VMware Aria and The Next Era of Multi-Cloud Management

VMware Aria and The Next Era of Multi-Cloud Management

Multi-cloud is a mess. I already said it more than once. But with VMware Aria, the future looks brighter again. Imagine a world where more than 50% of companies are using three or four different clouds (private and public cloud) and applications are being automatically migrated to the cloud where their hosting makes the most sense. Imagine that you could gather all data like events, metrics, traces, logs, netflows and configs from different clouds, correlate and analyze them, which gives you a totally different view of your multi-cloud infrastructure. What about if you can detect and understand patterns, and use artificial intelligence that gives you new business insights and possibilities for troubleshooting and maintaining your multi-cloud? This is VMware Aria.

The next chapter of VMware’s multi-cloud management story brings a new perspective on managing VMware-based clouds, native public clouds and cloud-native apps. And with Aria Hub we have the next superstar at the center of everything.

VMware Aria Overview

No, it was not a rebranding, Aria is something different. Yes, VMware vRealize and CloudHealth are now unified, but there is so much more. Let us start with the foundation and technologies underpinning Aria (these are pillars, not products):

  • VMware Aria Cost
    • Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth
  • VMware Aria Operations
    • Aria Operations (vRealize Operations)
    • Aria Operations for Logs (vRealize Log Insight)
    • Aria Operations for Networks (vRealize Network Insight)
    • Aria Operations for Applications (Tanzu Observability)
    • Aria Operations for Integrations (vRealize True Visibility Suite)
  • VMware Aria Automation
    • Aria Automation (vRealize Automation)
    • Aria Automation Assembler (VMware Cloud Assembly)
    • Aria Automation Consumption (VMware Service Broker)
    • Aria Automation Pipelines (VMware Code Stream)
    • Aria Automation Templates (VMware Cloud Templates)
    • Aria Automation Orchestrator (vRealize Orchestrator)
    • Aria Automation Config (vRealize Automation SaltStack Config)
    • Aria Automation for Secure Hosts (vRealize Automation SaltStack SecOps)
    • Aria Automation for Secure Clouds (CloudHealth Secure State)

In addition, you will get the following end-to-end multi-cloud management solutions:

These existing and new solutions come together in the new multi-cloud management platform called Aria Hub (formerly known as Project Ensemble).

VMware Aria Hub is a Game-Changer

Aria Hub is VMware’s platform that unified the management of cost, operations, configuration and automation with a common control plane and data model for any cloud. It is not an integration of different solutions and dashboards, but more a federation of data from different tools and clouds.

VMware Aria Hub Dashboard

I see Aria Hub as a multi-cloud database, which gives different teams finally an understanding of a multi-cloud application’s topology and its dependencies. It provides a centralized view and controls to manage a multi-cloud environment.

This is only possible because Aria Hub’s Entity Data Service (EDS) stores collected data in the Aria Graph database, which gives entities (in EDS) a unique ID and canonical resource ID, which allows the normalization of different data models from different public clouds and Aria services. You see? Federation, not integration.

Diagram that illustrates how Operations for Networks, Operations for Secure Clouds, Automation, and Operatons contribute to the Hub inventory, infrastructure management, applications management, and secure findings.

VMware Aria Graph is a graph-based datastore that captures all the resources and relationships of a multi-cloud environment. It uses Amazon Neptune which is highly scalable and can store billions of relationships.

How to get started with Aria Hub?

You have different options to experience Aria Hub:

  • Register for the free tier of Aria Hub that enables you to inventory, map, filter and search resources from vCenter Servers, Kubernetes Cluster, and public clouds like AWS and Microsoft Azure.
  • Test-drive Aria Hub via VMware Pathfinder
  • Try out the VMware hands-on lab “VMware Aria Hub (HOL-2301-08-ISM)” (follow the link and search for “aria”

Multi-Cloud Migration Service

Companies started to become cloud smart. They want to host or migrate their apps to the cloud which makes the most sense for it. It could be a VMware-based cloud like VMware Cloud on AWS or a native public cloud like Azure or Google Cloud.

With Aria Migration, VMware announced at VMware Explore, that it can assess your applications and workloads and tell you which cloud is the best fit for it. Today, organizations can already figure out which cloud is the most appropriate one. The problem is the execution. What sounds easy on paper becomes a nightmare. Migrations mostly take longer than planned, and the operational costs are going through the roof. And then there are application dependencies and network configurations and policies.

VMware Aria Migration can accelerate and simplify cloud migrations not only with its automated assessment, which is done with solutions like Aria Cost and Aria Operations, but helps customers with the planning and execution. If you tell Aria Migration that you want to migrate 1’000 VMs from your data center in 12 waves to a public cloud, it will do the planning for you. If needed, you can edit the suggested plan, and then Aria Migration executes it.

VMware Aria Migration Planning

VMware’s story about cloud migrations sounds much better now, I love it. Instead of only allowing the migrations to a VMware-based destination cloud, they are now talking about “any cloud to any cloud”, which implies that native public clouds are also on the roadmap.

VMware Aria Licensing

It took VMware some time to work things out, but they are on the right track now when it comes to licensing. If you praise that you are “the” multi-cloud enabler and embrace native public clouds as well, you need an easy licensing model.

Aria Universal Suite (vRealize Cloud Universal)

As you may already know from vRealize Cloud Universal (vRCU) before, the new Aria Universal Suite combines SaaS and on-premises capabilities and solutions for automation, operations, network and log analytics, cost optimization and compliance into one license.

Aria Suite (vRealize Suite) and VMware vCloud Suite

The Aria Suite, before known as vRealize Suite, includes Aria Automation (vRealize Automation), Aria Operations (vRealize Operations) and Aria Operations for Logs (vRealize Log Insight) – for on-prem only.

The VMware vCloud Suite is just a combination of VMware vSphere and the Aria Suite.

How do I get Aria Hub and the other new products?

We do not know yet. But I have spoken to different people at VMware Explore in Barcelona and one thing makes sense:

Since Aria Hub can be a SaaS solution only, customers need Aria Universal, and Aria Hub will be included in all editions. The higher the edition, the more Aria (Hub) capabilities you get.

You can sign up for the Aria Hub free tier for now. This means that there will be an open Beta program coming in the next few months. Aria Migration is also just available as tech preview for now.

VMware Aria Hub Free Tier

Maybe we will know more in January or February 2023.

Final Words

Sign up for the Aria Hub free tier and have a look at the Beta when it comes out, because Aria Hub is something that almost every company was asking for!

With an aggressive timeline and roadmap execution, Aria could become HUGE next year. I am a fan. I love it.

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  

API Security with Spring Cloud Gateway and Tanzu Service Mesh

API Security with Spring Cloud Gateway and Tanzu Service Mesh

Today, more than ever, both humans and machines consume or process data. We, humans, consume data through multiple applications that are hosted in different clouds from different devices like smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Companies are building applications that need to look good and work well on any platform/device.

At the same time, developers are building new applications following cloud-native principles. A cloud-native architecture is a design pattern for applications that are built for the cloud. Most cloud-native apps are organized as microservices which are used to break up larger applications into loosely coupled units that can be managed by smaller teams. Resilience and scale are achieved through horizontal scaling, distributed processing, and automated placement of failed components.

Different people have a different understanding of “cloud-native” and the chances are high that you will get different answers. Let us look at the official definition from CNCF:

“Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.

These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.”

12-Factor App

A widely accepted methodology for building cloud-based applications is the “Twelve-Factor Application”. It uses declarative formats for automation to minimize time and costs. It should offer maximum portability between execution environments and be suitable for the deployment on modern cloud platforms. The 12-factor methodology can be applied with any programming language and may use any combination of backing servers (caching, queuing, databases).

Interestingly, we now see other factors like API-first, telemetry, and security complementing this list.

While doing research for my book about “workload mobility and application portability”, I saw the term “API-first” many times.

Then I started to remember that VMware acquired Mesh7 a while ago and they announced Tanzu Service Mesh Enterprise last year at VMworld Europe (now known as VMware Explore). API security was even one of their main topics during the networking & security solutions keynote presented by Tom Gillis.

VMworld 2021 API Security

That is why I thought it is time to better understand this topic and write a piece about APIs. Let us start with some basics first.

What is an API?

An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more software components to communicate with each other using a set of defined protocols and definitions. APIs are here to make the developer’s life easier.

I bet you have seen parts of Google Maps already embedded in different websites when you were looking for a specific business or restaurant location. Most websites and developers would use Google Maps in this case, because it just makes sense for us, right? That is why Google exposes the Google Maps API so developers can embed Google Maps objects very easily in a standardized way. Or have you seen anyone who wants to develop their own version of Google Maps?

In the case of enterprises, APIs are a very elegant way to share data with customers or other external users. Such public APIs like Google Maps APIs can be used by partners who then can access your data. And we all know that data is the new oil. Companies can make a lot of money today by sharing their data.

Even when using private APIs (internal use only), you decide who can access your API and data. This is one of the reasons why API security and API management become more important. You want to provide secure access when sensitive data is being exposed.

What is an API Gateway?

For microservices-based apps, it makes sense to implement an API gateway, because it can act as a single entry point for all API calls made to your system. And it doesn’t matter if your system/application is hosted on-premises, in the public cloud, or a combination of both. The API gateway takes care of the request (API call) and returns the requested data.

API Gateway Diagram

Image Source: https://www.tibco.com/reference-center/what-is-an-api-gateway 

API gateways can also handle other tasks like authentication, rate management, and statistics. This is important for example when you want to monetize some of your APIs by offering a service to consumers or other companies.

What is Spring Cloud Gateway for VMware Tanzu?

Spring Cloud Gateway for VMware Tanzu provides a simple way to route internal and external API requests to application services that expose APIs. This solution is based on the open-source Spring Cloud Gateway project and provides a library for building API gateways on top of Spring and Java.

Because it is intended that Spring Cloud Gateway sits between a requester and the resource that is being requested, it is in the position to intercept, analyze and modify requests.

Revitalize Legacy Apps with APIs

Before we had microservices, there were monolithic applications. An all-in-one application architecture, where all services are installed on the same virtual machine and depend on each other.

There are multiple reasons why such a monolith cannot be broken up into smaller pieces and modernized. Sometimes it’s not (technically) possible, not worth it, or it just takes too long. Hence many companies still use such monolithic (legacy) applications. The best example here is the mainframe which often still runs business-critical applications.

I always thought that my customers only have two options when modernizing applications:

  • Start from scratch (throw the old app away)
  • Refactor/Rewrite an application

Rewriting an application needs time and costs money. Imagine that you would refactor 50 of your applications, split these monoliths up in microservices, connect these hundreds or thousands of microservices, and at the same time must take care of security (e.g., vulnerabilities).

So, what are you going to do now?

APIs seem to provide a very cost-effective way to integrate some of the older applications with newer ones. With this approach, one can abstract away the data and services from the underlying (legacy) application infrastructure. APIs can extend the life of a legacy application and could be the start of a phased application modernization approach.

Tanzu Service Mesh Enterprise

At the moment, we only have an API gateway that sits in front of our microservices. Multiple (micro)services in an aggregated fashion create the API you want to expose to your internal or external customers. The question now is, how you do plan to expose this API when your microservices are distributed over one or more private or public clouds?

When we talk about APIs, we talk about data in motion. That is why we must secure this data that is sent from its source to any location. And you want to secure the application and data without increasing the application latency and decreasing the user’s experience.

Now it makes sense to me why VMware acquired Mesh7 in March 2021 and announced Tanzu Service Mesh Enterprise about 6 months later with these additional features:

  • API Security. API security is achieved through API vulnerability detection and mitigation, API baselining, and API drift detection (including API parameters and schema validation)
  • Personally Identifiable Information (PII) segmentation and detection. PII data is segmented using attribute-based access control (ABAC) and is detected via proper PII data detection and tracking, and end-user detection mechanisms.
  • API Security Visibility. API security is monitored using API discovery, security posture dashboards, and rich event auditing.

Final Words

APIs are used to connect different applications. They are also used to aggregate services or functions that can be consumed by other businesses or partners. Modern and containerized applications bring a large number of APIs with them, that can be hosted in any cloud.

With Spring Cloud Gateway and Tanzu Service Mesh Enterprise, VMware can deliver application connectivity services that enable improved developer experience and more secure operations.

It took me almost a year to realize the strengths of these (combined) products and why VMware for example acquired Mesh7. But it makes sense to me now. Even I do not completely understand all the key features of Spring Cloud Gateway and Tanzu Service Mesh.

What Is Unique About Oracle Cloud VMware Solution?

What Is Unique About Oracle Cloud VMware Solution?

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.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution 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:

  • ESXi 7.0, 6.7 or 6.5
  • vCenter 7.0, 6.7 or 6.5
  • vSAN 7.0, 6.7 or 6.5
  • NSX-T 3.0
  • HCX Advanced 4.0, 3.5 (default option)
  • HCX Enterprise (billed upgrade)

Note: vSphere 6.5 and vSphere 6.7 reach the End of General Support from VMware on October 15, 2022.

Key Differentiator #2 – Customer-Managed & Baremetal Hosts

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.

Note: OCVS is not part (yet) of the VMware Cloud Universal subscription (VMCU).

Key Differentiator #7 – Global Reach

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).

OCVS Tanzu Standard 

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution FAQ

VMware’s OCVS FAQ can be found here.

Oracle’s OCVS FAQ can be found here.

Additional Resources

Here is a list of additional resources:

VMware Explore US 2022 – Summary of Day 1 Announcements

VMware Explore US 2022 – Summary of Day 1 Announcements

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.

ESXi on DPU

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.

Azure VMware Solution – Customers will be able to purchase Azure VMware Solution as part of VMware Cloud Universal, a flexible purchasing and consumption program for executing multi-cloud and digital transformation strategies. VMware Cloud Director Service for Azure VMware Solution is also now available in Public Preview.

Google Cloud VMware Engine – VMware announced VMware Tanzu Standard edition on Google Cloud VMware Engine to help simplify Kubernetes adoption and management.

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 Automation (formerly, vRealize Automation)
  • VMware Aria Operations (formerly, vRealize Operations)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Networks (formerly, vRealize Network Insight)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Logs (formerly, vRealize Log Insight)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Secure Clouds (formerly, CloudHealth Secure State)
  • VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth (formerly, CloudHealth)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Applications (formerly VMware Tanzu Observability)
  • VMware Skyline

VMware Aria Products

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.

Graphical user interface Description automatically generated

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.

Image of a SmartNIC

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 Mission Control – Finally, VMware announced the preview for lifecycle management of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters, which enables direct provisioning and management of EKS clusters, which is awesome! I suppose we can expect the support for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) also coming very soon.

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.

Tanzu Service Mesh – Also pre-announced, VMware is adding several enterprise and application resiliency capabilities into Tanzu Service Mesh:

  • 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.

Read more about all the Tanzu announcements here.

Anywhere Workspace

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.

20K user infrastructure cost comparison

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!

Interclouds And The Future of Cloud Computing

Interclouds And The Future of Cloud Computing

I am finally taking the time to write this piece about interclouds, workload mobility and application portability. Some of my engagements during the past four weeks led me several times to discussions about interclouds and workload mobility.

Cloud to Cloud Interoperability and Federation

Who has thought back in 2012 that we will have so many (public) cloud providers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud etc. in 2022?

10 years ago, many people and companies were convinced that the future consists of public cloud infrastructure only and that local self-managed data centers are going to disappear.

This vision and perception of cloud computing has dramatically changed over the past few years. We see public cloud providers stretching their cloud services and infrastructure to large data centers or edge locations. It seems they realized, that the future is going to look differently than a lot of people anticipated back then.

I was not aware that the word “intercloud” and the need for it exists for a long time already apparently. Let’s take David Bernstein’s presentation as an example, which I found by googling “intercloud”:

This presentation is about avoiding the mistake of using proprietary protocols and cloud infrastructures that lead to silos and a non-interoperable architecture. He was part of the IEEE Intercloud Working Group (P2302) which was working on a standard for “Intercloud Interoperability and Federation (SIIF)” (draft), which mentioned the following:

Currently there are no implicit and transparent interoperability standards in place in order for disparate
cloud computing environments to be able to seamlessly federate and interoperate amongst themselves.
Proposed P2302 standards are a layered set of such protocols, called “Intercloud Protocols”, to solve the interoperability related challenges. The P2302 standards propose the overall design of decentralized, scalable, self-organizing federated “Intercloud” topology.

David Bernstein Intercloud

I do not know David Bernstein and the IEEE working group personally, but it would be great to hear from some of them, what they think about the current cloud computing architectures and how they envision the future of cloud computing for the next 5 or 10 years.

As you can see, the wish for an intercloud protocol or an intercloud exists since a while. Let us quickly have a look how others define intercloud:

Cisco in 2008 (it seems that David Bernstein worked at Cisco that time). Intercloud is a network of clouds that are linked with each other. This includes private, public, and hybrid clouds that come together to provide a seamless exchange of data.

teradata. Intercloud is a cloud deployment model that links multiple public cloud services together as one holistic and actively orchestrated architecture. Its activities are coordinated across these clouds to move workloads automatically and intelligently (e.g., for data analytics), based on criteria like their cost and performance characteristics.

The Future of Cloud Computing

I found this post on Twitter on May 19th, 2022:

Alvin Cheung Berkeley Intercloud

Alvin Cheung is an associate professor at Berkeley EECS and wrote the following in his Twitter comments:

we argue that cloud computing will evolve to a new form of inter-cloud operation: instead of storing data and running code on a single cloud provider, apps will run on an inter-operating set of cloud providers to leverage their specialized services / hw / geo etc, much like ISPs.

Alvin and his colleagues wrote a publication which states “A Berkeley View on the Future of Cloud Computing” that mentions the following very early in the PDF:

We predict that this market, with the appropriate intermediation, could evolve into one with a far greater emphasis on compatibility, allowing customers to easily shift workloads between clouds.

[…] Instead, we argue that to achieve this goal of flexible workload placement, cloud computing will require intermediation, provided by systems we call intercloud brokers, so that individual customers do not have to make choices about which clouds to use for which workloads, but can instead rely on brokers to optimize their desired criteria (e.g., price, performance, and/or execution location).

We believe that the competitive forces unleashed by the existence of effective intercloud brokers will create a thriving market of cloud services with many of those services being offered by more than one cloud, and this will be sufficient to significantly increase workload portability.

Intercloud Broker

Organizations place their workloads in that cloud which makes the most sense for them. Depending on different regulations, data classification, different cloud services, locations, or pricing, they then decide which data or workload goes to which cloud.

The people from Berkeley do not necessarily promote a multi-cloud architecture, but have the idea of an intercloud broker that places your workload on the right cloud based on different factors. They see the intercloud as an abstraction layer with brokering services:

In my understanding their idea goes towards the direction of an intelligent and automated cloud management platform that takes the decision where a specific workload and its data should be hosted. And that it, for example, migrates the workload to another cloud which is cheaper than the current one.

Cloud Native Technologies for Multi-Cloud

Companies are modernizing/rebuilding their legacy applications or create new modern applications using cloud native technologies. Modern applications are collections of microservices, which are light, fault tolerant and small. These microservices can run in containers deployed on a private or public cloud.

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

The challenge today is that we have modern architectures, new technologies/services and multiple clouds running with different technology stacks. And we have Kubernetes as framework, which is available in different formats (DIY or offerings like Tanzu TKG, AKS, EKS, GKE etc.)

Then there is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the open source community which embrace the principal of “open” software that is created and maintained by a community.

It is about building applications and services that can run on any infrastructure, which also means avoiding vendor or cloud lock-in.

Challenges of Interoperability and Multiple Clouds

If you discuss multi-cloud and infrastructure independent applications, you mostly end up with an endless list of questions like:

  • How can we achieve true workload mobility or application portability?
  • How do we deal with the different technology formats and the “language” (API) of each cloud?
  • How can we standardize and automate our deployments?
  • Is latency between clouds a problem?
  • What about my stateful data?
  • How can we provide consistent networking and security?
  • What about identity federation and RBAC?
  • Is the performance of each cloud really the same?
  • How should we encrypt traffic between services in multiple clouds?
  • What about monitoring and observability?

Workload Mobility and Application Portability without an Intercloud

VMware has a different view and approach how workload mobility and application portability can be achieved.

Their value add and goal is the same, but with a different strategy of abstracting clouds.

VMware is not building an intercloud but they provide customer a  technology stack (compute, storage, networking), or a cloud operating system if you will, that can run on top of every major public cloud provider like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.

VMware Workload Mobility

This consistent infrastructure makes it especially for virtual machines and legacy applications extremely easy to be migrated to any location.

What about modern applications and Kubernetes? What about developers who do not care about (cloud) infrastructures?

Project Cascade

At VMworld 2021, VMware announced the technology preview of “Project Cascade” which will provide a unified Kubernetes interface for both on-demand infrastructure (IaaS) and containers (CaaS) across VMware Cloud – available through an open command line interface (CLI), APIs, or a GUI dashboard.

The idea is to provide customers a converged IaaS and CaaS consumption service across any cloud, exposed through different Kubernetes APIs.

VMware Project Cascade

I heard the statement “Kubernetes is complex and hard” many times at KubeCon Europe 2022 and Project Cascade is clearly providing another abstraction layer for VM and container orchestration that should make the lives of developers and operators less complex.

Project Ensemble

Another project in tech preview since VMworld last year is “Project Ensemble“. It is about multi-cloud management platform that provides an app-centric self-service portal with predictive support.

Project Ensemble will deliver a unified consumption surface that meets the unique needs of the cloud administrator and SRE alike. From an architectural perspective, this means creating a platform designed for programmatic consumption and a firm “API First” approach.

I can imagine that it will be a service that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to simplify troubleshooting and that is capable in the future to intelligently place or migrate your workloads to the appropriate or best cloud (for example based on cost) including all attached networking and security policies.

Conclusion

I believe that VMware is on the right path by giving customers the option to build a cloud-agnostic infrastructure with the necessary abstraction layers for IaaS and CaaS including the cloud management platform. By providing a common way or standard to run virtual machines and containers in any cloud, I am convinced, VMware is becoming the defacto standard for infrastructure for many enterprises.

VMware Vision and Strategy 2022

By providing a consistent cloud infrastructure and a consistent developer model and experience, VMware bridges the gap between the developers and operators, without the need for an intercloud or intercloud protocol. That is the future of cloud computing.

 

Other relevant resources: