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.
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).
Everyone talks about multi-cloud and in most cases they mean the so-called big 3 that consist of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. If we are looking at the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services, one can also spot Alibaba Cloud, Oracle, IBM and Tencent Cloud.
VMware has a strategic partnership with 6 of these hyperscalers and all of these 6 public clouds offer VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) stack on top of their global infrastructure:
While I mostly have to talk about AWS, AVS and GCVE, I am finally getting the chance to attend a OCVS customer workshop led by Oracle. That is why I wanted to prepare myself accordingly and share my learnings with you.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud dominate the cloud market, but Oracle has unique capabilities and characteristics that no one else can deliver. Additionally, Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has shown an impressive pace of innovation in the past two years, which led to a 16% increase on Gartner’s solution scorecard for OCI (November 2021, from 62% to 78%), which put them into the fourth place behind Alibaba Cloud!
What is Oracle Cloud VMware Solution?
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution or OCVS is a result of the strategic partnership announced by VMware and Oracle in September 2019. Like the other VMware Cloud solutions like VMC on AWS, AVS or GCVE, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution will enable customers to run VMware Cloud Foundation on Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure.
Meaning, running an on-premises VMware-based infrastructure combined with OCVS should make cloud migrations easier and faster, because it is the same foundation with vSphere, vSAN and NSX.
Key Differentiator #1 – Different SDDC Bundles
Customers can choose between a multi-host SDDC (minimum of 3 production hosts) and a single-host SDDC, that is made for test and dev environments. Oracle guarantees a monthly uptime percentage of at least 99.9% for the OCVS service.
OCVS offers three different ESXi software versions and supports the following versions of other components:
The VMware Cloud offerings from AWS, Azure or Google are all vendor-controlled and customers get limited access to the VMware hosts and infrastructure components. With Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, customers get baremetal servers and the same operational experience as on-premises. This means full control over VMware infrastructure and its components:
SSH access to ESXi
Edit vSAN cluster settings
Browse datastores; upload and delete files
Customer controls the upgrade policy (version, time, defer)
Oracle has NO ACCESS after the SDDC provisioning!
Note: According to Oracle it takes about 2 hours to deploy a new SDDC that consists of 3 production hosts.
Customers can choose between Intel- and AMD-based hosts:
Two-socket BM.DenseIO2.52 with two CPUs each running 26 cores (Intel)
Two-socket BM.DenselO.E4.128 with two CPUs each running 16 cores (AMD)
Two-socket BM.DenselO.E4.128 with two CPUs each running 32 cores (AMD)
Two-socket BM.DenselO.E4.128 with two CPUs each running 64 cores (AMD)
Details about the compute shapes can be found here.
Key Differentiator #3 – Availability Domains
To provide high throughput and low latency, an OCVS SDDC is deployed by default across a minimum of three fault domains within a single availability domain in a region. But, upon request it is also possible to deploy your SDDC across multiple availability domains (AD), which comes with a few limitations:
While OCVS can scale from 3 up to 64 hosts in a single SDDC, Oracle recommends a maximum of 16 ESXi hosts in a multi-AD architecture
This architecture can have impacts on vSAN storage synchronization, and rebuild and resync times
Most hyperscaler only let you use two availability zones and fault domains in the same region. With Oracle it is possible to distribute the minimum of 3 hosts to 3 different availability domains. An availability domain consists of one or more data centers within the same region.
Note: Traffic between ADs within a region is free of charge.
Key Differentiator #4 – Networking
Because OCVS is customer-managed and can be operated like your on-premises environment, you also get “full” control over the network. OCVS is installed within a customers’ tencancy, which gives customer the advantage to run their VMware SDDC workloads in the same subnet as OCI native services. This provides lower latency to the OCI native services, especially for customers that are using Exadata for example.
Another important advantage of this architecture is capability to create VLAN-backed port groups on your vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS).
Key Differentiator #5 – External Storage
Since March 2022 the OCI File Storage service (NFS) is certified as secondary storage for an OCVS cluster. This allows customers to scale the storage layer of the SDDC without adding new compute resources at the same time.
And just announced on 22 August 2022, with Oracle’s summer ’22 release, OCVS customers can now connect to a certified OCI Block Storage through iSCSI as a second external storage option.
Block Storage provides high IOPS to OCI, and data is stored redundantly across storage servers with built-in repair mechanisms with a 99.99% uptime SLA.
Key Differentiator #6 – Billing Options
OCVS is currently only sold and supported by Oracle. Like with other cloud providers and VMware Cloud offerings, customers have different pricing options depending upon their commitment levels:
On-demand (hourly)
1 month
1 year
3 years
The rule of thumb for any hyperscaler says, that a 1-year commitment get around 30% discount and the 3-year commitments are around 50% discount.
The unique characteristic here is the monthly commitment option, which is caluclated with a discount of 16-17% depending on the compute shape.
Currently, OCI is available in 39 different cloud regions (21 countries) and Oracle announced five more by the end of 2022. On day one of each region, OCVS is available with a consistent and predictable pricing that doesn’t vary from region to region.
To compare: AWS has launched 27 different regions with 19 being able to host the VMware Cloud on AWS service. In Switzerland, AWS just opened their new data center without having the VMware Cloud on AWS service available, while OCVS is already available in Zurich.
Use Cases
While OCVS is a great solution for joint VMware and Oracle customers, it is not necessary for customers to using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure native solutions.
Data Center Expansion
As you just learned before, OCVS is a great fit if you want to maintain the same VMware software versions on-premises and in OCI. The classic use case here is the pure data center expansion scenario, which allows you to stretch your on-premises infrastructure to OCI, without the need to use their native services.
VMware Horizon on OCVS
As I mentioned at the beginning, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is based on VMware Cloud Foundation and so it is no surprise that Horizon on OCVS is fully supported.
The Horizon deployment on OCVS works a little bit different compared to the on-premises installation and there is no feature parity yet:
Horizon on OCVS does not support vGPUs yet.
Horizon on OCVS does not support IPv6 yet.
Horizon on OCVS does not support vTPM yet. In this situation it is recommended to use shielded OCVS instances.
Note: The support of NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi) is still a roadmap item
VMware Tanzu for OCVS
Since April 2022 it is possible for joint VMware and Oracle customers to use Tanzu Standard and its components with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Tanzu Standard comes with VMware’s Kubernetes distribution Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and Tanzu Mission Control, which is the right solution for multi-cloud, multi-cluster K8s management.
With TMC you can deploy and manage TKG clusters on vSphere on-premises or on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. You can even attach existing Kubernetes clusters from other vendors like RedHat OpenShift, Amazon EKS or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Last year at VMworld 2021, VMware mentioned and announced a lot of (new) projects they are working on. What happened to them and which new VMware projects have been mentioned this year at VMware Explore so far?
Project Ensemble – VMware Aria Hub
VMware unveiled their unified multi-cloud management portfolio called VMware Aria, which provides a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud native applications.
VMware Aria is anchored by VMware Aria Hub (formerly known as Project Ensemble), which provides centralized views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment, and leverages VMware Aria Graph to provide a common definition of applications, resources, roles, and accounts.
VMware Aria Graph provides a single source of truth that is updated in near-real time. Other solutions on the market were designed in a slower moving era, primarily for change management processes and asset tracking. By contrast, VMware Aria Graph is designed expressly for cloud-native operations.
Project Arctic has been introduced last year as a Technology Preview and was described as “the next step in the evolution of vSphere in a multi-cloud world”. What has started with the idea of bringing VMware Cloud services closer to vSphere, has evolved to a even more interesting and enterprise-ready version called vSphere+ and vSAN+. It includes developer services that consist of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid runtime, Tanzu Mission Control Essentials and NSX Advanced Load Balancer Essentials. VMware is going to add more and more VMware Cloud add-on services in the future. Additionally, VMware even introduced VMware Cloud Foundation+.
Project Iris – Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu
VMware mentioned Project Iris very briefly last year at VMworld. In February 2022, Project Iris became generally available and is since then known as Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu.
Project Northstar
At VMware Explore on day 1, VMware introduced Project Northstar, which will provide customers a centralized cloud console that gives them instant access to networking and security services, such as network and security policy controls, Network Detection and Response (NDR), NSX Intelligence, Advanced Load Balancing (ALB), Web Application Firewall (WAF), and HCX. Project Northstar will be able to apply consistent networking and security policies across private cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments.
At VMware Explore on day 1,VMware unveiled Project Watch, a new approach to multi-cloud networking and security that will provide advanced app-to-app policy controls to help with continuous risk and compliance assessment. In technology preview, Project Watch will help network security and compliance teams to continuously observe, assess, and dynamically mitigate risk and compliance problems in composite multi-cloud applications.
Project Trinidad
Also announced at VMware Explore day 1 and further explained at day 2, Project Trinidad extends VMware’s API security and analytics by deploying sensors on Kubernetes clusters and uses machine learning with business logic inference to detect anomalous behavior in east-west traffic between microservices.
Project Trinidad just dropped from @vmwocto xLabs! This project is near and dear to my heart! (Happy Independence Day 🇹🇹!!! 😉)
Project Narrows introduces a unique addition to Harbor, allowing end users to assess the security posture of Kubernetes clusters at runtime. Images previously undetected, will be scanned at the time of introduction to a cluster, so vulnerabilities can now be caught, images may be flagged, and workloads quarantined.
Project Narrows adding dynamic scanning to your software supply chain with Harbor is critical. It allows greater awareness and control of your running workloads than the traditional method of simply updating and storing workloads.
VMware is open sourcing the initial capabilities of Project Narrows on GitHub as the Cloud Native Security Inspector (CNSI) Project.
Also introduced on day 2, Project Keswick is about simplifying edge deployments at scale. It comes as an xLabs project coming out of the Advanced Technology Group in VMware’s Office of the CTO.
A Keswick deployment is entirely automated and uses Git as a single source of truth for a declarative way to manage your infrastructure and applications through desired state configuration enabled by GitOps. This ensures the infrastructure and applications running at the edge are always exactly what they need to be.
At VMware Explore 2022 day 2, VMware demonstrated what they believe to be the world’s first quantum-safe multi-cloud application!
VMware developed and presented Project Newcastle, a policy-based framework enabling and orchestrating cryptographic transition in modern applications.
Integrated with Tanzu Service Mesh, Project Newcastle gives users greater insight into the cryptography in their applications. But that’s not all — as a platform for cryptographic agility, Project Newcastle automates the process of reconfiguring an application’s cryptography to comply with user-defined policies and industry standards.
Closing Comment
Which VMware projects excite you the most? I’m definitely going with Project Ensemble (Aria Hub) and Project Newcastle!
VMworld is now VMware Explore and is currently happening in San Francisco! This is a consolidated of the announcements from day 1 (August 30th, 2022).
VMware Introduces vSphere 8, vSAN 8 and VMware Cloud Foundation+
VMware today introduced VMware vSphere 8 and VMware vSAN 8—major new releases of VMware’s compute and storage solutions.
vSphere 8 – vSphere 8 introduces vSphere on DPUs, previously known as Project Monterey. In close collaboration with technology partners AMD, Intel and NVIDIA as well as OEM system partners Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo, vSphere on DPUs will unlock hardware innovation helping customers meet the throughput and latency needs of modern distributed workloads. vSphere will enable this by offloading and accelerating network and security infrastructure functions onto DPUs from CPUs.
vSphere 8 will dramatically accelerate AI and machine learning applications by doubling the virtual GPU devices per VM, delivering a 4x increase of passthrough devices, and supporting vendor device groups which enable binding of high-speed networking devices and the GPU.
vSAN 8: vSAN 8 introduces breakthrough performance and hyper-efficiency. Built from the ground up, the new vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) will enhance the performance, storage efficiency, data protection and management of vSAN running on the latest generation storage devices. vSAN 8 will provide customers with a future ready infrastructure that supports modern TLC storage devices and delivers up to a 4x performance boost.
VMware Cloud Foundation+ – VMware introduces a new cloud-connected architecture for managing and operating full stack HCI in data centers. Built on vSphere+ and vSAN+, VMware Cloud Foundation+ will add a new cloud-connected architecture for managing and operating full-stack HCI in our data center or co-location facility.
VMware Cloud Foundation+ will deliver new admin, developer and hybrid cloud services through a simplified subscription model and keyless entitlement. VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 will enable VMware Cloud Foundation+ by adding vSphere+ and vSAN+, plus a cloud gateway that provides access to the VMware Cloud Console as part of the full stack architecture.
VMware Cloud for Hyperscalers
VMC on AWS – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) I4i instances for I/O-intensive Workloads: Powered by 3rd generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Ice Lake), Amazon EC2 instances help deliver better workload support and delivery, lower TCO, and increased scalability and application performance. Compared to I3, the I4i instances provide nearly twice the number of physical cores, twice the memory, three times the storage capacity, and three times the network bandwidth.
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Integration Availability – as a native AWS cloud storage service that is certified as a supplemental datastore for VMware Cloud on AWS, FSx for ONTAP offers fully managed shared storage built on the familiar NetApp ONTAP file system trusted by VMware customers running on premises today. Customers can now use FSx for ONTAP as a simple and elastic datastore for VMware Cloud on AWS, enabling them to scale storage up or down independently from compute while paying only for the resources they need.
VMware Cloud Flex Storage Availability – A new VMware-managed and natively integrated cloud storage and data management solution that offers supplemental datastore-level access for VMware Cloud on AWS. With just a few clicks in the VMware Cloud Console, customers can scale their storage environment without adding hosts, and elastically adjust storage capacity up or down as needed for every application. Customers also benefit from a simple, pay-as-you-consume pricing model. Together with VMware vSAN, VMware Cloud Flex Storage offers flexibility and customer value in terms of resilience, performance, scale, and cost in the cloud.
VMware Cloud Flex Compute – “Preview” of a new cloud compute model that will help customers get started faster with VMware Cloud on AWS. With this new model, VMware introduces a “resource-defined” cloud compute model in place of “hardware-defined” compute instance model which will provide customers higher flexibility, elasticity, and speed to better meet cost and performance requirements of enterprise applications. It will help customers get started faster with VMware Cloud on AWS by using smaller consumable units.
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution – New features and capabilities with VMware Tanzu Standard Edition and introduced support for single host SDDCs for non-production workloads.
VMware Cloud Management – VMware Aria
VMware unveiled a multi-cloud management portfolio called VMware Aria, which provides a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud native applications.
VMware Aria is a new brand for the vRealize components, Tanzu Observability by Wavefront and CloudHealth unified under one umbrella, one name.
The VMware products and services within the VMware Aria portfolio are:
VMware Aria is anchored by VMware Aria Hub (formerly known as Project Ensemble), which provides centralized views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment, and leverages VMware Aria Graph to provide a common definition of applications, resources, roles, and accounts.
VMware Aria Graph provides a single source of truth that is updated in near-real time. Other solutions on the market were designed in a slower moving era, primarily for change management processes and asset tracking. By contrast, VMware Aria Graph is designed expressly for cloud-native operations.
VMware Aria provides features and functions that span management disciplines and clouds to deliver unique value for multi-cloud governance, cross-cloud migration, and actionable business insights. In addition, there are three new end-to-end management services built on top of VMware Aria Hub and VMware Aria Graph:
VMware Aria Guardrails – Automate enforcement of cloud guardrails for networking, security, cost, performance, and configuration at scale for multi-cloud environments with an everything-as-code approach
VMware Aria Migration – Accelerate and simplify the multi-cloud migration journey by automating assessment, planning, and execution in conjunction with VMware HCX
VMware Aria Business Insights – Discern relevant business insights from full-stack event correlation leveraging AI/ML analytics
Networking and Security
Project Northstar – Project Northstar is a SaaS-based network and security offering that will empower NSX customers with a set of on-demand multi-cloud networking and security services, end-to-end visibility, and controls. Customers will be able to use a centralized cloud console to gain instant access to networking and security services, such as network and security policy controls, Network Detection and Response (NDR), NSX Intelligence, Advanced Load Balancing (ALB), Web Application Firewall (WAF), and HCX. It will support both private cloud and VMware Cloud deployments running on public clouds and enable enterprises to build flexible network infrastructure that they can spin up and down in minutes.
DPU-based Acceleration for NSX – Formerly known as Project Monterey, VMware announced that starting with NSX 4.0 and vSphere 8.0, customers can leverage DPU-based acceleration using SmartNICs. Offloading NSX services to the DPU can accelerate networking and security functions without impacting the host CPUs, addressing the needs of modern applications and other network-intensive and latency-sensitive applications.
Project Trinidad – Available as tech preview, Project Trinidad extends VMware’s API security and analytics by deploying sensors on Kubernetes clusters and uses machine learning with business logic inference to detect anomalous behavior in east-west traffic between microservices.
Project Watch – VMware unveiled Project Watch, a new approach to multi-cloud networking and security that will provide advanced app-to-app policy controls to help with continuous risk and compliance assessment. In technology preview, Project Watch will help network security and compliance teams to continuously observe, assess, and dynamically mitigate risk and compliance problems in composite multi-cloud applications.
Additionally, VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer adds new bot management capabilities to help enterprises address threats quickly and efficiently, providing enhanced multi-layer application protection with existing Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, and API security.
Edge
VMware Edge Compute Stack 2.0 – VMware announced the VMware Edge Compute Stack v1.0 last year and is now adding more features and functionalities optimized for different use cases at the enterprise edge – shipped with vSphere 8 and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0. VMware, for the first time, will introduce initial support for non-x86 processor-based specialized small form factor edge platforms to simultaneously run IT/OT workloads and workflows on a single stack.
VMware Private Mobile Network (Beta) – Delivered by service providers, this new managed service offering provides enterprises with private 4G/5G mobile connectivity in support of edge-native applications. VMware will empower partners with a single PMN orchestrator to operate multi-tenant private 4G/5G networks with an enterprise-grade solution.
Modern Applications (VMware Tanzu)
Tanzu Application Platform – VMware pre-announced new Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) 1.3 capabilities like the availability on RedHat OpenShift or the support for air-gapped installations for regulated and disconnected environments.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid – With the release of TKG 2.0, VMware now includes a unified experience for applications running on any cloud. In the near future, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0 should support both Supervisor-based and VM-based management cluster models. On vSphere 8, both Supervisor-based and VM-based models will be supported, and VM-based management clusters will continue to be available on previous versions of vSphere and public clouds. This means in other words, that VMware continues with their “TKGS” and “TKGm” flavors.
Support for customer-owned enterprise certificate authority through integration with Venafi
Improved security with enterprise-approved container image registries, data services support, external services support
and a global SLO dashboard that allows developers and site-reliability engineers to view all managed service SLOs, helping with capacity planning, troubleshooting, and understanding the health of their applications.
VMware unveiled how it is advancing self-configuring, self-healing and self-securing outcomes across four key technology areas that are delivered by the Anywhere Workspace platform:
VDI and DaaS
Digital Employee Experience
Unified Endpoint Management
Security
VMware is introducing a next generation of VMware Horizon Cloud that will enable multi-cloud agility and flexibility. This new release represents a major update to Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure that can dramatically simplify the infrastructure that needs to be deployed inside customer environments, reducing infrastructure costs in some cases by over 70% while increasing scalability and reliability of VMware’s DaaS platform.
Workspace ONE UEM’s Freestyle Orchestrator will be expanding to include support for mobile devices.
Workspace ONE support for Windows OS multi-user mode is now available in Tech Preview for Azure Active Directory-based deployments; and it will soon be extended to Active Directory-based deployments.
VMware also announced the coming tech preview of Workspace ONE Cloud Marketplace, which will feature dashboards, widgets, reports, Freestyle Orchestrator workflows, and other resources that can be imported to help customers adopt additional solutions.
Horizon Managed Desktop – I am very excited about this announcement, because it will provide a managed service offering that takes care of lifecycle services, support, and more, on top of a customer-provided infrastructure. This will help customers that don’t have in-house experts get to value with VDI faster.
Availability
VMware Cloud Foundation+, VMware vSphere 8, VMware vSAN 8 and VMware Edge Compute Stack 2.0 are all expected to be available by October 28, 2022 (the close of VMware’s Q3 FY23). VMware Private Mobile Network is expected to be available in beta in VMware’s Q3 FY23.
Closing Comment
Not bad for the first day, right? Stay tuned for more exciting VMware Explore announcements!
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.
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