VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal – The New Intercloud?

VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal – The New Intercloud?

It was November 2022 when VMware and Equinix announced an expanded partnership to deliver new infrastructure and multi-cloud services. Called VMware Cloud on Equinix, this solution combines VMware Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with Equinix Metal Hardware-as-a-Services (HWaaS) independently. In other words, the SDDC (software-defined data center) stack is sold by VMware, and HWaaS is sold by Equinix. Looking at this partnership and solution, one could say that Equinix might become “the” intercloud in this multi-cloud era.

What is VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal (VMC-E)?

VMC-E combines VMware’s managed and supported cloud IaaS with Equinix’s baremetal-as-a-service (BMaaS) offering. This gives enterprises the advantage to run this cloud offering almost everywhere globally. Another benefit is that VMC-E will be available in over 30 of the most interconnected global Equinix locations, connected to all the major public clouds and networks (Equinix Fabric).

Equinix Multi-Cloud App

What is Equinix Fabric?

This service allows organizations to connect to other Equinix customers and other internet resources like service providers:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Google Cloud
  • Oracle Cloud
  • Alibaba Cloud
  • IBM Cloud
  • and many more

For me, Equinix Fabric is an interesting way to interconnect different VMware-based Clouds like VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution, Google Cloud VMware Engine, Alibaba Cloud VMware Solution, or Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

VMC-E for multi-cloud apps?

A lot of enterprises are not “cloud-first” anymore, they became “cloud-smart”. They put the right apps in the right cloud based on the right reasons.

VMware Cloud-Smart

VMC-E has the potential to become a true multi-cloud enabler by letting VMware and Equinix customers move their applications to an ideal place. Imagine lifting and shifting a legacy application to VMC-E. This application then sits in the middle of all major clouds and customers can use different services and components for the same application. This is my definition of a multi-cloud app.

Multi-Cloud App on VMC-E

What are the use cases?

VMware and Equinix mention distributed environments and mission-critical applications that rely on high-performance network bandwidth and low latency, such as smart cities, video analytics, game development, VDI, real-time financial market trading, retail POS, IoT, and machine learning.

Which hosts are available?

VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal comes with multiple host configs that can be found here. It is not clear yet which host type(s) will be available during the initial lunch. But the tech preview on YouTube shows the “n3.xlarge.x86” instance type.

Tech Preview VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal - YouTube

How can I get VMC-E?

VMC-E is currently in an early access phase for selected customers in H1 2023.

Tech Preview VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal

Where can I get more information?

To learn more and to participate in the early access program for VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal, please email your interest to  .

10 More Things You Didn’t Know About vSphere+

10 More Things You Didn’t Know About vSphere+

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

vCloud Suite+ Editions 2023

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

vSphere+ vROps Add-On

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)

vSphere+ VCDR Add-On

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:

 

VMware vSphere – The Enterprise Data Platform

VMware vSphere – The Enterprise Data Platform

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.

VMware DSM Personas

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 Closer Look at VMware NSX Security

A Closer Look at VMware NSX Security

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.

Perimeter Defense vs Micro-Segmentation

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)

Note: If you are an existing NSX customer using network virtualization, please have a look at Product offerings for VMware NSX-T Data Center 3.2.x (86095).

VMware NSX Distributed Firewall

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):

NSX Distributed Firewall

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?

VMware 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.

VMware Cloud Foundation – A Technical Overview (based on VCF 4.5)

VMware Cloud Foundation – A Technical Overview (based on VCF 4.5)

 

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.

VMware Cloud Foundation Components

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.

VMware Cloud Foundation Consumption Models

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.

VMware Cloud Foundation+

The following components are included in VCF+:

  • vSphere+
  • vSAN+
  • NSX (term license)
  • SDDC Manager
  • Aria Universal Suite (formerly vRealize Cloud Universal aka vRCU)
  • Tanzu Standard
  • vCenter (included as part of vSphere+)

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.

VMware Cloud Foundation Subscription TLSS

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?

A VCF comparison matrix can be found here.

VMware Cloud Foundation Architecture

VCF is made for greenfield deployments (brownfield not supported) and supports two different architecture models:

  • Standard Architecture
  • Consolidated Architecture

VMware Cloud Foundation Deployment Options

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.

VMware Cloud Foundation Single Site Deployment

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.

VMware Cloud Foundation Storage Options

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.

VMware Cloud Foundation Stretched Cluster

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.

VMware Cloud Foundation Flexible Licensing

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 seven physical nodes.

What are the minimum hardware requirements?

These minimum specs have been listed for the management WLD since VCF 4.0 (September 2020):

VMware Cloud Foundation Hardware Requirements

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.

VMware Cloud Foundation Remote Cluster

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.

VMware Cloud Foundation SDDC Manager

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

VMware Cloud Foundation SDDC Manager Dashboard

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:

VMware Cloud Foundation Resource Requirements

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:

VMware Cloud Foundation Resource Requirements vRealize

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.

VMware Cloud Foundation HCX

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:

Can I get VCF as a managed service offering?

Yes, this is possible. Please have a look at Data Center as a Service based on VMware Cloud Foundation.

Can I install VCF in my home lab?

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.

VCF Lab Constructor

Where can I find more information about VCF?

Please consult the VMware Foundation 4.5 FAQ for more information about VMware Cloud Foundation.

 

 

 

VMware Explore Europe 2022 Major Announcements

VMware Explore Europe 2022 Major Announcements

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!

Aria Hub Free Tier Announcement: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2022/11/announcing-vmware-aria-hub-free-tier.html 

Aria Hub Free Tier Technical Overview: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2022/11/aria-hub-free-tier-technical-overview 

If you want to sign up for the free tier, please follow this link: https://www.vmware.com/learn/1732750_REG.html 

Tanzu Mission Control On-Premises

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! 

Bild

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.

TKG 2.1 Announcement: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/tanzu-kubernetes-grid-2-1 

Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced Enhancements

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).

VMC-E Announcement: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud/2022/11/07/introducing-vmware-cloud-on-equinix-metal 

VMC-E Technical Preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WpGfrxW39Y&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=VMwareCloud