natively in the GUI once you enable the feature.

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VMworld 2012: Steve Herrod, End User Keynote

Steve will introduce the new suites from VMware. The session will discuss how VMware has combined their products to solve key business problems with a focus on the end user space. Steve opens with a few buzz words to highlight growing trends in the consumerization of IT, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) or the IT of consumerization (which describes how technically savvy users are becoming).

Steve talks about how difficult these trends have made things for IT. The disparity in solutions has led to more tools and more point products. This complexity has led to cost increases.

Last year they talked about the transformation from legacy approach of IT into a new services approach. The second challenge that was alluded to is how you broker these new services and tailor them to a user vs a device.

Transformation has not really meant the death of the PC but the move to a multi-device environment. Gartner reports only 30% of business have migrated to Windows 7.

Steve reviews the release of View 5.1. View 5.1 has reduced the aquisition costs and improved the end user experience. Steve also mentions new products that are appliance based and allow you to build out desktops quickly. CISCO has a new device called the ISR G2 that allows you to deploy View in a branch and integrates a number of technology enhancements including VoIP.

Even with all the work done on View you still need to deal with the offline mode. Steve talks about Winova software and specifically the Mirage product. Mirage will decompose a desktop image into layers such as hardware OS, applications and user data. Once you have done this it enables you to quickly change out components of the stack. Mirage enables you to keep these Mirage desktop images synchronized when deployed to the end device. This allows you to keep these images current in near realtime. Mirage enables you to run the View desktop locally but trickle the changes back to the datacenter.

This keys up a demo that takes a user from Windows XP to 7 while online and using their laptop. A reboot completes the migration. The next scenario presented is when the laptop is 'stolen' access is enabled through a thin client to demonstrate that the virtual desktop follows the user. The final piece is the redeployment of the View desktop using Fusion to integrate it into a new Apple iOS laptop.

VMware also introduces the concept of User Interface Virtualization - to allow legacy apps to be tablet friendly. It takes apps and makes them work through gesture. The demo showed movement between applications using a album cover approach. The demo also showed clipboard functionality using gestures.

Now Steve moves to a discussion on brokers. Steve introduces the Horizon Suite. It can broker Applications, Data and Desktops. Project Octopus is integrated into the suite. Steve mentions that this can all be administered from a single place. The Alpha product is shown. When you login you get a dashboard of current use of all the pieces including traditional, thin and mobile applications. You can manage mobile Apps in addition to Web Applications, Thin Apps and low and behold Citrix. The Apple AppStore and Google Apps have also been integrated. Deployment is done through the completion of Class of Service policies. Applications can be self activated by the user provided the administrator allows it.

Steve now introduces Horizon mobile which manages a virtual container for your smart phone allowing personal and business segregation. Currently they support iPhone and Android. Horizon Apps are managed in a separate container on the mobile phone.


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