#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.