DevSecOps with VMware Tanzu – Intrinsic Security for a Modern Application Supply Chain

DevSecOps with VMware Tanzu – Intrinsic Security for a Modern Application Supply Chain

Feb 17, 2022 | AWS, Azure, Carbon Black, Cloud Native Apps, Google Cloud, Networking, Observability, Tanzu, VMware Cloud

Intrinsic security is something we heard a lot in the past from VMware and it was mostly used to describe the strategy and capabilities behind the Carbon Black portfolio (EDR) that is complemented with the advanced threat prevention from NSX (NDR), that form together the VMware XDR vision.

I see similarities between intrinsic security and workout I am doing in the gym. My goal is to build more strength and power, and to become healthier in general. For additional muscle gain benefits and to be more time efficient, I have chosen compound exercises. I am not a fan of single muscle group exercises, which involve isolation exercises. Our body has a lot of joints for different movements, and I think it’s just natural if you use multiple muscle groups and joints during a specific exercise.

Therefore, when you perform compound exercises, you involve different muscles to complete the movement. This improves your intermuscular coordination of your muscles. In addition, as everyone would tell you, these exercises improve your core strength and they let your body become a single unit.

While doing weight training, it is very important to use the proper technique and equipment. Otherwise, the risk for injuries and vulnerabilities increases.

This is what intrinsic security means for me! And I think this is very much relevant to understand when talking about DevSecOps.

Understanding DevSecOps

For VMware, talking to developers and talking about DevOps started in 2019 when they presented VMware Tanzu the first time at VMworld. The ideas and innovation behind the name “Tanzu” should bring developers and IT operators closer together for collaboration.

DevOps is the combination of different practices, tools and philosophies that should help an organization to deliver applications and services at a higher pace. In the example above it would mean, that application developers and operations teams are not working isolated in silos anymore, they become one team, a single unit. But technology plays very important role to support the success of the new mindset and culture!

DevOps is about efficiency and the automation of manual tasks or processes. You want to become fast, flexible and efficient. When you put security in the center of this, then we start talking about DevSecOps. You want to know if one of your muscles or parts of the body become weak (defect) or vulnerable.

Tanzu DevSecOps Flow

Depending on where you are right now on this application modernization journey, doing DevSecOps could mean a huge cultural and fundamental change to how you develop applications and do IT operations.

For me, DevSecOps is not about bringing security tools together from different teams and technologies. If DevOps and DevSecOps mean that you must change your mindset, then it is maybe also about time to consider the importance of new technology choices.

If DevSecOps means that you put security in the center of a DevOps- or container-centric environment, then security must become an intrinsic part of a modern application supply chain.

The VMware Tanzu portfolio has a lot of products and services to bring developers, operations and security teams together.

Where do we start? We need to “shift left” and this means we need to integrate security already early in the application lifecycle.

Code – Spring Framework

Before you can deliver an application to your customer, you need to develop it, you need to code. Application frameworks are a very effective approach for developing more secure and optimized applications.

Frameworks help to write code faster and more efficient. Not only does a framework can save your developers a lot of coding effort, but it also comes with pre-defined templates. They incorporate best practices and help you simplifying the overall application architecture.

Why is this important? To achieve better security or a more secure cloud native application, it makes sense to standardize and automate. Automation is key for security. Standardization makes it easier to understand or reuse code. You can write all the code yourself, but the chances are high that someone else did parts of your work already. Less variability reduces complexity and therefore enhances security.

There is the open-source Spring Framework for example, which uses Java as the underlying language (or .NET for Steeltoe). Both projects are managed by VMware and millions of developers use them.

Tanzu Spring Steeltoe

What happens next? You would now run your continuous integration (CI) process (integration tests, unit tests) and then you are ready to package or build your application.

Build – Tanzu Build Service (TBS)

So, your code is now good for release. If you want to deploy your application to a Kubernetes environment, then you need a secure, portable and reproducible build that can be checked for security vulnerabilities, and you need an easy way to patch those vulnerabilities.

How are you going to build your container image where you application is going to be built into? A lot of customers and vendors have a dockerfile based approach.

VMware recommends Tanzu Build Service (TBS), which uses Tanzu Buildpacks that are based on the open-source Cloud Native Buildpacks CNCF project to turn application source code into container images. So, no dockerfiles.

TBS is constantly looking for changes in your source code and then automatically builds an image based on that. This means with TBS you don’t need any advanced knowledge of container packaging formats or know how to optimally construct a container creation script for a given programming language.

Tanzu Build Service knows all the images you have built and understands all the dependencies and components you have used. If something changes, your image is going to be rebuilt automatically and then stored in a registry of your choice. More about the registry in a second.

Tanzu Build Service

What happens if a vulnerability comes out and one of your libraries, operating systems or components is affected? TBS would patch this vulnerability and all the affected downstream container images would be updated automatically.

Imagine how happy your CISO would be about this way of building secure container images! 🙂

Build – Harbor

We have now pushed our container image to a container repository, a so-called registry. VMware uses Harbor (open-source cloud native registry by VMware, donated to the CNCF in 2018) as an enterprise-grade storage for container images. Additionally, Harbor provides static analysis of vulnerabilities in images through open-source projects like Trivy and Clair.

Tanzu Build Service Harbor

We have now developed our applications and stored our packaged images in our Harbor registry. What else do we need?

Build – VMware Application Catalog (VAC)

Developers are not going to build everything by themselves. Other services like databases or caching are needed to build the application as well and there are so many known and pre-packaged open-source software freely available online. This brings additional security risks and provides malicious actors to publish container images that contain vulnerabilities.

How can you mitigate this risk and reduce the chance for a critical application outage or breach?

In 2019, VMware acquired Bitnami, which delivers and maintains a catalog of 130+ pre-packaged and ready-to-use open-source application components, that are “continuously maintained and verifiably tested for use in production environments”.

Known as VMware Application Catalog (VAC, formerly also known as Tanzu Application Catalog), VAC as a SaaS offering provides your organization a customizable private collection of open-source software and services, that can automatically be placed in your private container image registry. In this case in your Harbor registry.

Example apps that are supported today:

Language Runtimes Databases App Components Developer Tools Business Apps
Nodejs MySQL Kafka Artifactory WordPress
Python PostgreSQL RabbitMQ Jenkins Drupal
Ruby MariaDB TensorFlow Redmine Magento
Java MongoDB ElasticSearch Harbor Moodle

How does it work?

VMware Application Catalog - How it works

There are two product features that I would like to highlight:

  • Build-time CVE scan reports for container images using Trivy
  • Build-time Antivirus scans for container images using ClamAV

Your application, built by Tanzu Build Service and VMware Application Catalog, is complete now, and stored in your Harbor registry. And since you use VAC, you also have your “marketplace” of applications, that is curated by a (security) team in your organization. 

If you want to see VAC in action, have a look at this Youtube video.

Note: Yes, VAC is a SaaS hosted application and you may have concerns because you are a public/federal customer. That’s no problem. Consider VAC as your trusted source where you can copy things from. There is no data stored in the public cloud nor does it run anything up there. Download your packages from this trusted repository over to you air gapped environment.

Run – Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG)

Your application is ready to be deployed and the next step is in your pipeline is “continuous deployment“. We finally can deploy our applications to a Kubernetes cluster.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid or TKG is VMware’s own consistent and conformant Kubernetes distribution that can run in any cloud. VMware’s strategy is about running the same Kubernetes dial tone across data centers and public cloud, which enables a consistent and secure experience for your developers.

TKG has a tight integration with vSphere called “vSphere with Tanzu”. Since TKG is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes for a multi-cloud infrastructure, it can run also in all major public clouds.

If consistent automation is important to you and you want to run Kubernetes in an air gapped environment, where there is no AWS, Azure or any other major public cloud provider, then a consistent Kubernetes version like TKG would add value to your infrastructure.

Manage/Operate – Tanzu Mission Control (TMC)

How do we manage these applications on any Kubernetes cluster (VMware TKG, Amazon EKS, Microsoft AKS, Google GKE), that can run in any cloud?

Some organizations started with TKG and others already started with managed Kubernetes offerings like EKS, AKS or GKE. That’s not a problem. The question here is how you deploy, manage, operate, and secure all these different clusters.

VMware’s solution for that is Tanzu Mission Control, which is also a SaaS-based tool hosted by VMware, that is the first offering I’m going to cover, that is part of a global Tanzu control plane. TMC is a solution that makes your multi-cloud and multi-cluster Kubernetes management much easier.

With TMC you’ll get:

  • Centralized Cluster Lifecycle Management. TMC enables automated provisioning and lifecycle management of TKG cluster across any cloud. It provides centralized provision, scaling, upgrading and deletion functions for your Kubernetes clusters. Tanzu Mission Control also allows you to attach any CNCF-conformant Kubernetes cluster (K8s on-prem, K8s in public cloud, TKG, EKS, AKS, GKE, OpenShift) to the platform for management, visibility, and analytic purposes. I would expect that we can use TMC in the future to lifecycle managed offerings like EKS, AKS or GKE.
  • Centralized Policy Management. TMC has a very powerful policy engine to apply consistent policies across clusters and clouds. You can create security, access, network, quota, registry, and custom policies (Open Policy Agent framework).
  • Identity and Access Management. Another important feature you don’t want to miss with DevSecOps in mind is centralized authentication and authorization, and identity federation from multiple sources like AD, LDAP and SAML. Make sure you give the right people or project teams the right access to the right resources.
  • Cluster Inspection. There are to inspection that you can run against your Kubernetes clusters. TMC leverages the built-in open-source project Sonobuoy that makes sure your cluster are configured in a conformant way with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) standards. Tanzu Mission Control provides CIS Benchmark inspection as another option.

Tanzu Mission Control

Tanzu Mission Control integrates with other Tanzu products like Tanzu Observability and Tanzu Service Mesh, which I’m covering later.

Connect – Antrea

VMware Tanzu uses Antrea as the default container network interface (CNI) and Kubernetes NetworkPolicy to provide network connectivity and security for your pods. Antrea is an open-source project with active contributors from Intel, Nvidia/Mellanox and VMware, and it supports multiple operating systems and managed Kubernetes offerings like EKS, AKS or GKE!

Antrea uses Open vSwitch (OvS) as the networking data plane in every Kubernetes node. OvS is a high performance and programmable virtual switch that not only supports Linux, but also Windows. VMware is working on the achievement to reach feature parity between them, and they are even working on the support for ARM hosts in addition to x86 hosts.

Antrea creates overlay networks using VXLAN or Geneve for encapsulation and encrypts node-to-node communication if needed.

Connect & Secure – NSX Advanced Load Balancer

Ingress is a very important component of Kubernetes and let’s you configure how an application can or should be accessed. It is a set of routing rules that describe how traffic is routed to an application inside of a Kubernetes cluster. So, getting an application up and running is only the half side of the story. The application still needs a way for users to access it. If you would like to know more about “ingress”, I can recommend this short introduction video.

While a project like Contour is a great open-source project, VMware recommends Avi (aka NSX Advanced Load Balancer) provides much more enterprise-grade features like L4 load balancing, L7 ingress, security/WAF, GSLB and analytics. If stability, enterprise support, resiliency, automation, elasticity, and analytics are important to you, then Avi Enterprise, a true software-defined multi-cloud application delivery controller, is definitely the better fit.

 

Secure – Tanzu Service Mesh (TSM)

Let’s take a step back and recap what we have achieve until here. We have a standardized and automated application supply chain, with signed container images, that can be deployed in any conformant Kubernetes cluster. We can also access the application from outside and pod-to-pod communication, so that applications can talk to each other. So far so far good.

Is there maybe another way to stitch these services together or “offload” security from the containers? What if I have microservices or applications running in different clouds, that need to securely communicate with each other?

A lot of vendors including VMware realized that the network is the fabric that brings microservices together, which in the end form the application. With modernized or partially modernized apps, different Kubernetes offerings and a multi-cloud environment, we will find the reality of hybrid applications which sometimes run in multiple clouds.

This is the moment when you need to think about the connectivity and communication between your app’s microservices. Today, many Kubernetes users do that by implementing a service mesh and Istio is most probably the most used open-source project platform for that.

The thing with service mesh is, while everyone thinks it sounds great, that there are new challenges that service mesh brings by itself. The installation and configuration of Istio is not that easy and it takes time. Besides that, Istio is also typically tied to a single Kubernetes cluster and therefore Istio data plane – and organizations usually prefer to keep their Kubernetes clusters independent from each other. This leaves us with security and policies tied to a Kubernetes cluster or cloud vendor, which leaves us with silos.

Tanzu Service Mesh, built on VMware NSX, is an offering that delivers an enterprise-grade service mesh, built on top of a VMware-administrated Istio version.

The big difference and the value that comes with Tanzu Service Mesh (TSM) is its ability to support cross-cluster and cross-cloud use cases via Global Namespaces.

Global Namespaces

A Global Namespace is a unique concept in Tanzu Service Mesh and connects resources and workloads that form the application into a virtual unit. Each GNS is an isolated domain that provides automatic service discovery and manages the following functions that are port of it, no matter where they are located:

  • Identity. Each global namespace has its own certificate authority (CA) that provisions identities for the resources inside that global namespace
  • Discovery (DNS). The global namespace controls how one resource can locate another and provides a registry.
  • Connectivity. The global namespace defines how communication can be established between resources and how traffic within the global namespace and external to the global namespace is routed between resources.
  • Security. The global namespace manages security for its resources. In particular, the global namespace can enforce that all traffic between the resources is encrypted using Mutual Transport Layer Security authentication (mTLS).
  • Observability. Tanzu Service Mesh aggregates telemetry data, such as metrics for services, clusters, and nodes, inside the global namespace.

Monitor – Tanzu Observability (TO)

Another important part of DevSecOps with VMware Tanzu is observability. What happens if something goes wrong? What are you doing when an application is not working anymore as expected? How do you troubleshoot a distributed application, split in microservices, that potentially runs in multiple clouds?

Image an application split into different smaller services, that are running in a pod, which could be running in a virtual machine on a specific host in your on-premises datacenter, at the edge, or somewhere in the public cloud.

You need a tool that supports the architecture of a modern application. You need a solution that understands and visualizes cloud native applications.

That’s when VMware suggests Tanzu Observability to provide you observability and deep visibility across your DevSecOps environment.

Tanzu Observability

Tanzu Observability has an integration with Tanzu Mission Control, which has the capability then to install the Wavefront Kubernetes collector on your Kubernetes clusters. The name “Wavefront” comes from the company Wavefront, which VMware acquired in 2017.

Since Tanzu Observability is only offered as a SaaS version, I would like to highlight that it is “secure by design” according to VMware:

  • Isolation of customer data
  • User & Service Account Authentication (SSO, LDAP, SAML)
  • RBAC & Authorization
  • Data encryption at rest and in transit
  • Data at rest is managed by AWS S3 (protected by KMS)
  • Certifications like ISO 27001/27017/27018 or SOC 2 Type 1

Summary – Tanzu Portfolio Capabilities

The container build and deploy process consists of the Spring runtime, Tanzu Application Catalog and Tanzu Build Service.

The global control plane (SaaS) is formed by Tanzu Mission Control, Tanzu Service Mesh and Tanzu Observability.

The networking layer consists of NSX Advanced Load Balancer for ingress & load balancing and uses Antrea for container networking.

The foundation of this architecture is built on VMware’s Kubernetes runtime called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.

Tanzu Advanced Capabilities

Note: There are other components like Application Transformer or Tanzu SQL (part of Tanzu Data Services), which I haven’t covered in this article.

Secure – Carbon Black Cloud Container

Another solution that might be of interest for you is Carbon Black Container. CB Container also provide visibility and control that DevSecOps team need to secure Kubernetes clusters and the application the deploy on top of them.

This solution provides container vulnerability & risk dashboard, image scanning, compliance policy scanning, CI/CD integration, integration with Harbor and supports any upstream Kubernetes like TKG, EKS, AKS, GKE or OpenShift.

Conclusion

DevSecOps with VMware Tanzu helps you to simplify and secure the whole container and application lifecycle. VMware has made some strategic acquisitions (Heptio, Pivotal, Bitnami, Wavefront, Octarine, Avi Networks, Carbon Black) in the past to become a major player the world of containerization, Kubernetes and application modernization.

I personally believe that VMware’s approach and Tanzu portfolio have a very strong position in the market. Their modular approach and the inclusion of open-source projects is a big differentiator. Tanzu is not just about Kubernetes, it’s about building, securing and managing the applications.

If you have a strong security focus, VMware can cover all the layers up from the hypervisor to the applications that can be deployed in any cloud. That’s the strength and unique value of VMware: A complete and diverse portfolio with products, that provide even more value when combined together.

Don’t forget, that VMware is number 1 when it comes to data center infrastructures and most of the customer workloads are still running on-premises. That’s why I believe that VMware and their Tanzu portfolio are very well positioned.

In case you missed it the announcements a few weeks ago, check out  Tanzu Application Platform and Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations that meet the needs of all those who are concerned with DevSecOps!

And if you would like to know more about VMware Tanzu in general, have a look at my “10 Things You Didn’t Know About VMware Tanzu” article.

 

VMware Cloud on AWS – The Power of VMware and AWS

VMware Cloud on AWS – The Power of VMware and AWS

Feb 4, 2022 | AWS, Carbon Black, Edge Computing, HCX, Horizon, NSX, Tanzu, VCPP, VMC, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN, vSphere

VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS) brings VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) stack to the AWS cloud. By using the same vSphere-based virtualization/cloud technology on-premises and in the public cloud, you can create a true hybrid cloud architecture, that enables you to get consistent operations by using consistent infrastructure.

VMC on AWS Overview

This solution comes with optimized access to the AWS services and is delivered, sold and supported by VMware, AWS and their partner networks.

As you can see above, VMC on AWS comes with the same VMware tools and integrates the VMware Cloud Foundation stack (vSphere for compute, vSAN for storage, NSX for networking) along with vCenter for management.

VMware Cloud on AWS runs on dedicated Amazon EC2 bare-metal infrastructure.

Instance Types

VMware Cloud on AWS comes with two different host configurations, which both require a minimum of two hosts per cluster.

VMC on AWS Instances

For identifying the right host types for specific use cases, check out the VMware Cloud on AWS sizer.

Note: 99.9% SLA for non-stretched clusters, 99.99% for stretched clusters

Single Host Starter Configuration

VMC on AWS allows you to deploy a starter configuration with a single host only (not available with i3en.metal hosts).

This small SDDC configuration allows customers to get their first experiences with this hybrid cloud offering during a 60-day time period. Such a setup is only appropriate for test and development or proof of concept use cases. You can run production workloads on this small VMC on AWS environment if you scale up to the minimum of two hosts before the 60-day period ends, otherwise your evaluation ends with you losing data.

Note: Not all features of the standard VMC service offering are available in this limited setting. The VMC on AWS service level offering also does not apply to this one-node offering.

Included VMware Software

The following software is included in single host and production configurations:

Single Hosts (non-production environments) Production (minimum 2 hosts)

Includes

  • VMware SDDC software: vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T, vCenter Server
  • VMware HCX
  • Dedicated Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances
  • VMware Global Support

Purchase separately

  • VMware Site Recovery
  • VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery
  • VMware vRealize Automation Cloud
  • VMware vRealize Operations Cloud
  • VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud
  • VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud
  • VMware Tanzu Standard

Not supported

  • Lifecycle management by VMware (updates, patches and upgrades)
  • High Availability (HA) and Stretched Clusters
  • Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Includes

  • VMware SDDC software: vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T, vCenter Server
  • VMware HCX
  • VMware Tanzu Services: TKG Service + TMC Essentials
  • Dedicated Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances
  • VMware Global Support
  • Lifecycle management by VMware (updates, patches and upgrades)
  • Support for High Availability (HA) and Stretched Clusters
  • Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Purchase separately

  • VMware Site Recovery
  • VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery
  • VMware NSX Advanced Firewall
  • VMware vRealize Automation Cloud
  • VMware vRealize Operations Cloud
  • VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud
  • VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud
  • VMware Tanzu Standard

VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts

If you want to get the agility and innovation of (VMware) Cloud in your own data center, delivered as a service, then VMC on AWS Outposts is for you.

VMC on AWS Outposts is a fully managed on-premises as-a-service offering, that stretches VMC on AWS to your data center or edge location. You’ll get dedicated Amazon Nitro-based EC2 bare-metal instances delivered on-premises with VMware Cloud Foundation running on top.

VMC on AWS Outposts

What’s included in the offering?

  • AWS Outposts 42u rack (we can also expect a half-rack offering in the future)
    • 3-8 hosts configurations based on i3en.metal
    • Dark host capacity included (for remediation, EDRS, scale-out and lifecycle management purposes)
    • Installed by AWS
  • AWS managed dedicated Nitro-based i3en.metal EC2 instance with local SSD storage
  • VMware managed SDDC software – vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T, vCenter Server
  • VMware HCX
  • VMware Cloud Console
  • Support by VMware SREs
  • Supply chain, shipment logistics and onsite installation by AWS
  • Ongoing hardware monitoring with break/fix support.

Use Cases

VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts is made for multiple use cases:

  • Data/App Locality
  • Low latency
  • Local data processing
  • Data sovereignty/compliance
  • Infrastructure modernization
  • Branche Office or large edge modernization

But this offering and VMC on AWS in general come with multiple other use cases which help orgnaizations to fulfill their cloud strategy.

App Modernization

VMware Cloud on AWS provides an infrastructure platform option for customers to modernize their existing enterprise applications on and enables them to run their enterprise workloads of today and tomorrow. With VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can run, monitor, and manage their Kubernetes clusters and virtual machines – all on the same infrastructure. VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid provides a consistent, upstream-compatible distribution of Kubernetes, that is tested, signed, and supported by VMware. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is central to many of the offerings in the VMware Tanzu portfolio.

Solution Brief

Cloud Migration / Data Center Extension

VMC on AWS can help customers to expand to new locations. Maybe it’s an unplanned project or there are temporary or seasonal capacity needs. Some customers are also using such an offering to build a flexible test, lab or training environment in the public cloud.

Solution Brief

Cloud VDI

Adopt a robust, feature-rich cloud platform for virtual desktops and applications that can be used to deliver complete VDI infrastructure from the cloud. Or you can extend an existing on-premises VDI environment for desktop bursting, protection or proximity to applications running in AWS. Optimize infrastructure costs with flexible, consumption-based billing while paying only for what you use.

Solution Brief

Disaster Recovery

Another typical use case is disaster recovery. Customers are looking for an offsite approach with which they can prepare themselves for different kind of scenarios with “warm standby” or “active/active” configurations. There are different architectural options and also different solutions from VMware available, e.g.:

Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX)

How can you bridge the gap between on-premises data centers and VMC on AWS to enable application migrations or workload mobility? HCX creates an encrypted, high-throughput, WAN-optimized, load-balanced, traffic-engineered hybrid interconnect automates the creation of network extensions.

In short: VMware HCX can interconnect different vSphere-based clouds and with that you achieve a fabric for workload mobility by using vMotion over different clouds. It even preserves existing network connections!

Imagine how much easier and faster application migrations can be done now.

Let’s see if there is a future, that customers need full workload mobility where regular migrations from and to different clouds can be done. Maybe there is a customer, who migrates workloads today from on-prem to VMC on AWS, tomorrow to Azure VMware Solution, the next week to Google Cloud VMware Engine, and in the end back to an on-premises data center where another fully managed service like VMC on Dell EMC is deployed. 😀

VMware Cloud on AWS with Tanzu Services

It was mentioned above already, VMware Cloud on AWS includes “Tanzu Kubernetes Service” and “Tanzu Mission Control Essentials”.

VMware Cloud with Tanzu Services has been introduced at VMworld 2021 as the “Easy path to enterprise-grade Kubernetes on a fully managed, multi-cloud ready IaaS and CaaS platform”:

VMware Cloud with Tanzu Services

 

This was also when Tanzu Services became available for VMC on AWS with the following capabilities:

  • Managed Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service: Provision Tanzu Kubernetes clusters within a few minutes using a simple, fast, and self-service experience in the VMware Cloud console. The underlying SDDC infrastructure and capacity required for Kubernetes workloads is fully managed by VMware. Use vCenter Server for managing Kubernetes workloads by deploying Kubernetes clusters, provisioning role-based access and allocating capacity for Developer teams. Manage multiple TKG clusters as namespaces with observability, troubleshooting and resiliency in vCenter Server.
  • Built in support for Tanzu Mission Control Essentials: Attach upstream compliant Kubernetes clusters including Amazon EKS and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters. Manage lifecycle for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters and centralize platform operations for Kubernetes clusters using the Kubernetes management plane offered by Tanzu Mission Control. Tanzu Mission Control provides a global visibility across clusters and clouds and increases security and governance by automating operational tasks such as access and security management at scale.

VMware Cloud with Tanzu Services

Take a look at the VMware Tanzu Mission Control Feature Comparison Chart to better understand the feature set of TMC Essentials.

Did you know that the Tanzu Mission Control Standard Package is included with TMC Essentials?

As of November 2021, new clusters registered with TMC will have the Carvel package manager (the kapp-controller), deployed within the cluster. The “Catalog” page in the Tanzu Mission Control console allows you to view packages available from the Tanzu Standard repository (and your own custom Carvel package repositories) and install them in your Kubernetes clusters.

Tanzu Mission Control Packages

Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu for VMC on AWS

VMware announced the tech preview for Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu for VMware Cloud on AWS in September 2021.

Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu is a tool that aids organizations in discovering application types, visualizing application topology, choosing a modernization approach based on scores, and containerizing and migrating suitable legacy applications to enhance business outcomes. As an agentless tool, Application Transformer for Tanzu utilizes the VMware vCenter API to introspect VMs across an entire vSphere or VMware Cloud on AWS-based data center.

Application Transformer can help you to convert virtual machines and application components to OCI-compliant container images, that then can be deployed into the Tanzu Kubernetes stack.

There are several ways how customers get access to Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu:

Good news for everyone is that Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu became generally available in February 2022. With this, VMware Cloud on AWS customers also have limited access to this offering from now on. The access is through integration with VMware Cloud console. If customers desire full access to Application Transformer, they need to buy Tanzu Standard, Tanzu Advanced, Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, or App Navigator.

Features & Roadmap

VMware provides a lot of information about the features and roadmap of VMware Cloud on AWS.

VMC on AWS FAQ

There is a large collection of FAQs available that can be found here.

A Universal License and Technology to Build a Flexible Multi-Cloud

A Universal License and Technology to Build a Flexible Multi-Cloud

Jan 25, 2022 | AWS, Edge Computing, Google Cloud, NSX, Tanzu, VMC, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN, vSphere

In November 2020 I wrote an article called “VMware Cloud Foundation And The Cloud Management Platform Simply Explained“. That piece was focused on the “why” and “when” VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) makes sense for your organization. It also includes business values and hints that VCF is more than just about technology. Cloud Foundation is one of the most important drivers and THE enabler for to fulfill VMware’s multi-cloud strategy.

If you are not familiar enough with VMware’s multi-cloud strategy, then please have a look at my article “VMware Multi-Cloud and Hyperscale Computing” first.

To summarize the two above mentioned articles, one can say, that VMware Cloud Foundation is a software-defined data center (SDDC) that can run in any cloud. In “any cloud” means that VCF can also be consumed as a service through other cloud provider partners like:

Additionally, Cloud Foundation and the whole SDDC can be consumed as a managed offering called DCaaS or LCaaS (Data Center / Local Cloud as a service).

Let’s say a customer is convinced that a “VCF everywhere” approach is right for them and starts building up private and public clouds based on VMware’s technologies. This means that VMware Cloud Foundation now runs in their private and public cloud.

Note: This doesn’t mean that the customer cannot use native public cloud workloads and services anymore. They can simply co-exist.

The customer is at a point now where they have achieved a consistent infrastructure. What’s up next? The next logical step is to use the same automation, management and security consoles to achieve consistent operations.

A traditional VMware customer goes for the vRealize Suite now, because they would need vRealize Automation (vRA) for automation and vRealize Operations (vROps) to monitor the infrastructure.

The next topic in this customer’s journey would be application modernization, which includes topics containerization and Kubernetes. VMware’s answer for this is the Tanzu portfolio. For the sake of this example let’s go with “Tanzu Standard”, which is one of four editions available in the Tanzu portfolio (aka VMware Tanzu).

VMware Cloud Foundation

Let’s have a look at the customer’s bill of materials so far:

  • VMware Cloud Foundation on-premises (vSphere, vSAN, NSX)
  • VMware Cloud on AWS
  • VMware Cloud on Dell EMC (locally managed VCF service for special edge use cases)
  • vRealize Automation
  • vRealize Operations
  • Tanzu Standard (includes Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Tanzu Mission Control)

Looking at this list above, we see that their infrastructure is equipped with three different VMware Cloud Foundation flavours (on-prem, hyperscaler managed, locally managed) complemented by products of the vRealize Suite and the Tanzu portfolio.

This infrastructure with its different technologies, components and licenses has been built up over the past few years. But organizations are nowadays asking for more flexibility than ever. By flexibility I mean license portability and a subscription model.

VMware Cloud Universal

On 31st March 2021 VMware introduced VMware Cloud Universal (VMCU). VMCU is the answer to make the customer’s life easier, because it gives you the choice and flexibility in which clouds you want to run your infrastructure and consume VMware Cloud offerings as needed. It even allows you to convert existing on-premises VCF licenses to a VCF-subscription license.

The VMCU program includes the following technologies and licenses:

  • VMware Cloud Foundation Subscription
  • VMware Cloud on AWS
  • Google Cloud VMware Engine
  • Azure VMware Solution
  • VMware Cloud on Dell EMC
  • vRealize Cloud Universal Enterprise Plus
  • Tanzu Standard Edition
  • VMware Success 360 (S360 is required with VMCU)

VMware Cloud Console

As Kit Kolbert, CTO VMware, said, “the idea is that VMware Cloud is everywhere that you want your applications to be”.

The VMware Cloud Console gives you view into all those different locations. You can quickly see what’s going on with a specific site or cloud landing zone, what its overall utilization looks like or if issues occur.

The Cloud Console has a seamless integration with vROps, which also helps you regarding capacity forecasting and (future) requirements (e.g., do I have enough capacity to meet my future demand?).

VMware Cloud Console

In short, it’s the central multi-cloud console to manage your global VMware Cloud environment.

vRealize Cloud Universal

What is part of vRealize Cloud Universal (vRCU) Enterprise Plus? vRCU is a SaaS management suite that combines on-premises and SaaS capabilities for automation, operations, log analytics and network visibility into a single offering. In other words, you get to decide where you want to deploy your management and operations tools. vRealize Cloud Universal comes in four editions and in VMCU you have the vRCU Enterprise Plus edition included with the following components:

vRealize Cloud Universal Editions

    Note: While vRCU standard, advanced and enterprise are sold as standalone editions today, the enterprise plus edition is only sold with VMCU (and as add-on to VMC on AWS).

    vRealize AI Cloud

    Have you ever heard of Project Magna? It is something that was announced at VMworld 2019, that provides adaptive optimization and a self-tuning engine for your data center. It was Pat Gelsinger who envisioned a so-called “self-driving data center”. Intelligence-driven data center might haven been a better term since Project Magna leverages artificial intelligence by using reinforcement learning, which combs through your data and runs thousands of scenarios that searches for the best regard output based on trial and error on the Magna SaaS analytics engine.

    The first instantiation began with vSAN (today also known as vRAI Cloud vSAN Optimizer), where Magna will collect data, learn from it, and make decisions that will automatically self-tune your infrastructure to drive greater performance and efficiencies.

    Today, this SaaS service is called vRealize AI Cloud.

    vRealize AI Cloud vSAN vRealize AI (vRAI) learns about your operating environments, application demands and adapts to changing dynamics, ensuring optimization per stated KPI. vRAI Cloud is only available on vRealize Operations Cloud via the vRealize Cloud Universal subscription.

    VMware Skyline

    VMware Skyline as a support service that automatically collects, aggregates, and analyzes product usage data, which proactively identifies potential problems and helps the VMware support engineers to improve the resolution time. Skyline is included in vRealize Cloud Universal because it just makes sense. A lot of customers have asked for unifying the self-service experience between Skyline and vRealize Operations Cloud. And many customers are using Skyline and vROps side by side today.

    Users can now be proactive and perform troubleshooting in a single SaaS workflow. This means customers save more time by automating Skyline proactive remediations in vROps Cloud. But Skyline supports vSphere, vSAN, NSX, vRA, VCF and VMware Horizon as well.

    VMware Cloud Universal Use Cases

    As already mentioned, VMCU makes very much sense if you are building a hybrid or multi-cloud architecture with a consistent (VMware) infrastructure. VMCU, vRCU and the Tanzu portfolio help you to create a unified control plane for your cloud infrastructure.

    Other use cases could be cloud migration or cloud bursting scenarios. If we switch back to the fictive customer before, we could use VMCU to convert existing VCF licenses to VCF-S (subscription) licenses, which in the end allow you to build a VMware-based Cloud on top of AWS (other public cloud providers are coming very soon!) for example.

    Another good example is to achieve the same service and operating model on-prem as in the public cloud: a fully managed consumable infrastructure. Meaning, to move from a self-built and self-managed VCF infrastructure to something like VMC on Dell EMC.

    How can I get VMCU?

    There is no monthly subscription model and VMware only supports one-year or three-year terms. Customers will need to sign an Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) and purchase VMCU SPP credits.

    Note: SPP credits purchased out of the program are not allowed to be used within the VMCU program!

    After purchasing the VMCU SPP credits and VMware Cloud onboarding and organization setup, you can select the infrastructure offerings to consume your SPP credits. This can be done via the VMware Cloud Console.

    Summary

    I hope this article was useful to get a better understanding about VMware Cloud Universal. It might seem a little bit complex, but that’s not true. VMCU makes your life easier and helps you to build and license a globally distributed cloud infrastructure based on VMware technology.

    VCF Subscription

     

     

     

    The Rise of VMware Tanzu Service Mesh

    The Rise of VMware Tanzu Service Mesh

    May 18, 2021 | AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, Edge Computing, ESXi, Google Cloud, Networking, NSX, project pacific, Tanzu, VMware Cloud

    My last article focused on application modernization and data portability in a multi-cloud world. I explained the value of the VMware Tanzu portfolio by mentioning a consistent infrastructure and consistent application platform approach, which ultimately delivers a consistent developer experience. I also dedicated a short section about Tanzu Service Mesh, which is only one part of the unified Tanzu control plane (besides Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Observability) for multiple Kubernetes clusters and clouds.

    When you hear or see someone writing about TSM, you very soon get to the point, where the so-called “Global Namespaces” (GNS) are being mentioned, which has the magic power to stitch hybrid applications together that run in multiple clouds.

    Believe me when I say that Tanzu Service Mesh (TSM) is rising and becoming the next superstar of the VMware portfolio. I think Joe Baguley would agree here. 😀

    Namespaces

    Before we start talking about Tanzu Service Mesh and the magical power of Global Namespaces, let us have a look at the term “Namespaces” first.

    Kubernetes Namespace

    Namespaces give you a way to organize clusters into virtual carved out sub-clusters, which can be helpful when different teams, tenants or projects share the same Kubernetes cluster. This form of a namespace provides a method to better share resources, because it ensures fair allocation of these resources with the right permissions.

    So, using namespaces gives you a way of isolation that developers never affect other project teams. Policies allow to configure compute resources by defining resource quotas for CPU or memory utilization. This also ensures the performance of a specific namespace, its resources (pods, services etc.) and the Kubernetes cluster in general.

    Although namespaces are separate from each other, they can communicate with each other. Network policies can be configured to create isolated and non-isolated pods. For example, a network policy can allow or deny all traffic coming from other namespaces.

    Ellei Mei explained this in a very easy in her article after Project Pacific had been made public in September 2019:

    Think of a farmer who divides their field (cluster + cluster resources) into fenced-off smaller fields (namespaces) for different herds of animals. The cows in one fenced field, horses in another, sheep in another, etc. The farmer would be like operations defining these namespaces, and the animals would be like developer teams, allowed to do whatever they do within the boundaries they are allocated.

    vSphere Namespace

    The first time I heard of Kubernetes or vSphere Namespaces was in fact at VMworld 2019 in Barcelona. VMware then presented a new app-focused management concept. This concept described a way to model modern application and all their parts, and we call this a vSphere Namespace today.

    With Project Pacific (today known vSphere with Tanzu or Tanzu Kubernetes Grid), VMware went one step further and extended the Kubernetes Namespace by adding more options for compute resource allocation, vMotion, encryption, high availability, backup & restore, and snapshots.

    Rather than having to deal with each namespace and its containers, vSphere Namespaces (also called “guardrails” sometimes) can draw a line around the whole application and services including virtual machines.

    Namespaces as the unit of management

    With the re-architecture of vSphere and the integration of Kubernetes as its control plane, namespaces can be seen as the new unit of management.

    Imagine that you might have thousands of VMs in your vCenter inventory that you needed to deal with. After you group those VMs into their logical applications, you may only have to deal with dozens of namespaces now.

    If you need to turn on encryption for an application, you can just click a button on the namespace in vCenter and it does it for you. You don’t need to deal with individual VMs anymore.

    vSphere Virtual Machine Service

    With the vSphere 7 Update 2a release, VMware provided the “VM Service” that enables Kubernetes-native provisioning and management of VMs.

    For many organizations legacy applications are not becoming modern over night, they become hybrid first before the are completely modernized. This means we have a combination of containers and virtual machines forming the application, and not find containers only. I also call this a hybrid application architecture in front of my customers. For example, you may have a containerized application that uses a database hosted in a separate VM.

    So, developers can use the existing Kubernetes API and a declarative approach to create VMs. No need to open a ticket anymore to request a virtual machine. We talk self-service here.

    Tanzu Mission Control – Namespace Management

    Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) is a VMware Cloud (SaaS) service that provides a single control point for multiple teams to remove the complexities from managing Kubernetes cluster across multiple clouds.

    One of the ways to organize and view your Kubernetes resources with TMC is by the creation of “Workspaces”.

    Workspaces allows you to organize your namespaces into logical groups across clusters, which helps to simplify management by applying policies at a group level. For example, you could apply an access policy to an entire group of clusters (from multiple clouds) rather than creating separate policies for each individual cluster.

    Think about backup and restore for a moment. TMC and the concept of workspaces allow you to back up and restore data resources in your Kubernetes clusters on a namespace level.

    Management and operations with a new application view!

    FYI, VMware announced the integration of Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Service Mesh in December 2020.

    Service Mesh

    A lot of vendors including VMware realized that the network is the fabric that brings microservices together, which in the end form the application. With modernized or partially modernized apps, different Kubernetes offerings and a multi-cloud environment, we will find the reality of hybrid applications which sometimes run in multiple clouds. 

    This is the moment when you have to think about the connectivity and communication between your app’s microservices.

    One of the main ideas and features behind a service mesh was to provide service-to-service communication for distributed applications running in multiple Kubernetes clusters hosted in different private or public clouds.

    The number of Kubernetes service meshes has rapidly increased over the last few years and has gotten a lot of hype. No wonder why there are different service mesh offerings around:

    • Istio
    • Linkerd
    • Consul
    • AWS Apps Mesh
    • OpenShift Service Mesh by Red Hat
    • Open Service Mesh AKS add-on (currently preview on Azure)

    Istio is probably the most famous one on this list. For me, it is definitely the one my customers look and talk about the most.

    Service mesh brings a new level of connectivity between services. With service mesh, we inject a proxy in front of each service; in Istio, for example, this is done using a “sidecar” within the pod.

    Istio’s architecture is divided into a data plane based on Envoy (the sidecar) and a control plane, that manages the proxies. With Istio, you inject the proxies into all the Kubernetes pods in the mesh.

    As you can see on the image, the proxy sits in front of each microservice and all communications are passed through it. When a proxy talks to another proxy, then we talk about a service mesh. Proxies also handle traffic management, errors and failures (retries) and collect metric for observability purposes.

    Challenges with Service Mesh

    The thing with service mesh is, while everyone thinks it sounds great, that there are new challenges that service mesh brings by itself.

    The installation and configuration of Istio is not that easy and it takes time. Besides that, Istio is also typically tied to a single Kubernetes cluster and therefore Istio data plane – and organizations usually prefer to keep their Kubernetes clusters independent from each other. This leaves us with security and policies tied to a Kubernetes cluster or cloud vendor, which leaves us with silos.

    Istio supports a so-called multi-cluster deployment with one service mesh stretched across Kubernetes clusters, but you’ll end up with a stretched Istio control plane, which eliminates the independence of each cluster.

    So, a lot of customers also talk about better and easier manageability without dependencies between clouds and different Kubernetes clusters from different vendors.

    That’s the moment when Tanzu Service Mesh becomes very interesting. 🙂

    Tanzu Service Mesh (formerly known as NSX Service Mesh)

    Tanzu Service Mesh, built on VMware NSX, is an offering that delivers an enterprise-grade service mesh, built on top of a VMware-administrated Istio version.

    When onboarding a new cluster on Tanzu Service Mesh, the service deploys a curated version of Istio signed and supported by VMware. This Istio deployment is the same as the upstream Istio in every way, but it also includes an agent that communicates with the Tanzu Service Mesh global control plane. Istio installation is not the most intuitive, but the onboarding process of Tanzu Service Mesh simplifies the process significantly.

    Overview of Tanzu Service Mesh

    The big difference and the value that comes with Tanzu Service Mesh (TSM) is its ability to support cross-cluster and cross-cloud use cases via Global Namespaces.

    Global Namespaces (GNS)

    Yep, another kind of a namespace, but the most exciting one! 🙂

    A Global Namespace is a unique concept in Tanzu Service Mesh and connects resources and workloads that form the application into a virtual unit. Each GNS is an isolated domain that provides automatic service discovery and manages the following functions that are port of it, no matter where they are located:

    • Identity. Each global namespace has its own certificate authority (CA) that provisions identities for the resources inside that global namespace
    • Discovery (DNS). The global namespace controls how one resource can locate another and provides a registry.
    • Connectivity. The global namespace defines how communication can be established between resources and how traffic within the global namespace and external to the global namespace is routed between resources.
    • Security. The global namespace manages security for its resources. In particular, the global namespace can enforce that all traffic between the resources is encrypted using Mutual Transport Layer Security authentication (mTLS).
    • Observability. Tanzu Service Mesh aggregates telemetry data, such as metrics for services, clusters, and nodes, inside the global namespace.

    Use Cases

    The following diagram represents the global namespace concept and other pieces in a high-level architectural view. The components of one application are distributed in two different Kubernetes clusters: one of them is on-premises and the other in a public cloud. The Global Namespace creates a logical view of these application components and provides a set of basic services for the components.

    Global Namespaces

    If we take application continuity as another example for a use case, we would deploy an app in more than one cluster and possibly in a remote region for disaster recovery (DR), with a load balancer between the locations to direct traffic to both clusters. This would be an active-active scenario. With Tanzu Service Mesh, you could group the clusters into a Global Namespace and program it to automatically redirect traffic in case of a failure. 

    In addition to the use case and support for multi-zone and multi-region high availability and disaster recovery, you can also provide resiliency with automated scaling based on defined Service-Level Objectives (SLO) for multi-cloud apps.

    VMware Modern Apps Connectivity Solution  

    In May 2021 VMware introduced a new solution that brings together the capabilities of Tanzu Service Mesh and NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB, formerly Avi Networks) – not only for containers but also for VMs. While Istio’s Envoy only operates on layer 7, VMware provides layer 4 to layer 7 services with NSX (part of TSM) and NSX ALB, which includes L4 load balancing, ingress controllers, GSLB, WAF and end-to-end service visibility. 

    This solution speeds the path to app modernization with connectivity and better security across hybrid environments and hybrid app architectures.

    Multiple disjointed products, no end-to-end observability

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Summary

    One thing I can say for sure: The future for Tanzu Service Mesh is bright!

    Many customers are looking for ways for offloading security (encryption, authentication, authorization) from an application to a service mesh.

    One great example and use case from the financial services industry is crypto agility, where a “crypto service mesh” (a specialized service mesh) could be part of a new architecture, which provides quantum-safe certificates.

    And when we offload encryption, calculation, authentication etc., then we may have other use cases for SmartNICs and  Project Monterey. 

    To learn more about service mesh and the capabilities of Tanzu Service Mesh, I can recommend Service Mesh for Dummies written Niran Even-Chen, Oren Penso and Susan Wu.

    Thank you for reading!

     

    Application Modernization and Multi-Cloud Portability with VMware Tanzu

    Application Modernization and Multi-Cloud Portability with VMware Tanzu

    Mar 22, 2021 | AWS, Azure, Carbon Black, Cloud Native Apps, Edge Computing, ESXi, Google Cloud, HCX, Networking, NSX, project pacific, Tanzu, VMC, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN, vSphere

    It was 2019 when VMware announced Tanzu and Project Pacific. A lot has happened since then and almost everyone is talking about application modernization nowadays. With my strong IT infrastructure background, I had to learn a lot of new things to survive initial conversations with application owners, developers and software architects. And in the same time VMware’s Kubernetes offering grew and became very complex – not only for customers, but for everyone I believe. 🙂

    I already wrote about VMware’s vision with Tanzu: To put a consistent “Kubernetes grid” over any cloud

    This is the simple message and value hidden behind the much larger topics when discussing application modernization and application/data portability across clouds.

    The goal of this article is to give you a better understanding about the real value of VMware Tanzu and to explain that it’s less about Kubernetes and the Kubernetes integration with vSphere.

    Application Modernization

    Before we can talk about the modernization of applications or the different migration approaches like:

    • Retain – Optimize and retain existing apps, as-is
    • Rehost/Migration (lift & shift) – Move an application to the public cloud without making any changes
    • Replatform (lift and reshape) – Put apps in containers and run in Kubernetes. Move apps to the public cloud
    • Rebuild and Refactor – Rewrite apps using cloud native technologies
    • Retire – Retire traditional apps and convert to new SaaS apps

    …we need to have a look at the palette of our applications:

    • Web Apps – Apache Tomcat, Nginx, Java
    • SQL Databases – MySQL, Oracle DB, PostgreSQL
    • NoSQL Databases – MongoDB, Cassandra, Prometheus, Couchbase, Redis
    • Big Data – Splunk, Elasticsearch, ELK stack, Greenplum, Kafka, Hadoop

    In an app modernization discussion, we very quickly start to classify applications as microservices or monoliths. From an infrastructure point of view you look at apps differently and call them “stateless” (web apps) or “stateful” (SQL, NoSQL, Big Data) apps.

    And with Kubernetes we are trying to overcome the challenges, which come with the stateful applications related to app modernization:

    • What does modernization really mean?
    • How do I define “modernization”?
    • What is the benefit by modernizing applications?
    • What are the tools? What are my options?

    What has changed? Why is everyone talking about modernization? Why are we talking so much about Kubernetes and cloud native? Why now?

    To understand the benefits (and challenges) of app modernization, we can start looking at the definition from IBM for a “modern app”:

    “Application modernization is the process of taking existing legacy applications and modernizing their platform infrastructure, internal architecture, and/or features. Much of the discussion around application modernization today is focused on monolithic, on-premises applications—typically updated and maintained using waterfall development processes—and how those applications can be brought into cloud architecture and release patterns, namely microservices“

    Modern applications are collections of microservices, which are light, fault tolerant and small. Microservices can run in containers deployed on a private or public cloud.

    Which means, that a modern application is something that can adapt to any environment and perform equally well.

    Note: App modernization can also mean, that you must move your application from .NET Framework to .NET Core.

    I have a customer, that is just getting started with the app modernization topic and has hundreds of Windows applications based on the .NET Framework. Porting an existing .NET app to .NET Core requires some work, but is the general recommendation for the future. This would also give you the option to run your .NET Core apps on Windows, Linux and macOS (and not only on Windows).

    A modern application is something than can run on bare-metal, VMs, public cloud and containers, and that easily integrates with any component of your infrastructure. It must be something, that is elastic. Something, that can grow and shrink depending on the load and usage. Since it is something that needs to be able to adapt, it must be agile and therefore portable.

    Cloud Native Architectures and Modern Designs

    If I ask my VMware colleagues from our so-called MAPBU (Modern Application Platform Business Unit) how customers can achieve application portability, the answer is always: “Cloud Native!”

    Many organizations and people see cloud native as going to Kubernetes. But cloud native is so much more than the provisioning and orchestration of containers with Kubernetes. It’s a about collaboration, DevOps, internal processes and supply chains, observability/self-healing, continuous delivery/deployment and cloud infrastructure.

    There are so many definitions around “cloud native”, that Kamal Arora from Amazon Web Services and others wrote the book “Cloud Native Architecture“, which describes a maturity model. This model helps you to understand, that cloud native is more a journey than only restrictive definition.

    Cloud Native Maturity Model

    The adoption of cloud services and applying an application-centric design are very important, but the book also mentions that security and scalability rely on automation. And this for example could bring the requirement for Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

    In the past, virtualization – moving from bare-metal to vSphere – didn’t force organizations to modernize their applications. The application didn’t need to change and VMware abstracted and emulated the bare-metal server. So, the transition (P2V) of an application was very smooth and not complicated.

    And this is what has changed today. We have new architectures, new technologies and new clouds running with different technology stacks. We have Kubernetes as framework, which requires applications to be redesigned for these platforms.

    That is the reason why enterprises have to modernize their applications.

    One of the “five R’s” mentioned above is the lift and shift approach. If you don’t want or need to modernize some of your applications, but move to the public cloud in an easy, fast and cost efficient way, have a look at VMware’ hybrid cloud extension (HCX).

    In this article I focus more on the replatform and refactor approaches in a multi-cloud world.

    Kubernetize and productize your applications

    Assuming that you also define Kubernetes as the standard to orchestrate your containers where your microservices are running in, usually the next decision would be about the Kubernetes “product” (on-prem, OpenShift, public cloud).

    Looking at the current CNCF Cloud Native Landscape, we can count over 50 storage vendors and over 20 networks vendors providing cloud native storage and networking solutions for containers and Kubernetes.

    Talking to my customers, most of them mention the storage and network integration as one of their big challenges with Kubernetes. Their concern is about performance, resiliency, different storage and network patterns, automation, data protection/replication, scalability and cloud portability.

    Why do organizations need portability?

    There are many use cases and requirements that portability (infrastructure independence) becomes relevant. Maybe it’s about a hardware refresh or data center evacuation, to avoid vendor/cloud lock-in, not enough performance with the current infrastructure or it could be about dev/test environments, where resources are deployed and consumed on-demand.

    Multi-Cloud Application Portability with VMware Tanzu

    To explore the value of Tanzu, I would like to start by setting the scene with the following customer use case:

    In this case the customer is following a cloud-appropriate approach to define which cloud is the right landing zone for their applications. They decided to develop new applications in the public cloud and use the native services from Azure and AWS. The customers still has hundreds of legacy applications (monoliths) on-premises and didn’t decide yet, if they want to follow a “lift and shift and then modernize” approach to migrate a number applications to the public cloud.

    Multi-Cloud App Portability

    But some of their application owners already gave the feedback, that their applications are not allowed to be hosted in the public cloud, have to stay on-premises and need to be modernized locally.

    At the same time the IT architecture team receives the feedback from other application owners, that the journey to the public cloud is great on paper, but brings huge operational challenges with it. So, IT operations asks the architecture team if they can do something about that problem.

    Both cloud operations for Azure and AWS teams deliver a different quality of their services, changes and deployments take longer with one of their public clouds, they have problems with overlapping networks, different storage performance characteristics and APIs.

    Another challenge is the role-based access to the different clouds, Kubernetes clusters and APIs. There is no central log aggregation and no observability (intelligent monitoring & alerting). Traffic distribution and load balancing are also other items on this list.

    Because of the feedback from operations to architecture, IT engineering received the task to define a multi-cloud strategy, that solves this operational complexity.

    Notes: These are the regular multi-cloud challenges, where clouds are the new silos and enterprises have different teams with different expertise using different management and security tools.

    This is the time when VMware’s multi-cloud approach Tanzu become very interesting for such customers.

    Consistent Infrastructure and Management

    The first discussion point here would be the infrastructure. It’s important, that the different private and public clouds are not handled and seen as silos. VMware’s approach is to connect all the clouds with the same underlying technology stack based on VMware Cloud Foundation.

    Beside the fact, that lift and shift migrations would be very easy now, this approach brings two very important advantages for the containerized workloads and the cloud infrastructure in general. It solves the challenge with the huge storage and networking ecosystem available for Kubernetes workloads by using vSAN and NSX Data Center in any of the existing clouds. Storage and networking and security are now integrated and consistent.

    For existing workloads running natively in public clouds, customers can use NSX Cloud, which uses the same management plane and control plane as NSX Data Center. That’s another major step forward.

    Using consistent infrastructure enables customers for consistent operations and automation.

    Consistent Application Platform and Developer Experience

    Looking at organization’s application and container platforms, achieving consistent infrastructure is not required, but obviously very helpful in terms of operational and cost efficiency.

    To provide a consistent developer experience and to abstract the underlying application or Kubernetes platform, you would follow the same VMware approach as always: to put a layer on top.

    Here the solution is called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), that provides a consistent, upstream-compatible implementation of Kubernetes, that is tested, signed and supported by VMware.

    A Tanzu Kubernetes cluster is an opinionated installation of Kubernetes open-source software that is built and supported by VMware. In all the offerings, you provision and use Tanzu Kubernetes clusters in a declarative manner that is familiar to Kubernetes operators and developers. The different Tanzu Kubernetes Grid offerings provision and manage Tanzu Kubernetes clusters on different platforms, in ways that are designed to be as similar as possible, but that are subtly different.

    VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG aka TKGm)

    Tanzu Kubernetes Grid can be deployed across software-defined datacenters (SDDC) and public cloud environments, including vSphere, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon EC2. I would assume, that the Google Cloud is a roadmap item.

    TKG allows you to run Kubernetes with consistency and makes it available to your developers as a utility, just like the electricity grid. TKG provides the services such as networking, authentication, ingress control, and logging that a production Kubernetes environment requires.

    This TKG version is also known as TKGm for “TKG multi-cloud”.

    VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service (TKGS aka vSphere with Tanzu)

    TKGS is the option vSphere admins want to hear about first, because it allows you to turn a vSphere cluster to a platform running Kubernetes workloads in dedicated resources pools. TKGS is the thing that was known as “Project Pacific” in the past.

    Once enabled on a vSphere cluster, vSphere with Tanzu creates a Kubernetes control plane directly in the hypervisor layer. You can then run Kubernetes containers by deploying vSphere Pods, or you can create upstream Kubernetes clusters through the VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service and run your applications inside these clusters.

    VMware Tanzu Mission Control (TMC)

    In our use case before, we have AKS and EKS for running Kubernetes clusters in the public cloud.

    The VMware solution for multi-cluster Kubernetes management across clouds is called Tanzu Mission Control, which is a centralized management platform for the consistency and security the IT engineering team was looking for.

    Available through VMware Cloud Services as SaaS offering, TMC provides IT operators with a single control point to provide their developers self-service access to Kubernetes clusters.

    TMC also provides cluster lifecycle management for TKG clusters across environment such as vSphere, AWS and Azure.

    It allows you to bring the clusters you already have in the public clouds or other environments (with Rancher or OpenShift for example) under one roof via the attachment of conformant Kubernetes clusters.

    Not only do you gain global visibility across clusters, teams and clouds, but you also get centralized authentication and authorization, consistent policy management and data protection functionalities.

    VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront (TO)

    Tanzu Observability extends the basic observability provided by TMC with enterprise-grade observability and analytics.

    Wavefront by VMware helps Tanzu operators, DevOps teams, and developers get metrics-driven insights into the real-time performance of their custom code, Tanzu platform and its underlying components. Wavefront proactively detects and alerts on production issues and improves agility in code releases.

    TO is also a SaaS-based platform, that can handle the high-scale requirements of cloud native applications.

    VMware Tanzu Service Mesh (TSM)

    Tanzu Service Mesh, formerly known as NSX Service Mesh, provides consistent connectivity and security for microservices across all clouds and Kubernetes clusters. TSM can be installed in TKG clusters and third-party Kubernetes-conformant clusters.

    Organizations that are using or looking at the popular Calico cloud native networking option for their Kubernetes ecosystem often consider an integration with Istio (Service Mesh) to connect services and to secure the communication between these services.

    The combination of Calico and Istio can be replaced by TSM, which is built on VMware NSX for networking and that uses an Istio data plane abstraction. This version of Istio is signed and supported by VMware and is the same as the upstream version. TSM brings enterprise-grade support for Istio and a simplified installation process.

    One of the primary constructs of Tanzu Service Mesh is the concept of a Global Namespace (GNS). GNS allows developers using Tanzu Service Mesh, regardless of where they are, to connect application services without having to specify (or even know) any underlying infrastructure details, as all of that is done automatically. With the power of this abstraction, your application microservices can “live” anywhere, in any cloud, allowing you to make placement decisions based on application and organizational requirements—not infrastructure constraints.

    Note: On the 18th of March 2021 VMware announced the acquisition of Mesh7 and the integration of Mesh7’s contextual API behavior security solution with Tanzu Service Mesh to simplify DevSecOps.

    Tanzu Editions

    The VMware Tanzu portfolio comes with three different editions: Basic, Standard, Advanced

    Tanzu Basic enables the straightforward implementation of Kubernetes in vSphere so that vSphere admins can leverage familiar tools used for managing VMs when managing clusters = TKGS

    Tanzu Standard provides multi-cloud support, enabling Kubernetes deployment across on-premises, public cloud, and edge environments. In addition, Tanzu Standard includes a centralized multi-cluster SaaS control plane for a more consistent and efficient operation of clusters across environments = TKGS + TKGm + TMC

    Tanzu Advanced builds on Tanzu Standard to simplify and secure the container lifecycle, enabling teams to accelerate the delivery of modern apps at scale across clouds. It adds a comprehensive global control plane with observability and service mesh, consolidated Kubernetes ingress services, data services, container catalog, and automated container builds = TKG (TKGS & TKGm) + TMC + TO + TSM + MUCH MORE

    Tanzu Data Services

    Another topic to reduce dependencies and avoid vendor lock-in would be Tanzu Data Services – a separate part of the Tanzu portfolio with on-demand caching (Tanzu Gemfire), messaging (Tanzu RabbitMQ) and database software (Tanzu SQL & Tanzu Greenplum) products.

    Bringing all together

    As always, I’m trying to summarize and simplify things where needed and I hope it helped you to better understand the value and capabilities of VMware Tanzu.

    There are so many more products available in the Tanzu portfolio, that help you to build, run, manage, connect and protect your applications. In case you are interested to read more about VMware Tanzu, the have a look at my article 10 Things You Didn’t Know About VMware Tanzu.

    If you would like to know more about application and cloud transformation make sure to attend the 45 minute VMware event on March 31 (Americas) or April 1 (EMEA/APJ)!

    Data Center as a Service based on VMware Cloud Foundation

    Data Center as a Service based on VMware Cloud Foundation

    Feb 16, 2021 | AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, Edge Computing, ESXi, Google Cloud, HCX, IoT, NSX, Tanzu, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN, vSphere

    IT organizations are looking for consistent operations, which is enabled by consistent infrastructure. Public cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft offer an extension of their cloud infrastructure and native services to the private cloud and edge, which is also known as Data Center as a Service.

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a fully managed service with AWS Outposts, that offers AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs and their tools to any data center or on-premises facility.

    Microsoft has Azure Stack is even working on a new Azure Stack hybrid cloud solution that is codenamed “Fiji” to provide the ability to run Azure as a managed local cloud.

    What do these offerings have in common or why would customers choose one (or even both) of these hybrid cloud options?

    They bring the public cloud operation model to the private cloud or edge in form of one or more racks and servers provided as a fully managed service.

    AWS Outposts (generally available since December 2019) and Azure Stack Fiji (in development) provide the following:

    • Extension of the public cloud services to the private cloud and edge
    • Consistent infrastructure with consistent operations
    • Local processing of data (e.g., analytics at the data source)
    • Local data residency (governance and security)
    • Low latency access to on-premises systems
    • Local migrations and modernization of applications with local system interdependencies
    • Build, run and manage on-premises applications using existing and familiar services and tools
    • Modernize applications on-prem resp. at the edge
    • Prescriptive infrastructure and vendor managed lifecycle and maintenance (racks and servers)
    • Creation of different physical pools and clusters depending on your compute and storage needs (different form factors)
    • Same licensing and pricing options on-premises (like in the public cloud)

    The pretty new AWS Outposts or the future Azure Stack Fiji solution are also called “Local Cloud as a Service” (LCaaS) or “Data Center as a Service” and meant to be consumed and delivered in the on-prem data center or at the edge. It’s about bringing the public cloud to your data center or edge location.

    The next phase of cloud transformations is about the “edge” of an enterprise cloud and we know today that private and hybrid cloud strategies are critical for the implementation of IT infrastructure and the operation of it.

    If you come from VMware’s standpoint, then it’s not about extending the public cloud to the local data centers. It’s about extending your VMware-based private cloud to the edge or the public cloud.

    This article focuses on the local (private) cloud as a service options from VMware, not the public cloud offerings.

    In case you would like to know more about VMware’s multi-cloud strategy, which is about running the VMware Cloud Foundation stack on top of a public cloud like AWS, Azure or Google, please check some of my recent posts.

    Features and Technologies

    Before I describe the different VMware LCaaS offerings based on VMware Cloud Foundation, let me show and explain the different features and technologies my customers ask about when they plan to build a private cloud with public cloud characteristics in mind.

    I work with customers from different verticals like

    • finance
    • fast-moving consumer goods
    • manufacturing
    • transportation (travel)

    which are hosting IT infrastructure in multiple data centers all over the world including hundreds of smaller locations. My customers belong to different vertical markets, but are looking for the same features and technologies when it comes to edge computing and delivering a managed cloud on-premises. 

    Compute and Storage. They are looking for pre-validated and standardized configuration offerings to meet their (application) needs. Most of them describe hardware blueprints with t-shirts sizes (small, medium, large). These different servers or instances provide different options and attributes, which should provide enough CPU, RAM, storage and networking capacity based on their needs. Usually you’ll find terms like “general purpose”, “compute optimized” or “memory optimized” node types or instances.

    Networking. Most of my customers look for the possibility to extend their current network (aka elastic or cloud-scale networking) to any other cloud. They prefer a way to use the existing network and security policies and to provide software-defined networking (SDN) services like routing, firewalling and IDS/IPS, load balancing – also known as virtualized network functions (VNF). Service providers are also looking at network function virtualization (NFV), which includes emerging technologies like 5G and IoT. As cloud native or containerized applications become more important, service providers also discuss containerized network functions (CNF).

    Services. Applications consist of one or many (micro-)services. All my conversations are application-centric and focus on the different application components. Most of my discussions are about containers, databases and video/data analytics at the edge.

    Security. Customers, that are running workloads in the public cloud, are familiar with the shared responsibility model. The difference between public cloud and local cloud as a service offering is the physical security (racks, servers, network transits, data center access etc.).

    Scalability and Elasticity. IT providers want to provide the simplicity and agility on-prem as their customers (the business) would expect it from a public cloud provider. Scalability is about a planned level of capacity that can grow or shrink as needed.

    Resource Pooling and Sharing. Larger enterprises and service providers are interested in creating dedicated workload domains and resource clusters, but also look for a way to provide infrastructure multi-tenancy.

    The challenge for today’s IT teams is, that edge locations are not often well defined. And these IT teams need an efficient way to manage different infrastructure sizes (can range from 2 nodes up to 16 or 24 nodes), for sometimes up to 400 edge locations.

    Rethinking Private Clouds

    Organizations have two choices when it comes to the deployment of a private cloud extension to the edge. They could continue using the current approach, which includes the design, deployment and operation of their own private cloud. Another pretty new option would be the subscription of a predefined “Data Center as a Service” offering.

    Enterprises need to develop and implement a cloud strategy to support the existing workloads, which are still mostly running on VMware vSphere, and build something, which is vendor and cloud-agnostic. Something, that provides a (public) cloud exit strategy at the same time.

    If you decide to go for AWS Outposts or the coming Azure Stack Fiji solution, which for sure are great options, how would you migrate or evacuate workloads to another cloud and technology stack?

    VMware Cloud on Dell EMC

    At VMworld 2019 VMware announced the general availability of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC (VMC on Dell EMC). In 2018 introduced as “Project Dimension”, the idea behind this concept was to deliver a (public) cloud experience to customers on-premises. Give customers the best of two worlds:

    The simplicity, flexibility and cost model of the public cloud with the security and control of your private cloud infrastructure.

    VMware Cloud on Dell EMC

    Initially, Project Dimension was focused primarily on edge use cases and was not optimized for larger data centers.

    Note: This has changed with the introduction of the 2nd generation of VMC on Dell EMC in May 2020 to support different density and performance use cases.

    VMC on Dell EMC is a VMware-managed service offering with these components:

    • A software-defined data center based von VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) running on Dell EMC VxRail
      • ESXi, vSAN, NSX, vCenter Server
      • HCX Advanced
    • Dell servers, management & ToR switches, racks, UPS
      • Standby VxRail node for expansion (unlicensed)
      • Option for half or full-height rack
    • Multiple cluster support in a single rack
      • Clusters start with a minimum of 3 nodes (not 4 as you would expect from a regular VCF deployment)
    • VMware SD-WAN (formerly known as VeloCloud) appliances for remote management purposes only at the moment
    • Customer self-service provisioning through cloud.vmware.com
    • Maintenance, patching and upgrades of the SDDC performed by VMware
    • Maintenance, patching and upgrades of the Dell hardware performed by VMware (Dell provides firmware, drivers and BIOS updates)
    • 1- or 3-year term subscription commitment (like with VMC on AWS)

    There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to hosting workloads at the edge and in your data centers. VMC on Dell EMC provides also different hardware node types, which should match with your defined t-shirt sizes (blueprints).

    VMC on Dell EMC HW Node Types

    If we talk about at a small edge location with a maximum of 5 server nodes, you would go for a half-height rack. The full-height rack can host up to 24 nodes (8 clusters). Currently, the largest instance type would be a good match for high density, storage hungry workloads such as VDI deployments, databases or video analytics.

    As HCX is part of the offering, you have the right tool and license included to migrate workloads between vSphere-based private and public clouds.

    The following is a list of some VMworld 2020 breakout sessions presented by subject matter experts and focused on VMware Cloud on Dell EMC:

    HCP1831: Building a successful VDI solution with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC – Andrew Nielsen, Sr. Director, Workload and Technical Marketing, VMware

    HCP1802: Extend Hybrid Cloud to the Edge and Data Center with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC – Varun Chhabra, VP Product Marketing, Dell

    HCP1834: Second-Generation VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, Explained by Product Experts – Neeraj Patalay, Product Manager, VMware

    VMware Cloud Foundation and HPE Synergy with HPE GreenLake

    At VMworld 2019 VMware announced that VMware Cloud Foundation will be offered in HPE’s GreenLake program running on HPE Synergy composable infrastructure (Hybrid Cloud as a Service). This gives VMware customers the opportunity to build a fully managed private cloud with the public cloud benefits in an on-premises environment.

    HPE’s vision is built on a single platform that can span across multiple clouds and GreenLake brings the cloud consumption model to joint HPE and VMware customers.

    Today, this solution is fully supported and sold by HPE. In case you want to know more, have a look at the VMworld 2020 session Simplify IT with HPE GreenLake Cloud Services and VMware from Erik Vogel, Global VP, Customer Experience, HPE GreenLake, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

    VMC on AWS Outposts

    If you are an AWS customer and look for a consistent hybrid cloud experience, then you would consider AWS Outposts.

    There is also VMware variant of AWS Outposts available for customers, who already run their on-premises workloads on VMware vSphere or in a cloud vSphere-based environment running on top of the AWS global infrastructure (called VMC on AWS).

    VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts is a  on-premises as-a-service offering based on VMware Cloud Foundation. It integrates VMware’s software-defined data center software, including vSphere, vSAN and
    NSX. Ths Cloud Foundation stack runs on dedicated elastic Amazon EC2 bare-metal infrastructure, delivered on-premises with optimized access to local and remote AWS services.

    VMC on AWS Outposts

    Key capabilities and use cases:

    • Use familiar VMware tools and skillsets
    • No need to rewrite applications while migrating workloads
    • Direct access to local and native AWS services
    • Service is sold, operated and supported by VMware
    • VMware as the single point of primary contact for support needs, supplemented by AWS for hardware shipping, installation and configuration
    • Host-level HA with automated failover to VMware Cloud on AWS
    • Resilient applications required to work in the event of WAN link downtime
    • Application modernization with access to local and native AWS services
    • 1- or 3-year term subscription commitment
    • 42U AWS Outposts rack, fully assembled and installed by AWS (including ToR switches)
    • Minimum cluster size of 3 nodes (plus 1 dark node)
    • Current cluster maximum of 16 nodes

    Currently, VMware is running a VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts Beta program, that lets you try the pre-release software on AWS Outposts infrastructure. An early access program should start in the first half of 2021, which can be considered as a customer paid proof of concept intended for new workloads only (no migrations).

    VMware on Azure Stack

    To date there are no plans communicated by Microsoft or VMware to make Azure VMware Solution, the vSphere-based cloud offering running on top of Azure, available on-premises on the current or future Azure Stack family.

    VMware on Google Anthos

    To date there are no plans communicated by Google or VMware to make Google Cloud VMware Engine, the vSphere-based cloud offering running on top of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), available on-premises.

    The only known supported combination of a Google Cloud offering running VMware on-premises is Google Anthos (Google Kubernetes Engine on-prem).

    Multi-Cloud Application Portability

    Multi-cloud is now the dominant cloud strategy and many of my customers are maintaining a vSphere-based cloud on-premises and use at least two of the big three public clouds (AWS, Azure, Google).

    Following a cloud-appropriate approach, customers are inspecting each application and decide which cloud (private or public) would be the best to run this application on. VMware gives customers the option to run the Cloud Foundation technology stack in any cloud, which doesn’t mean, that customers at the same time are not going cloud-native and still add AWS and Azure to the mix.

    How can I achieve application portability in a multi-cloud environment when the underlying platform and technology formats differ from each other?

    This is a question I hear a lot. Kubernetes is seen as THE container orchestration tool, which at the same time can abstract multiple public clouds and the complexity that comes with them.

    A lot of people also believe that Kubernetes is enough to provide application portability and figure out later, that they have to use different Kubernetes APIs and management consoles for every cloud and Kubernetes (e.g., Rancher, Azure, AWS, Google, RedHat OpenShift etc.) flavor they work with.

    That’s the moment we have to talk about VMware Tanzu and how it can simplify things for you.

    The Tanzu portfolio provides the next generation the building blocks and steps for modernizing your existing workloads while providing capabilities of Kubernetes. Additionally, Tanzu also has broad support for containerization across the entire application lifecycle.

    Tanzu gives you the possibility to build, run, manage, connect and protect applications and to achieve multi-cloud application portability with a consistent platform over any cloud – the so-called “Kubernetes grid”.

    Note: I’m not talking about the product “Tanzu Kubernetes Grid” here!

    I’m talking about the philosophy to put a virtual application service layer over your multi-cloud architecture, which provides a consistent application platform.

    Tanzu Mission Control is a product under the Tanzu umbrella that provides central management and governance of containers and clusters across data centers, public clouds, and edge.

    Conclusion

    Enterprises must be able to extend the value of their cloud investments to the edge of the organization.

    The edge is just one piece of a bigger picture and customers are looking for a hybrid cloud approach in a multi-cloud world.

    Solutions like VMware Cloud on Dell EMC or running VCF on HPE Synergy with HPE Greenlake are only the first steps towards innovation in the private cloud and to bring the cost and operation model from the public cloud to the enterprises on-premises.

    IT organizations are rather looking for ways to consume services in the future and care less about building the infrastructure or services by themselves.

    The two most important differentiators for selecting an as-a-service infrastructure solution provider will be the provider’s ability to enable easy/consistent connectivity and the provider’s established software partner portfolio.

    In cases where IT organizations want to host a self-managed data center or local cloud, you can expect, that VMware is going to provide a new and appropriate licensing model for it.