virtualguru.org @ VMworld 2014

Technorati Tags: #vmworld

Well it has been a busy couple of weeks at the show but it was a great event.  Stephane Asselin (@virtualstef) and I had a great time at our presentation during VMworld 2014. We had over 370 people attend in person; a special thanks to those who attended virtually. With well over 500 registered we had lots of great questions after. For those who missed it, the recording of our session “EUC1289 - What’s New in End User Computing: Full Desktop Automation and Self-Service” has been released on the VMworld website (http://www.vmworld.com).

Not only was our session well attended but we also had lots of support for our most recent publication “VMware Horizon Suite: Building End User Services”. 

We appreciate all the great feedback and many thanks to those of you who came out on the last day for the book signing. We had a great time working with Eric Sloof (@esloof) and the crew of VMworld TV for the “VMware Press Trivia Challenge Book Give Away Event”. 

If you missed our discussion and interview regarding the book then you can catch it here on VMworld TV. 

I managed to get out quite a few posts for those of you following the http://virtualguru.org blog but have more coming.  There was just so much information and so little time so stay tuned for additional information from the show.

vCloud Automation Center Overview and a Glimpse into the Future

Virtualization on its own will not deliver on the software defined enterprise. Management through automation is the catalyst that empowers the software defined datacenter.

Management automation accelerates your service delivery model to your customers. It also delivers improved operational efficiency, better resource utilization and reduced complexity and standardization. vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) amalgamated vCAC, vFabric Application Director and vCenter Orchestrator under a single framework. The new name for the suite is vRealize Suite (vCAC becomes vRealize Automaton, vCOPs becomes vRealize Operations and ITBM becomes vRealize Business).

Unifying these products delivers a common service catalog of applications, infrastructure, XaaS and Desktops. vCAC allows both single and multi-tenant deployments. Services are defined through blueprints which allow you to define infrastructure and layered application provisioning (leveraging Application Director). In addition through the vCO integration you can define service blueprints allowing you to define custom processes through either standard or customized workflows.

ITBM can be plugged into vCAC to auto-populate the cost profiles using standard and reference industry costs. ITBM also allows you to compare other public clouds costs to ensure your resources are efficiently deployed.

Moving forward with vCAC, VMware is investing in comprehensive infrastructure management to ensure they can manage many platforms (hypervisor, converged infrastructure and public cloud) without compromising IT policies. VMware has also placed a strong focus on automated release management to deliver a DevOps solution using the product. The target is to deliver anything as a service and deliver on the IT as a Broker concept.

From a vendor perspective, support is coming for IBM, HDS and Fujitsu servers. NSX integration will become more seamless. VMware will build enhancements on other hypervisors and Clouds such as AWS. These orchestration plugins will be certified by VMware so it is simple to hook them in and start automating.

One area of focus is to be able to switch from on-premise to off seamlessly. This will include synchronization of blueprints between Clouds. Blueprints will also be enhanced to provide infrastructure and applications authoring that is simple and straight forward. In addition the product will monitor drift protection and auto-remediate them (very Puppet like).

Work is being done to allow multiple catalog selections by the user that consolidates them using a single approval process ("similar to a shopping cart approach"). vCOPs will be more tightly integrated to allow you to look at resources and build in reclamation and right-sizing workflows through vCAC.

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.