Momentum in the Cloud: Crafting Your Winning Strategy with VMware Cloud

Momentum in the Cloud: Crafting Your Winning Strategy with VMware Cloud

The time is right for VMware Cloud! In the rapidly evolving landscape of modern business, embracing the cloud has become essential for organizations seeking to stay competitive and agile. The allure of increased scalability, cost-efficiency, and flexibility has driven enterprises of all sizes to embark on cloud migration journeys. However, the road to a successful cloud adoption is often coming with challenges. Slow and failed migrations have given rise to what experts call the “cloud paradox,” where the very technology meant to accelerate progress ends up hindering it.

As businesses navigate through this paradox, finding the right strategy to harness the full potential of the cloud becomes paramount. One solution that has emerged as a beacon of hope in this complex landscape is VMware Cloud. With its multi-cloud approach, which is also known as supercloud, VMware Cloud provides organizations the ability to craft a winning strategy that capitalizes on momentum while minimizing the risks associated with cloud migrations.

The Experimental Phase is Over

Is it really though? The experimental phase was an exciting journey of discovery for organizations seeking the potential of multi-cloud environments. Companies have explored different cloud providers, tested a variety of cloud services, and experimented with workloads and applications in the cloud. It allowed them to understand the benefits and drawbacks of each cloud platform, assess performance, security and compliance aspects, and determine how well each cloud provider aligns with their unique business needs.

The Paradox of Cloud and Choice

With an abundance of cloud service providers, each offering distinct features and capabilities, decision-makers can find themselves overwhelmed with options. The quest to optimize workloads across multiple clouds can lead to unintended complexities, such as increased operational overhead, inconsistent management practices/tools, and potential vendor lock-in.

Furthermore, managing data and applications distributed across various cloud environments can create challenges related to security, compliance, and data sovereignty. The lack of standardized practices and tools in a multi-cloud setup can also hinder collaboration and agility, negating the very advantages that public cloud environments promise to deliver.

Multi-Cloud Complexity

(Public) Cloud computing is often preached for its cost-efficiency, enabling businesses to pay for resources on-demand and avoid capital expenditures on physical infrastructure. However, the cloud paradox reveals that organizations can inadvertently accumulate hidden costs, such as data egress fees, storage overage charges, and the cost of cloud management tools. Without careful planning and oversight, the cloud’s financial benefits might be offset by unexpected expenses.

Why Cloud Migrations are Slowing Down

Failed expectations. The first reasons my customers mention are cost and complexity.

While the cloud offers potential cost savings in the long run, the initial investment and perceived uncertainty in calculating the total cost of ownership can deter some organizations from moving forward with cloud migrations. Budget constraints and difficulties in accurately estimating and analyzing cloud expenses lead to a cautious approach to cloud adoption.

One significant factor impeding cloud migrations is the complexity of the process itself. Moving entire infrastructures, applications, and data to the cloud requires thorough planning, precise execution, and in-depth knowledge of cloud platforms and technologies. Many organizations lack the in-house expertise to handle such a massive undertaking, leading to delays and apprehensions about potential risks.

Other underestimated reasons are legacy systems and applications that have been in use for many years and are often deeply ingrained within an organization’s operations. Migrating these systems to the cloud may require extensive reconfiguration or complete redevelopment, making the migration process both time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Reverse Cloud Migrations

While I don’t advertise a case for repatriation, I would like to share the idea that companies should think about workload mobility, application portability, and repatriation upfront. You can infinitely optimize your cloud spend, but if cloud costs start to outpace your transformation plans or revenue growth, it is too late already.

Embracing a Smart Approach with VMware Cloud

To address the cloud paradox and maximize the potential of multi-cloud environments, VMware is embracing the cloud-smart approach. This approach is designed to empower organizations with a unified and consistent platform to manage and operate their applications across multiple clouds.

VMware Cloud-Smart

  • Single Cloud Operating Model: A single operating model that spans private and public clouds. This consistency simplifies cloud management, enabling seamless workload migration and minimizing the complexities associated with multiple cloud providers.
  • Flexible Cloud Choice: VMware allows organizations to choose the cloud provider that best suits their specific needs, whether it is a public cloud or a private cloud infrastructure. This freedom of choice ensures that businesses can leverage the unique advantages of each cloud while maintaining operational consistency.
  • Streamlined Application Management: A cloud-smart approach centralizes application management, making it easier to deploy, secure, and monitor applications across multi-cloud environments. This streamlines processes, enhances collaboration, and improves operational efficiency.
  • Enhanced Security and Compliance: By adopting VMware’s security solutions, businesses can implement consistent security policies across all clouds, ensuring data protection and compliance adherence regardless of the cloud provider.

Why VMware Cloud?

This year I realized that a lot of VMware customers came back to me because their cloud-first strategy did not work as expected. Costs exploded, migrations were failing, and their project timeline changed many times. Also, partners like Microsoft and AWS want to collaborate more with VMware, because the public cloud giants cannot deliver as expected.

Customers and public cloud providers did not see any value in lifting and shifting workloads from on-premises data centers to the public. Now the exact same people, companies and partners (AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle etc.) are back to ask for VMware their support, and solutions that can speed up cloud migrations while reducing risks.

This is why I am always suggesting a “lift and learn” approach, which removes pressure and reduces costs.

Organizations view the public cloud as a highly strategic platform for digital transformation. Gartner forecasted in April 2023 that Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is going to experience the highest spending growth in 2023, followed by PaaS.

It is said that companies spend most of their money for compute, storage, and data services when using Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. Guess what, VMware Cloud is a perfect fit for IaaS-based workloads (instead of using AWS EC2, Google’s Compute Engine, and Azure Virtual machine instances)!

Who doesn’t like the idea of cost savings and faster cloud migrations?

Disaster Recovery and FinOps

When you migrate workloads to the cloud, you have to rethink your disaster recovery and ransomware recovery strategy. Have a look at VMware’s DRaaS (Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service) offering which includes ransomware recovery capabilities as well. 

If you want to analyze and optimize your cloud spend, try out VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth.

Final Words

VMware’s approach is not right for everyone, but it is a future-proof cloud strategy that enables organizations to adapt their cloud strategies as business needs to evolve. The cloud-smart approach offers a compelling solution, providing businesses with a unified, consistent, and flexible platform to succeed in multi-cloud environments. By embracing this approach, organizations can overcome the complexities of multi-cloud, unlock new possibilities, and set themselves on a path to cloud success.

And you still get the same access to the native public cloud services.

 

 

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  .

Why AWS Developers Love VMware’s Lift and Learn Approach with VMware Cloud on AWS

Why AWS Developers Love VMware’s Lift and Learn Approach with VMware Cloud on AWS

Learn why AWS developers love VMware Cloud on AWS and want to present it to their internal platform team.

I had booth duty at the AWS Swiss Cloud Day 2022 and had the chance to finally talk to people that normally do not talk to VMware folks like me. I believe I had not a single infrastructure or cloud architect talking to me the whole day and I have been approached by Linux administrators and developers only. After I explained to them our partnership and capabilities with AWS, they were mind blown!

Michael, what is VMware’s business with AWS?”

Why are you here at the event, you are only a hypervisor company, right?

Haha, what are you guys doing here?

What is the reason for VMware coming here? You are a competitor of AWS, no?

Developers don’t want to do ops

Look, the developers did not know, that I have no developer background and spent most of my time with data centers. I already built true hybrid clouds almost 10 years ago before we had all the different hyperscalers and providers like Amazon Web Services. After I passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate and AWS Developer Associate exams a few months ago, I finally understood better how complex software development and cloud migrations must be.

It is said that developers do not want to deal with operational concerns. And other developers want to understand the production environment to make sure that their code work. Additionally, we have the shift-left approach that puts more pressure on the developer’s shoulders, they do not have time for ops.

But after talking to a few developers, I had a light-bulb moment and the following truths came to the surface:

  • Developers had no clue how VMware can ease some of their pain
  • Developers liked my talk about infrastructure and ops
  • I need to bring more business cards to such events!!!

Developers are interested in infrastructure

Remember the questions from above? To answer the questions about VMware’s relevance or relationship with AWS, I used the first 2min to explain VMware Cloud on AWS to them. Yes, I started talking about infrastructure and not about Tanzu, developer experience, our open source projects, and contributions, or Tanzu Labs. The people visiting us at the booth were impressed that VMware and AWS have even specialists only focusing on this solution. Still, they were not convinced yet that VMware can do something good for them.

VMC on AWS Overview

Okay, I got it. So what? What is the value?

How would someone with a VMware background answer such a question? Most of us usually see this situation as the right moment to talk about use cases like:

  • Data center exit or refresh (infrastructure modernization)
  • Burst Capacity
  • Low latency to AWS native services
  • Application modernization
  • Cloud migrations

So, which of these use cases are relevant and important to developers?

The developer’s story

The developers confirmed some statements of mine:

  • Cloud migrations take long and are not easy
  • Lift & shift migrations involve a lot of manual tasks
  • They either have to refactor their app on-premises first and then move to the public cloud or start from scratch on AWS

I say it again, software development is complex. Developers need to modernize existing applications on-premises and then migrate them somehow to AWS because you cannot always start from scratch.

Imagine this: You have an application that was deployed and operated for years in your data centers. Most probably you don’t even understand all the dependencies and configurations anymore since the years have passed. Maybe you are not even the guy who initially developed this application.

Note: The only thing that can be assumed, is, that your infrastructure is most likely running on a VMware-based cloud.

Now you need to start modernizing this application, which takes months or even years. When you are done with your task, you have to figure out how to bring this application over to AWS. Because you had to spend all your time refactoring this application, there was no time to build new AWS skills. At least not during normal office hours.

Lift and shift is easy, right?

Nope. When it would be easy, why does the migration in most cases take longer than expected and cost more than expected? When you have to exit a data center for any reason and need to bring some of your workloads over to a public cloud like AWS, then a lift and shift approach is the best and fastest approach. But somehow organizations do not see much value in using this approach during their cloud adoption. At least not with VMware.

But if a consulting firm or AWS themselves tell the customer, that lift and shift is a good idea, their customers suddenly see the benefit even if they have to add millions to their estimated budget. Consulting firms are not cheap, and neither are lift and shift projects with different underlying technologies like having VMware as the source site on-premises and AWS (or any other public cloud provider) as the destination. But hey, good for your company if they have this extra money.

AWS Lift and Shift

Lift and shift brings no innovation

Different organizations have different agendas and goals. For some, solely running their virtual machines and containers, and using cloud native services is enough for them – no matter the costs. Others expect that economies of scale bring the necessary cost advantages over time while they implement and deliver innovation.

That is why some companies see lift and shift as the approach, which brings no innovation. It is complex, not easy, takes longer, costs more and in the end, you don’t use cloud native services (yet).

It is time now to change the perspective and narrative because I get why you think that lift and shift brings no innovation.

Forget Lift and Shift – Do Lift and Learn

So, our use case here is application modernization. A developer needs to modernize and migrate an application, ideally at the same time. No wonder why some of you may think that lift and shift brings no innovation: because you modernize later. 

Developers struggle. They struggle very much. After I explained VMware Cloud on AWS and mentioned, that a lift and learn approach is the better way that makes their life much easier, they asked me for my business card. It took less than 24h until I received my first two e-mails to organize a meeting.

Give developers more time.

Developers and ops teams need to have enough time to skill up, to learn and understand the new things. You have to break and fix things first in the new world before you can truly understand it. They loved the idea of lift and learn:

  1. Lift and shift your applications first with VMware Cloud on AWS. A true hybrid cloud approach, where the technology format is the same (on-prem and on AWS), will speed up your cloud adoption timeline and therefore save costs. Your workload now runs in the public cloud. Check!
  2. Since the cloud migration didn’t take 12 months, but more something like 3-4 months, your developers can use the additional time to learn and understand how to build things on AWS! The developers are happy because they have less pressure now and can play around with new stuff.
  3. After they have understood the new world, they can start modernizing different parts of the application. What has started with a legacy/traditional application, becomes a hybrid application and eventually a fully modernized app over time.

Figure 4. Connectivity examples for AWS Cloud storage services

The stepping stone to becoming cloud native

Some of you may think now that VMware and its solution with VMC on AWS is just a temporary solution before going completely, cloud native. Let us take a step back again quickly.

When I joined VMware in 2018, they talked about 70mio workloads running on their platform. This year at VMware Explore (formerly VMworld) they showed several 85mio VMware-based workloads. This is proof to me, that:

  • the cloud adoption does not happen as fast as expected,
  • on-premises data centers and VMware is not legacy,
  • VMware is more than only a “hypervisor” company,
  • cloud native and container-based workloads do not always make sense and
  • virtual machines are still going to exist for a while.

These are some pointers to why AWS has this partnership with VMware. As you can see, VMware is very strategic and relevant and should be part of every cloud and application modernization conversation.

Call to action

Just because a lot of people say that developers do not care about ops and are not interested in talking to “infrastructure guys” like me, does not mean that this statement/assumption is true. My conversations from AWS Swiss Cloud Day 2022 clearly showed that developers need to know more about the options and value that companies like VMware can bring to the table.

Do not let developers only talk to developers. Do lift and learn.

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!

VMware vSphere+ and vSAN+ – The Multi-Cloud Workload Platform

VMware vSphere+ and vSAN+ – The Multi-Cloud Workload Platform

Everyone knows VMware made it possible with vSphere to virtualize the compute resources in your data centers. Then they moved to the software-defined data center (SDDC) approach that allows you to virtualize storage and network as well. And for a few years now, VMware is moving towards what I call a hybrid multi-cloud platform, which enables customers to unify multiple public clouds, private clouds and edge locations with the same underlying technology stack complemented by cross-cloud services. Industry analysts and vendors like VMware are even talking about the term “Supercloud“. But let us focus on the vSphere+ and vSAN+ announcement for now. 🙂

VMware is moving their customers to a subscription-based consumption model and has already various technologies and licenses that help customers with that on their (multi-cloud) journey:

However, a subscription model and managed service offering were missing for customers who cannot or do not want to go down the VMware Cloud Foundation or VMware Cloud path, which includes vSphere, vSAN and NSX.

So, here is the next evolution of vSphere and vSAN.

vSphere+ and vSAN+

vSphere+ and vSAN+ are hybrid cloud solutions, which include a subscription license for your greenfield or brownfield deployments of vSphere and vSAN combined with a connection to VMware Cloud services (centralized management) that allows an easier and keyless management of your vSphere and vSAN infrastructure. You do not need to buy vCenter separately anymore and can deploy as many vCenter instances as needed for no additional cost! Finally, no more tracking and splitting of licenses!

How does it work?

It is very easy. To make it short, customers can connect their existing environment to a cloud management portal and at the same time migrate their perpetual licenses to subscriptions. There is no need to purchase anything else or move workloads to the cloud. You just need to follow four steps:

  1. Procure Subscription
  2. Deploy a new Cloud Gateway Appliance
  3. Connect and register Cloud Gateway with VMware Cloud
  4. Register on-premises vCenter(s)

vSphere+ Migration

Requirements

Your vSphere deployment must meet different software and hardware criteria for vSphere+.

ESXi and vCenter

Even though vSphere 6.7 is reaching EoGS (End of General Support) on 15th October 2022, you can still use this version to start a free trial of vSphere+. The minimum required version for production environments is vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3g, which allows you to convert your vCenter to subscription and use the full vSphere+ feature set.

Note: vCenter Server HA (VCHA) mode configuration and Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) are not supported.

Important: Your vCenter Server can only be used with vSphere+. Non-vSphere+ licensed hosts must be managed with a different vCenter Server.

vCenter Cloud Gateway

You can connect up to four vCenter Server instances to a vCenter Cloud Gateway, that needs to be deployed on-premises.

The vCenter Cloud Gateway uses 8 vCPUs, 28GB memory and 190GB of storage.

vCenter Cloud Gateway Appliance

Required Subscription Licenses

You can either purchase new subscriptions or convert your existing licenses to subscriptions. vSphere+ is licensed per core and requires a minimum of 16 cores per CPU for a predefined period of one, three or five years. This means, that a customer with a 12-core CPU count will be required to purchase a 16-core commitment for that CPU.

Note: VMware provides a small script (KB89116) that helps you to identify the number of cores

vCenter Cloud Gateway Appliance

Customers with vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus are eligible for an upgrade to vSphere+

vSAN+ is configured as an add-on to vSphere+ (co-term) and is licensed in the same way based on the same metrics (minimum of 16 cores per CPU). vSAN Enterprise is the only edition available for a subscription upgrade to vSAN+.

Note: VMware announced vSAN+ Standard and Advanced in the meantime.

vSphere and vSphere+ Feature Comparison

What else is included with vSphere+ compared to a regular vSphere deployment? You will not see virtual machines without containers anymore. So, it is not a surprise that vSphere+ includes so-called developer services as well:

  • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service – Run your containerized applications on a certified Kubernetes distribution, integrated with vSphere, using your existing tooling and workflows to give developers on-demand access to conformant Kubernetes clusters on-premises.
  • Tanzu integrated services – Streamlines the deployment and management of local and in-cluster platform services, such as logging, registry, monitoring, and ingress, to easily configure and maintain a production-ready Kubernetes environment. This includes open-source packages like Harbor, Fluentbit, Prometheus, Grafana, Contour, Sonobuoy and Pinniped.
  • Tanzu Mission Control Essentials – This will enable developers and DevOps teams to centralize platform operations and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with observability, troubleshooting, and resiliency. The Tanzu Mission Control Essentials feature set can be found here.
  • NSX Advanced Load Balancer Essentials – Feature set can be found here.

Here the list of admin services:

  • Cloud Console – Consolidate management of all vSphere deployments through a centralized cloud console (VMware Cloud Console).
  • Global inventory service – Visualize your inventory of vSphere resources and capacity to quickly understand your resource utilization across your vSphere estate.
  • Event view service – Get a consolidated view of events and alerts to quickly triage areas that need attention across your vSphere estate.
  • Security health check service – Evaluate the security posture of your entire vSphere infrastructure to identify security weaknesses or exposures.
  • Provision VM service – Quickly provision VMs from the VMware Cloud Console within any managed cluster.
  • Lifecycle management service – Simplify the lifecycle management of your vCenter instances – make updates with a single click and reduce the maintenance window so it is easier to schedule updates sooner. This gives you more rapid access to new features and address security vulnerabilities quickly. If there is a problem, you can easily roll back the update.
  • Configuration management service – Standardize and cascade vCenter configurations across your vSphere estate to quickly detect and remediate vCenter configuration drift.

Optional Add-On Services

There are a lot of VMware Cloud services that could add value, but the first optional add-on available for customers is VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR).

With this add-on service, you will be able to reliably protect and recover mission-critical applications. Customers will benefit from integrated protection workflows directly within the vSphere+ cloud console that will streamline IT operations and reduce risk of downtime in the event of regional outages or ransomware attacks.

Walkthrough

William Lam wrote a nice blog about the onboarding and configuration of vSphere+: A first look at the new vSphere+ & vSAN+ Cloud Service

Start your free vSphere+ and vSAN+ Trial

VMware offers free vSphere+ and vSAN+ trials that allows you to explore these new capabilities except upgrading the vCenter Server from the VMware Cloud Console. Customers just need to deploy a vCenter Cloud Gateway and connect their vCenter Server instance(s) to VMware Cloud. No need to purchase any new licenses.

Please follow this link to try vSphere+ for free: https://vmc.vmware.com/infrastructure/vsphere/overview

vSphere+ Hands-on Lab

You do not have a lab environment? No problem! Check out this new hands-on lab (HOL): https://pathfinder.vmware.com/v3/path/vsphere_plus/section/step2/activity/vsphere_plus_hol

Where can I find more resources?

Please find below a list with additional information:

Stay tuned for more vSphere and vSAN announcements from VMware Explore next week!