A few months ago I wrote the article 10 Things You Didn’t Know About vSphere+, which gives you a good overview of vSphere+ and VCF+, and some information about licensing. A few things have changed and been added since then and I would like to share some of the information with you.
1) vSphere+ Standard Edition
Some customers only need the feature set of vSphere Standard but were very interested in having the benefits that come with the (VMware) cloud connectivity. VMware listened to its customers and introduced vSphere+ Standard back in December 2022. What is included?
vSphere Standard features
vCenter Standard (unlimited number of deployments)
Admin Services (Cloud Console)
2) vSAN+ Standard and Advanced Edition
To mirror the vSAN perpetual license editions, VMware released vSAN+ Standard and vSAN+ Advanced in December 2022 as well.
3) Grace Period when moving from perpetual to subscription licensing
Customers need to move their existing perpetual licenses within 90 days to vSphere+/vSAN+, see here.
If Customer receives its entitlement to vSphere+ or vSAN+ through a VMware subscription upgrade program, then Customer must, within 90 days after purchase of the entitlement, relinquish its entitlements to any relevant vSphere or vSAN on-premises perpetual licenses (as applicable) that were exchanged through the subscription upgrade program (“Exchanged Licenses”).
5) What if I don’t renew my vSphere+/vSAN+ subscription?
You will be out of compliance, but your environment is still going to work. And you will not receive support from VMware’s Global Support anymore during that time.
6) Which data is transmitted to VMware Cloud?
According to this article, the following data is transmitted:
vCenter Server Inventory (transmission frequency: 24h)
Log Data (transmission frequency: continuous)
Performance Data (transmission frequency: 5min)
Consumption Data (transmission frequency: 15min)
Feature Usage (transmission frequency: 5min)
Entitlement (transmission frequency: as necessary)
7) Aria Universal Suite & vSphere+ (vCloud Suite+)
The subscription version of vCloud Suite is vCloud Suite+ (vCS+). vCS+ comes also in three editions: Standard, Advanced, Enterprise
8) What about VMware Horizon and vSphere+?
If you are using vSphere (for Desktop) that came as a bundle with VMware Horizon, then vSphere cannot be upgraded to vSphere+. Consult the product interoperability matrix for more information. If you are using Horizon as a standalone product on top of vSphere+, I don’t see any issues.
9) What are vSphere+ add-on services?
Currently, vSphere+ comes with a centralized cloud console that provides consolidated management of all vSphere+ deployments. Customers also get the Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) and Tanzu Mission Control Essentials as part of vSphere+.
Add-On #1: Aria Operations
Powered by Aria Operations (formerly known as vRealize Operations), vSphere+ provides an overview of the resource usage of all the clusters associated with the vCenter Server instances that are connected to your vCenter Cloud Gateway(s). You can monitor and analyze details such as hosts, cores, VMs, and remaining capacity on each cluster. You can also get a view of the number of days remaining until the cluster reaches its usable capacity.
Add-On #2: VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR)
You can protect VMs and manage their protection status directly from the VMware Cloud Console if you have a VCDR subscription.
Future Add-Ons
Without making any commitment and knowing the vSphere+ roadmap, it seems that VMware is going to bring parts of the VMware Data Services portfolio as an add-on service. More information can be found here.
10) Counting Cores for vSphere+ and vSAN+ Licensing
VMware has created a tool to identify the number of core licenses that are required to upgrade existing vSphere/vSAN deployment to vSphere+/vSAN+. William Lam has created two blogs that should help you using the script:
The world is creating and consuming more data than ever. There are multiple reasons that can explain this trend. Data creates the foundation for many digital products and services. And we read more and more about companies that want or need to keep their data on-premises because of reasons like data proximity, performance, data privacy, data sovereignty, data security, and predictable cost control. We also know that the edge is growing much faster than large data centers. These and other factors are the reasons why CIOs and decision-makers are now focusing on data more than ever before.
We live in a digital era where data is one of the most valuable assets. The whole economy from the government to local companies would not be able to function without data. Hence, it makes sense to structure and analyze the data, so a company’s data infrastructure becomes a profit center and is not just seen as a cost center anymore.
Data Sprawl
A lot of enterprises are confronted with the so-called data sprawl. Data sprawl means that an organization’s data is stored on and consumed by different devices and operating systems in different locations. There are cases where the consumers and the IT teams are not sure anymore where some of the data is stored and how it should be accessed. This is a huge risk and results in a loss of security and productivity.
Since the discussions about sovereign clouds and data sovereignty have started, it has never been more important where a company’s data resides, and where and how one can consume that data.
Enterprises have started to follow a cloud-smart approach: They put the right application and its data in the right cloud, based on the right reasons. In other words, they think twice now where and how they store their data.
What databases are popular?
When talking to developers and IT teams, I mostly received the following names (in no particular order):
Oracle
MSSQL
MySQL
PostgreSQL
I think it would be a fair statement to make that a lot of customers are looking for alternatives to reduce expensive database and database management solutions (DBMS). It seems that Postgres and MySQL earned a lot of popularity over the past years, while Oracle is still considered one of the best databases on the market – even seen as one of the most expensive and least liked solutions. But I also hear other solutions like MongoDB, MariaDB, and Redis mentioned in more discussions.
DBaaS and Public Cloud Characteristics
It is nothing new: Developers are looking for a public-cloud-like experience for their on-premises deployments. They want an easy and smooth self-service experience without the need for opening tickets and waiting for several days to get their database up and running. And we also know that open-source and freedom of choice are becoming more important to companies and their developers. Some of the main drivers here are costs and vendor lock-in.
IT teams on the other side want to provide security and compliance, more standardization around versions and types, and an easy way to backup and restore databases. But the truth is, that a lot of companies are struggling to provide this kind of Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) experience to their developers.
The idea and expectation of DBaaS are to reduce management and operational efforts with the possibility to easily scale databases up and down. The difference between the public cloud DBaaS offering and your on-premises data center infrastructure is the underlying physical and virtual platform.
On-premises it could be theoretically any hardware, but VMware vSphere is still the most used virtualization platform for an enterprise’s data (center) infrastructure.
VMware vSphere and Data
VMware shared the information that studying their telemetry from their customer base showed that almost 25% of VMware workloads are data workloads (databases, data warehouses, big data analytics, data queueing, and caching) and it looks like that MS SQL Server still has the biggest share of all databases that are hosted on-premises.
They are also seeing a high double-digit growth (approx. 70-90%) when it comes to MySQL and steady growth with PostgreSQL. Rank 4 is probably Redis followed by MongoDB.
VMware Data Solutions
VMware Data Solutions, formerly known as Tanzu Data Services, is a powerful part of the entire VMware portfolio and consists of:
VMware GemFire – Fast, consistent data for web-scaling concurrent requests fulfills the promise of highly responsive applications.
VMware RabbitMQ – A fast, dependable enterprise message broker that provides reliable communication among servers, apps, and devices.
VMware Greenplum – VMware Greenplum is a massively parallel processing database. Greenplum is based on open-source Postgres, enabling Data Warehousing, aggregation, AI/ML and extreme query speed.
VMware SQL – VMware’s open-source SQL Database (Postgres & MySQL) is a Relational database service providing cost-efficient and flexible deployments on-demand and at scale. Available on any cloud, anywhere.
VMware Data Services Manager – Reduce operational costs and increase developer agility with VMware Data Services Manager, the modern platform to manage and consume databases on vSphere.
VMware Data Services Manager and VMware SQL
VMware SQL allows customers to deploy curated versions of PostgreSQL and MySQL and DSM is the solution that enables customers to create this DBaaS experience their developers are looking for.
Data Services Manager has the following key features:
Provisioning – Provision different configurations of databases (MySQL, Postgres, and SQL Server) with either freely configurable or pre-defined sizing of compute and memory resources, depending on user permissions
Backup & Restore – Backup, Transactional log, Point in Time Recovery (PiTR), on-demand or as scheduled
Scaling – Modify instances depending on usage (scale up, scale down, disk extension)
Replication – Replicate (Cold/Hot or Read Replicas) across managed zones
Monitoring – Monitor database engine, vSphere infrastructure, networking, and more.
…and supports the following components and versions (with DSM v1.4):
MySQL 8.0.30
Postgres 10.23.0, 11.18.0, 12.13.0, 13.9.0
MSSQL Server 2019 (Standard, Developer, Enterprise Edition)
Companies with a lot of databases have now a way at least to manage, control and secure Postgres, MySQL and MSSQL DB instances from a centralized tool than can be accessed via the UI or API.
Project Moneta
VMware’s vision is to become the cloud platform of choice. What started with compute, storage and network, continues with data: make it as easy to consume as the rest of their software-defined data center stack.
VMware has started with DSM and sees Moneta, which is still an R&D project, as the next evolution. The focus of Moneta is to bring better self-service and programmatic consumption capabilities (e.g., integration with GitHub).
Project Moneta will provide native integration with vSphere+ and the Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI). While nothing is official yet, I think of it as a vSphere+ and VMware Cloud add-on service that would provide data infrastructure capabilities.
Final Words
If your developers want to use PostgreSQL, MySQL and MSSQL, and if your IT struggles to deploy, manage, secure and backup those databases, then DSM with Tanzu SQL can help. Both solutions are also perfectly made for disconnected use cases or airgapped environments.
Note: The DB engines are certified, tested and supported by VMware.
A customer of mine asked me a few days ago: “Is it not possible to get NSX Security features without the network virtualization capabilities?”. I wrote it already in my blog “VMware is Becoming a Leading Cybersecurity Vendor” that you do not NSX’s network virtualization editions or capabilities if you are only interested in “firewalling” or NSX security features.
If you google “nsx security”, you will not find much. But there is a knowledge base article that describes the NSX Security capabilities from the “Distributed Firewall” product line: Product offerings for NSX-T 3.2 Security (87077).
Believe it or not, there are customers that haven’t started their zero-trust or “micro-segmentation” journey yet. Segmentation is about preventing lateral (east-west) movement. The idea is to divide the data center infrastructure into smaller security zones and that the traffic between the zones (and between workloads) is inspected based on the organization’s defined policies.
If you are one of them and want to deliver east-west traffic introspection using distributed firewalls, then these NSX Security editions are relevant for you:
VMware NSX Distributed Firewall
NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW)
NSX DFW with Threat Prevention
NSX DFW with Advanced Threat Prevention
VMware NSX Gateway Firewall
NSX Gateway Firewall (GFW)
NSX Gateway Firewall with Threat Prevention
NSX Gateway Firewall with Advanced Threat Prevention
Network Detection and Response
Network Detection and Response (standalone on-premises offering)
The NSX Distributed Firewall is a hypervisor kernel-embedded stateful firewall that lets you create access control policies based on vCenter objects like datacenters and clusters, virtual machine names and tags, IP/VLAN/VXLAN addresses, as well as user group identity from Active Directory.
If a VM gets vMotioned to another physical host, you do not need to rewrite any firewall rules.
The distributed nature of the firewall provides a scale-out architecture that automatically extends firewall capacity when additional hosts are added to a data center.
Should you be interested in “firewalling” only, want to implement access controls for east-west traffic (micro-segmentation) only, but do not need threat prevention (TP) capabilities, then “NSX Distributed Firewall Edition” is perfect for you.
So, which features does the NSX DFW edition include?
The NSX DFW edition comes with these capabilities:
L2 – L4 firewalling
L7 Application Identity-based firewalling
User Identity-based firewalling
NSX Intelligence (flow visualization and policy recommendation)
Aria Operations for Logs (formerly known as vRealize Log Insight)
What is the difference between NSX DFW and NSX DFW with TP?
With “NSX DFW with TP”, you would get the following additional features:
Distributed Intrusion Detection Services (IDS)
Distributed Behavioral IDS
Distributed Intrusion Prevention Service (IPS)
Distributed IDS Event Forwarding to NDR
Where does the NSX Distributed Firewall sit?
This question comes up a lot because customers understand that this is not an agent-based solution but something that is built into the VMware ESXi hypervisor.
The NSX DFW sits in the virtual patch cable, between the VM and the virtual distributed switch (VDS):
Note: Prior to NSX-T Data Center 3.2, VMs must have their vNIC connected to an NSX overlay or VLAN segment to be DFW-protected. In NSX-T Data Center 3.2, distributed firewall protects workloads that are natively connected to a VDS distributed port group (DVPG).
VMware NSX Gateway Firewall
The NSX Gateway Firewall extends the advanced threat prevention (ATP) capabilities of the NSX Distributed Firewall to physical workloads in your private cloud. It is a software-only, L2 – L7 firewall that includes capabilities such as IDS and IPS, URL filtering and malware detection as well as routing and VPN functionality.
If you are not interested in ATP capabilities yet, you can start with the “NSX Gateway Firewall” edition. What is the difference between all NSX GFW editions?
The NSX GFW can be deployed as a virtual machine or with an ISO image that can run on a physical server and it shares the same management console as the NSX Distributed Firewall.
Do you have an opinion about cross-cloud mobility and application portability? If yes, what about this is important to you? How do you intend to achieve this kind of cloud operating model? Is it about flexibility or more about a cloud-exit strategy? Just because we can, does it mean we should? Will it ever become a reality? These are just some of the answers I am looking for.
I am writing a book about this topic and looking for cloud architects and decision-makers who would like to sit down with me via Zoom or MS Teams to discuss the challenges of multi-cloud and how to achieve workload mobility or application/data portability. I just started interviewing chief architects, CTOs and cloud architects from VMware, partners, customers and public cloud providers (like Microsoft, AWS and Google) as part of my research.
The below questions led me to the book idea.
What is Cross-Cloud Mobility and Application Portability about?
Cross-cloud mobility refers to the ability of an organization to move its applications and workloads between different cloud computing environments. This is an important capability for organizations that want to take advantage of the benefits of using multiple cloud providers, such as access to a wider range of services and features, and the ability to negotiate better terms and pricing.
To achieve cross-cloud mobility, organizations need to use technologies and approaches that are compatible with multiple cloud environments. This often involves using open standards and APIs, as well as adopting a microservices architecture and containerization, which make it easier to move applications and workloads between different clouds.
Another key aspect of cross-cloud mobility is the ability to migrate data between different clouds without losing any of its quality or integrity. This requires the use of robust data migration tools and processes, as well as careful planning and testing to ensure that the migrated data is complete and accurate.
In addition to the technical challenges of achieving cross-cloud mobility, there are also organizational and business considerations. For example, organizations need to carefully evaluate their use of different cloud providers, and ensure that they have the necessary contracts and agreements in place to allow for the movement of applications and workloads between those providers.
Overall, cross-cloud mobility is an important capability for organizations that want to take advantage of the benefits of using multiple cloud providers. By using the right technologies and approaches, organizations can easily and securely move their applications (application portability) and workloads between different clouds, and take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of the cloud.
What is a Cloud-Exit Strategy?
A cloud-exit strategy is a plan for transitioning an organization’s applications and workloads away from a cloud computing environment. This can be necessary for a variety of reasons, such as when an organization wants to switch to a different cloud provider, when it wants to bring its applications and data back in-house, or when it simply no longer needs to use the cloud. A cloud-exit strategy typically includes several key components, such as:
Identifying the specific applications and workloads that will be transitioned away from the cloud, and determining the timeline for the transition.
Developing a plan for migrating the data and applications from the cloud to the new environment, including any necessary data migration tools and processes.
Testing the migration process to ensure that it is successful and that the migrated applications and data are functioning properly.
Implementing any necessary changes to the organization’s network and infrastructure to support the migrated applications and data.
Ensuring that the organization has a clear understanding of the costs and risks associated with the transition, and that it has a plan in place to mitigate those risks.
By having a well-defined cloud-exit strategy, organizations can ensure that they are able to smoothly and successfully transition away from a cloud computing environment when the time comes.
What is a Cloud-Native Application?
A cloud-native application is a type of application that is designed to take advantage of the unique features and characteristics of cloud computing environments. This typically includes using scalable, distributed, and highly available components, as well as leveraging the underlying infrastructure of the cloud to deliver a highly performant and resilient application. Cloud-native applications are typically built using a microservices architecture, which allows for flexibility and scalability, and are often deployed using containers to make them portable across different cloud environments.
Does Cloud-Native mean an application needs to perform equally well on any cloud?
No, being cloud-native does not necessarily mean that an application will perform equally well on any cloud. While cloud-native applications are designed to be portable and scalable, the specific cloud environment in which they are deployed can still have a significant impact on their performance and behavior.
For example, some cloud providers may offer specific services or features that can be leveraged by a cloud-native application to improve its performance, while others may not. Additionally, the underlying infrastructure of different cloud environments can vary, which can affect the performance and availability of a cloud-native application. As a result, it is important for developers to carefully consider the specific cloud environment in which their cloud-native application will be deployed, and to optimize its performance for that environment.
How can you avoid a cloud lock-in?
A cloud lock-in refers to a situation where an organization becomes dependent on a particular cloud provider and is unable to easily switch to a different provider without incurring significant costs or disruptions. To avoid a cloud lock-in, organizations can take several steps, such as:
Choosing a cloud provider that offers tools and services that make it easy to migrate to a different provider, such as data migration tools and APIs for integrating with other cloud services.
Adopting a multi-cloud strategy, where the organization uses multiple cloud providers for different workloads or applications, rather than relying on a single provider.
Ensuring that the organization’s applications and data are portable, by using open standards and technologies that are supported by multiple cloud providers.
Regularly evaluating the organization’s use of cloud services and the contracts with its cloud provider, to ensure that it is getting the best value and flexibility.
Developing a cloud governance strategy that includes processes and policies for managing the organization’s use of cloud services, and ensuring that they align with the organization’s overall business goals and objectives.
By taking these steps, organizations can avoid becoming overly dependent on a single cloud provider and maintain the flexibility to switch to a different provider if needed.
Final Words
Multi-Cloud is very complex and has different layers like compute, storage, network, security, monitoring and observability, operations, and cost management. Add topics like open-source software, databases, Kubernetes, developer experience, and automation to the mix, then we will have most probably enough to discuss. 🙂
Update: Please follow this link to get to the updated version with VCF 5.0.
This technical overview supersedes this version, which was based on VMware Cloud Foundation 4.3, and now covers all capabilities and enhancements that were delivered with VCF 4.5.
What is VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)?
VMware Cloud Foundation is a multi-cloud platform that provides a full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) that is made for modernizing data centers and deploying modern container-based applications. VCF is based on different components like vSphere (compute), vSAN (storage), NSX (networking), and some parts of the Aria Suite (formerly vRealize Suite). The idea of VCF follows a standardized, automated, and validated approach that simplifies the management of all the needed software-defined infrastructure resources.
This stack provides customers with consistent infrastructure and operations in a cloud operating model that can be deployed on-premises, at the edge, or in the public cloud.
Tanzu Standard Edition is included in VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise editions.
Note: The VMware Cloud Foundation Starter, Standard, Advanced and Enterprise editions do NOT include Tanzu Standard.
What software is being delivered in VMware Cloud Foundation?
The BoM (bill of materials) is changing with each VCF release. With VCF 4.5 the following components and software versions are included:
VMware SDDC Manager 4.5
vSphere 7.0 Update 3g
vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3h
vSAN 7.0 Update 3g
NSX-T 3.2.1.2
VMware Workspace ONE Access 3.3.6
vRealize Log Insight 8.8.2
vRealize Operations 8.8.2
vRealize Automation 8.8.2
(vRealize Network Insight)
Note: Only one vCenter Server license is required for all vCenter Servers deployed in a VMware Cloud Foundation system.
What is VMware Cloud Foundation+ (VCF+)?
With the launch of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.5 in early October 2022, VCF introduced new consumption and licensing models.
VCF+ is the next cloud-connected SaaS product offering, which builds on vSphere+ and vSAN+. VCF+ delivers cloud connectivity to centralize management and a new consumption-based OPEX model to consume VMware Cloud services.
VCF+ components are cloud entitled, metered, and billed. There are no license keys in VCF+. Once the customer is onboarded to VCF+, the components are entitled from the cloud and periodically metered and billed.
Note: In a given VCF+ instance, you can only have VCF+ licensing, you cannot mix VCF-S (term) and VCF perpetual licenses with VCF+.
What are other VCF subscription offerings?
VMware Cloud Foundation Subscription (VCF-S) is an on-premises (disconnected) term subscription offer that is available as a standalone VCF-S offer using physical core metrics and term subscription license keys.
You can also purchase VCF+ and VCF-S licenses as part of the VMware Cloud Universal program.
Note: You can mix VCF-S with perpetual license keys as long as you use the same key (either or) for a workload domain.
Which VMware Cloud Foundation editions are available?
VCF is made for greenfield deployments (brownfield not supported) and supports two different architecture models:
Standard Architecture
Consolidated Architecture
The standard architecture separates management workloads and lets them run on a dedicated management workload domain. Customer workloads are deployed on a separate virtual infrastructure workload domain (VI workload domain). Each workload domain is managed by a separate vCenter Server instance, which allows autonomous licensing and lifecycle management.
Note: The standard architecture is the recommended model because it separates management workloads from customer workloads.
Customers with a small environment (or a PoC) can start with a consolidated architecture. This allows you to run customer and management workloads together on the same workload domain (WLD).
Note: The management workload domain’s default cluster datastore must use vSAN. Other WLDs can use vSAN, NFS, FC, and vVols for the principal storage.
What is a vSAN Stretched Cluster?
vSAN stretched clusters extend a vSAN cluster from a single site to two sites for a higher level of availability and inter-site load balancing.
Does VCF provide flexible workload domain sizing?
Yes, that’s possible. You can license the WLDs based on your needs and use the editions that make the most sense depending on your use cases.
How many physical nodes are required to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation?
A minimum of four physical nodes is required to start in a consolidated architecture or to build your management workload domain. Four nodes are required to ensure that the environment can tolerate a failure while another node is being updated.
VI workload domains require a minimum of three nodes.
This means, to start with a standard architecture, you need to have the requirements (and money) to start with at least sevenphysicalnodes.
What are the minimum hardware requirements?
These minimum specs have been listed for the management WLD since VCF 4.0 (September 2020):
Can I mix vSAN ReadyNodes and Dell EMC VxRail deployments?
No. This is not possible.
What about edge/remote use cases?
When you would like to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation workload domains at a remote site, you can deploy so-called “VCF Remote Clusters”. Those remote workload domains are managed by the VCF instance at the central site and you can perform the same full-stack lifecycle management for the remote sites from the central SDDC Manager.
Prerequisites to deploy remote clusters can be found here.
Note: If vSAN is used, VCF only supports a minimum of 3 nodes and a maximum of 4 nodes per VCF Remote Cluster. If NFS, vVOLs or Fiber Channel is used as principal storage, then VCF supports a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 4 nodes.
Important: Remote clusters and remote workload domains are not supported when VCF+ is enabled.
Does VCF support HCI Mesh?
Yes. VMware Cloud Foundation 4.2 and later supports sharing remote datastores with HCI Mesh for VI workload domains.
HCI Mesh is a software-based approach for disaggregation of compute and storage resources in vSAN. HCI Mesh brings together multiple independent vSAN clusters by enabling cross-cluster utilization of remote datastore capacity within vCenter Server. HCI Mesh enables you to efficiently utilize and consume data center resources, which provides simple storage management at scale.
Note: At this time, HCI Mesh is not supported with VCF ROBO.
What is SDDC Manager?
SDDC Manager is a preconfigured virtual appliance that is deployed in the management workload domain for creating workload domains, provisioning additional virtual infrastructure and lifecycle management of all the software-defined data center (SDDC) management components.
You use SDDC Manager in VMware Cloud Foundation to perform the following operations:
Commissioning or decommissioning ESXi hosts
Deployment of workload domains
Extension of clusters in the management and workload domains with ESXi hosts
Adding clusters to the management domain and workload domains
Support for network pools for host configuration in a workload domain
Product licenses storage
Deployment of vRealize Suite components.
Lifecycle management of the virtual infrastructure components in all workload domains, and of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager components.
Certificate management
Password management and rotation
NSX-T Edge cluster deployment in the management domain and workload domains
Backup configuration
How many resources does the VCF management WLD need during the bring-up process?
We know that VCF includes vSphere (ESXi and vCenter), vSAN, SDDC Manager, NSX-T and eventually some components of the vRealize Suite. The following table should give you an idea what the resource requirements look like to get VCF up and running:
If you are interested to know how many resources the Aria Suite (formerly vRealize Suite) will consume of the management workload domain, have a look at this table:
How can I migrate my workloads from a non-VCF environment to a new VCF deployment?
VMware HCX provides a path to modernize from a legacy data center architecture by migrating to VMware Cloud Foundation.
What is NSX Advanced Load Balancer?
NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) formerly known as Avi is a solution that provides advanced load balancing capabilities for VMware Cloud Foundation.
Which security add-ons are available with VMware Cloud Foundation?
VMware has different workload and network security offerings to complement VCF:
Yes, you can. With the VLC Lab Constructor, you can deploy an automated VCF instance in a nested configuration. There is also a Slack VLC community for support.
VMware Explore Europe 2022 is history. This year felt different and very special! Rooms were fully booked, and people were queuing up in the hallways. The crowd had a HUGE interest in technical sessions from known speakers like Cormac Hogan, Frank Denneman, Duncan Epping, William Lam, and many more!
Compared to VMware Explore US, there were not that many major announcements, but I thought it might be helpful again to list the major announcements, that seem to be the most interesting and relevant ones.
VMware Aria Hub Free Tier
For me, the biggest and most important announcement was the Aria Hub free tier. I am convinced that Aria Hub will be the next big thing for VMware and I am sure that it will change how the world manages a multi-cloud infrastructure.
VMware Aria Hub is a multi-cloud management platform that unifies the management disciplines of cost, performance, configuration, and delivery automation with a common control plane and data model for any cloud, any platform, any tool, and every persona. It helps you align multiple teams and solutions on a common understanding of resources, relationships, historical changes, applications, and accounts, fundamental to managing a multi-cloud environment.
The new free tier enables customers to inventory, map, filter, and search resources from up to two of their native public cloud accounts, currently from either AWS or Azure. It also helps you understand the relationships of your resources to other resources, policies, and other key components in your public cloud and Kubernetes environments. WOW!
Many customers asked for it, it is coming! Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) will become available on-premises for sovereign cloud partners/providers and enterprise customers!
There is a private beta coming. Hence, I cannot provide more information for now.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1
At VMware Explore US 2022, VMware announced Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) 2.0, and at Explore Europe 2022, they announced TKG 2.1, which adds support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Additionally, it will now also have the option of leveraging VMs as the management cluster. Each will be familiar, but now they both support a single, unified way of cluster creation using a new API called ClusterClass.
VMware unveiled new enhancements for Tanzu Service Mesh (TSM) as well, which are going to bring new capabilities that would provide VM discovery and integration into the mesh, providing the ability to combine VMs and containers in the same service mesh for secure communications and to apply consistent policy.
VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal (VMC-E)
The last thing I want to highlight is the VMC-E announcement. It is a combination of VMware Cloud IaaS with Equinix Metal hardware as-a-service, which can be deployed in over 30 Equinix global data centers.
VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal is a great option for enterprises that want the flexibility and performance of the Public Cloud, where business requirements prevent moving data or applications to the public cloud. It offers full compatibility and consistency with on-premises and VMware Cloud operational models and policies and zero downtime migration
VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal is a fully managed solution by VMware (delivered, operated, managed, supported).
Michael Rebmann is currently working as a Lead Solution Architect for VMware by Broadcom in Switzerland and focuses on some of the largest and most strategic customers. Michael engages with the community as a co-leader of the Swiss German VMUG and became a VMware vExpert PRO in 2022. Opinions are his own.
VMware CMTY Podcast #607 – VMware Cloud Foundation
VMware CMTY Podcast #546 – VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload
