10 More Things You Didn’t Know About vSphere+

10 More Things You Didn’t Know About vSphere+

Feb 28, 2023 | Edge Computing, ESXi, Kubernetes, Tanzu, VMware Cloud, VMware Data, vSphere

A few months ago I wrote the article 10 Things You Didn’t Know About vSphere+, which gives you a good overview of vSphere+ and VCF+, and some information about licensing. A few things have changed and been added since then and I would like to share some of the information with you.

1) vSphere+ Standard Edition

Some customers only need the feature set of vSphere Standard but were very interested in having the benefits that come with the (VMware) cloud connectivity. VMware listened to its customers and introduced vSphere+ Standard back in December 2022. What is included?

  • vSphere Standard features
  • vCenter Standard (unlimited number of deployments)
  • Admin Services (Cloud Console)

2) vSAN+ Standard and Advanced Edition

To mirror the vSAN perpetual license editions, VMware released vSAN+ Standard and vSAN+ Advanced in December 2022 as well.

3) Grace Period when moving from perpetual to subscription licensing

Customers need to move their existing perpetual licenses within 90 days to vSphere+/vSAN+, see here.

If Customer receives its entitlement to vSphere+ or vSAN+ through a VMware subscription upgrade program, then Customer must, within 90 days after purchase of the entitlement, relinquish its entitlements to any relevant vSphere or vSAN on-premises perpetual licenses (as applicable) that were exchanged through the subscription upgrade program (“Exchanged Licenses”).

5) What if I don’t renew my vSphere+/vSAN+ subscription?

You will be out of compliance, but your environment is still going to work. And you will not receive support from VMware’s Global Support anymore during that time.

6) Which data is transmitted to VMware Cloud?

According to this article, the following data is transmitted:

  • vCenter Server Inventory (transmission frequency: 24h)
  • Log Data (transmission frequency: continuous)
  • Performance Data (transmission frequency: 5min)
  • Consumption Data (transmission frequency: 15min)
  • Feature Usage (transmission frequency: 5min)
  • Entitlement (transmission frequency: as necessary)

7) Aria Universal Suite & vSphere+ (vCloud Suite+)

The subscription version of vCloud Suite is vCloud Suite+ (vCS+). vCS+ comes also in three editions: Standard, Advanced, Enterprise

vCloud Suite+ Editions 2023

8) What about VMware Horizon and vSphere+?

If you are using vSphere (for Desktop) that came as a bundle with VMware Horizon, then vSphere cannot be upgraded to vSphere+. Consult the product interoperability matrix for more information. If you are using Horizon as a standalone product on top of vSphere+, I don’t see any issues.

9) What are vSphere+ add-on services?

Currently, vSphere+ comes with a centralized cloud console that provides consolidated management of all vSphere+ deployments. Customers also get the Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) and Tanzu Mission Control Essentials as part of vSphere+.

Add-On #1: Aria Operations

vSphere+ vROps Add-On

Powered by Aria Operations (formerly known as vRealize Operations), vSphere+ provides an overview of the resource usage of all the clusters associated with the vCenter Server instances that are connected to your vCenter Cloud Gateway(s). You can monitor and analyze details such as hosts, cores, VMs, and remaining capacity on each cluster. You can also get a view of the number of days remaining until the cluster reaches its usable capacity.

Add-On #2: VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR)

vSphere+ VCDR Add-On

You can protect VMs and manage their protection status directly from the VMware Cloud Console if you have a VCDR subscription.

Future Add-Ons

Without making any commitment and knowing the vSphere+ roadmap, it seems that VMware is going to bring parts of the VMware Data Services portfolio as an add-on service. More information can be found here.

10) Counting Cores for vSphere+ and vSAN+ Licensing

VMware has created a tool to identify the number of core licenses that are required to upgrade existing vSphere/vSAN deployment to vSphere+/vSAN+. William Lam has created two blogs that should help you using the script:

 

VMware vSphere – The Enterprise Data Platform

VMware vSphere – The Enterprise Data Platform

Feb 21, 2023 | AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, Edge Computing, ESXi, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Tanzu, VMware Cloud, VMware Data, vSphere

The world is creating and consuming more data than ever. There are multiple reasons that can explain this trend. Data creates the foundation for many digital products and services. And we read more and more about companies that want or need to keep their data on-premises because of reasons like data proximity, performance, data privacy, data sovereignty, data security, and predictable cost control. We also know that the edge is growing much faster than large data centers. These and other factors are the reasons why CIOs and decision-makers are now focusing on data more than ever before.

We live in a digital era where data is one of the most valuable assets. The whole economy from the government to local companies would not be able to function without data. Hence, it makes sense to structure and analyze the data, so a company’s data infrastructure becomes a profit center and is not just seen as a cost center anymore.

Data Sprawl

A lot of enterprises are confronted with the so-called data sprawl. Data sprawl means that an organization’s data is stored on and consumed by different devices and operating systems in different locations. There are cases where the consumers and the IT teams are not sure anymore where some of the data is stored and how it should be accessed. This is a huge risk and results in a loss of security and productivity.

Since the discussions about sovereign clouds and data sovereignty have started, it has never been more important where a company’s data resides, and where and how one can consume that data.

Enterprises have started to follow a cloud-smart approach: They put the right application and its data in the right cloud, based on the right reasons. In other words, they think twice now where and how they store their data.

What databases are popular?

When talking to developers and IT teams, I mostly received the following names (in no particular order):

  • Oracle
  • MSSQL
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL

I think it would be a fair statement to make that a lot of customers are looking for alternatives to reduce expensive database and database management solutions (DBMS). It seems that Postgres and MySQL earned a lot of popularity over the past years, while Oracle is still considered one of the best databases on the market – even seen as one of the most expensive and least liked solutions. But I also hear other solutions like MongoDB, MariaDB, and Redis mentioned in more discussions.

DBaaS and Public Cloud Characteristics

It is nothing new: Developers are looking for a public-cloud-like experience for their on-premises deployments. They want an easy and smooth self-service experience without the need for opening tickets and waiting for several days to get their database up and running. And we also know that open-source and freedom of choice are becoming more important to companies and their developers. Some of the main drivers here are costs and vendor lock-in.

IT teams on the other side want to provide security and compliance, more standardization around versions and types, and an easy way to backup and restore databases. But the truth is, that a lot of companies are struggling to provide this kind of Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) experience to their developers.

The idea and expectation of DBaaS are to reduce management and operational efforts with the possibility to easily scale databases up and down. The difference between the public cloud DBaaS offering and your on-premises data center infrastructure is the underlying physical and virtual platform.

On-premises it could be theoretically any hardware, but VMware vSphere is still the most used virtualization platform for an enterprise’s data (center) infrastructure.

VMware vSphere and Data

VMware shared the information that studying their telemetry from their customer base showed that almost 25% of VMware workloads are data workloads (databases, data warehouses, big data analytics, data queueing, and caching) and it looks like that MS SQL Server still has the biggest share of all databases that are hosted on-premises.

They are also seeing a high double-digit growth (approx. 70-90%) when it comes to MySQL and steady growth with PostgreSQL. Rank 4 is probably Redis followed by MongoDB.

VMware Data Solutions

VMware Data Solutions, formerly known as Tanzu Data Services, is a powerful part of the entire VMware portfolio and consists of:

  • VMware GemFire – Fast, consistent data for web-scaling concurrent requests fulfills the promise of highly responsive applications.
  • VMware RabbitMQ – A fast, dependable enterprise message broker that provides reliable communication among servers, apps, and devices.
  • VMware Greenplum – VMware Greenplum is a massively parallel processing database. Greenplum is based on open-source Postgres, enabling Data Warehousing, aggregation, AI/ML and extreme query speed.
  • VMware SQL – VMware’s open-source SQL Database (Postgres & MySQL) is a Relational database service providing cost-efficient and flexible deployments on-demand and at scale. Available on any cloud, anywhere.
  • VMware Data Services Manager – Reduce operational costs and increase developer agility with VMware Data Services Manager, the modern platform to manage and consume databases on vSphere.

VMware Data Services Manager and VMware SQL

VMware SQL allows customers to deploy curated versions of PostgreSQL and MySQL and DSM is the solution that enables customers to create this DBaaS experience their developers are looking for.

VMware DSM Personas

Data Services Manager has the following key features:

  • Provisioning – Provision different configurations of databases (MySQL, Postgres, and SQL Server) with either freely
    configurable or pre-defined sizing of compute and memory resources, depending on user permissions
  • Backup & Restore – Backup, Transactional log, Point in Time Recovery (PiTR), on-demand or as scheduled
  • Scaling – Modify instances depending on usage (scale up, scale down, disk extension)
  • Replication – Replicate (Cold/Hot or Read Replicas) across managed zones
  • Monitoring – Monitor database engine, vSphere infrastructure, networking, and more.

…and supports the following components and versions (with DSM v1.4):

  • MySQL 8.0.30
  • Postgres 10.23.0, 11.18.0, 12.13.0, 13.9.0
  • MSSQL Server 2019 (Standard, Developer, Enterprise Edition)

Companies with a lot of databases have now a way at least to manage, control and secure Postgres, MySQL and MSSQL DB instances from a centralized tool than can be accessed via the UI or API.

Project Moneta

VMware’s vision is to become the cloud platform of choice. What started with compute, storage and network, continues with data: make it as easy to consume as the rest of their software-defined data center stack.

VMware has started with DSM and sees Moneta, which is still an R&D project, as the next evolution. The focus of Moneta is to bring better self-service and programmatic consumption capabilities (e.g., integration with GitHub).

Project Moneta will provide native integration with vSphere+ and the Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI). While nothing is official yet, I think of it as a vSphere+ and VMware Cloud add-on service that would provide data infrastructure capabilities. 

Final Words

If your developers want to use PostgreSQL, MySQL and MSSQL, and if your IT struggles to deploy, manage, secure and backup those databases, then DSM with Tanzu SQL can help. Both solutions are also perfectly made for disconnected use cases or airgapped environments.

Note: The DB engines are certified, tested and supported by VMware.

A Closer Look at VMware NSX Security

A Closer Look at VMware NSX Security

Dec 21, 2022 | Edge Computing, ESXi, Networking, NSX, Security, vSphere

A customer of mine asked me a few days ago: “Is it not possible to get NSX Security features without the network virtualization capabilities?”. I wrote it already in my blog “VMware is Becoming a Leading Cybersecurity Vendor” that you do not NSX’s network virtualization editions or capabilities if you are only interested in “firewalling” or NSX security features.

If you google “nsx security”, you will not find much. But there is a knowledge base article that describes the NSX Security capabilities from the “Distributed Firewall” product line: Product offerings for NSX-T 3.2 Security (87077).

Believe it or not, there are customers that haven’t started their zero-trust or “micro-segmentation” journey yet. Segmentation is about preventing lateral (east-west) movement. The idea is to divide the data center infrastructure into smaller security zones and that the traffic between the zones (and between workloads) is inspected based on the organization’s defined policies.

Perimeter Defense vs Micro-Segmentation

If you are one of them and want to deliver east-west traffic introspection using distributed firewalls, then these NSX Security editions are relevant for you:

VMware NSX Distributed Firewall

  • NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW)
  • NSX DFW with Threat Prevention
  • NSX DFW with Advanced Threat Prevention

VMware NSX Gateway Firewall

  • NSX Gateway Firewall (GFW)
  • NSX Gateway Firewall with Threat Prevention
  • NSX Gateway Firewall with Advanced Threat Prevention

Network Detection and Response

  • Network Detection and Response (standalone on-premises offering)

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

VMware NSX Distributed Firewall

The NSX Distributed Firewall is a hypervisor kernel-embedded stateful firewall that lets you create access control policies based on vCenter objects like datacenters and clusters, virtual machine names and tags, IP/VLAN/VXLAN addresses, as well as user group identity from Active Directory.

If a VM gets vMotioned to another physical host, you do not need to rewrite any firewall rules.

The distributed nature of the firewall provides a scale-out architecture that automatically extends firewall capacity when additional hosts are added to a data center.

Should you be interested in “firewalling” only, want to implement access controls for east-west traffic (micro-segmentation) only, but do not need threat prevention (TP) capabilities, then “NSX Distributed Firewall Edition” is perfect for you.

So, which features does the NSX DFW edition include?

The NSX DFW edition comes with these capabilities:

  • L2 – L4 firewalling
  • L7 Application Identity-based firewalling
  • User Identity-based firewalling
  • NSX Intelligence (flow visualization and policy recommendation)
  • Aria Operations for Logs (formerly known as vRealize Log Insight)

What is the difference between NSX DFW and NSX DFW with TP?

With “NSX DFW with TP”, you would get the following additional features:

  • Distributed Intrusion Detection Services (IDS)
  • Distributed Behavioral IDS
  • Distributed Intrusion Prevention Service (IPS)
  • Distributed IDS Event Forwarding to NDR

Where does the NSX Distributed Firewall sit?

This question comes up a lot because customers understand that this is not an agent-based solution but something that is built into the VMware ESXi hypervisor.

The NSX DFW sits in the virtual patch cable, between the VM and the virtual distributed switch (VDS):

NSX Distributed Firewall

Note: Prior to NSX-T Data Center 3.2, VMs must have their vNIC connected to an NSX overlay or VLAN segment to be DFW-protected. In NSX-T Data Center 3.2, distributed firewall protects workloads that are natively connected to a VDS distributed port group (DVPG).

VMware NSX Gateway Firewall

The NSX Gateway Firewall extends the advanced threat prevention (ATP) capabilities of the NSX Distributed Firewall to physical workloads in your private cloud. It is a software-only, L2 – L7 firewall that includes capabilities such as IDS and IPS, URL filtering and malware detection as well as routing and VPN functionality.

If you are not interested in ATP capabilities yet, you can start with the “NSX Gateway Firewall” edition. What is the difference between all NSX GFW editions?

VMware NSX GFW Editions

The NSX GFW can be deployed as a virtual machine or with an ISO image that can run on a physical server and it shares the same management console as the NSX Distributed Firewall.

VMware Aria and The Next Era of Multi-Cloud Management

VMware Aria and The Next Era of Multi-Cloud Management

Dec 5, 2022 | AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, Google Cloud, VMware Aria, VMware Cloud, vSphere

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.

10 Things You Didn’t Know About vSphere+

10 Things You Didn’t Know About vSphere+

Nov 18, 2022 | Tanzu, VMware Aria, vSphere

VMware vSphere+ is the next evolution that brings the benefits of the cloud to on-premises workloads. It transforms existing on-prem deployments into SaaS-enabled infrastructures. This allows customers to access new innovations and cloud services much faster.

I mention 4 important things to customers when they ask about vSphere+:

  • You can purchase a new subscription or upgrade your existing licenses to subscription
    • Available in 1, 3, and 5-year terms
    • Per-Core metric with a 16 core minimum per CPU (perpetual vSphere licenses use a per-socket metric with a 32 core maximum)
  • You still manage your ESXi hosts the same way. vCenter updates can be managed from the VMware Cloud console.
    • You can deploy an unlimited number of vCenters (vCenter Standard)
  • vSphere+ includes vSphere all features of the vSphere Enterprise+ edition and allows keyless management of your vSphere and vSAN infrastructure
  • You get central management and insights through the VMware Cloud Console, and add-on services

Diagram showing the architecture for vSphere+

That is vSphere+ in a nutshell. But there is much more. With this new service and connection to VMware Cloud services, customers start to ask a lot of questions. 😉

1) Which parts of the Tanzu portfolio are included in vSphere+?

vSphere+ comes with so-called developer services that include:

2) What is the Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI)?

The Cloud Consumption Interface is included with vSphere+ (powered by Aria Automation, formerly known as vRealize Automation) and gives consumers a consistent API and CLI to interact with all their cloud and IaaS operations. This means you can connect to all your Supervisor clusters from a graphical web console.

Note: Do you remember the Project Cascade announcement at VMworld 2021? That’s CCI.

3) What if I have 20 cores and want to license only 16 cores of them?

Let us say that you have 20 cores and disabled 4 of them in BIOS, vSphere+ would only see and activate/subscribe 16 cores only. This is a supported and valid configuration option.

There is a minimum of 16 cores per CPU. If your CPUs have only 12 cores per socket, you still pay for 16 cores. In this case, where a CPU has 20 cores, a customer pays for 20 cores.

But it is recommended that you activate all the cores during a subscription upgrade to set the correct baseline for the future. If you never plan to activate those 4 leftover cores, then go ahead and license only 16 cores for this CPU.

4) What if I bought VMware Cloud Foundation or vCloud Suite already?

vCloud Suite (vCS) customers can upgrade their existing perpetual license to subscription with vCloud Suite+ (vCS+).

vCloud Suite+ Editions

Existing VCF customers should have a look at VCF+.

5) What is VMware Cloud Foundation+?

VMware Cloud Foundation+ (VCF+) is generally available since October 2022 starting from VCF 4.5 or higher. The difference with vSphere+ is, that VCF+ connects the vCenter Cloud Gateway to the SDDC Manager instead of vCenter.

VMware Cloud Foundation+

The following components are included in VCF+:

  • vSphere+
  • vSAN+
  • NSX term license
  • SDDC Manager
  • Aria Universal Suite Enterprise edition (formerly known as vRealize Cloud Universal)
  • Tanzu Standard
  • Keyless entitlements (only for vSphere+ and vSAN+)

VMware Cloud Foundation+ comes in three different editions:

  • VCF+ Standard
  • VCF+ Advanced
  • VCF+ Enterprise

Note: vCenter Standard is included in vSphere+. This means that vCenter is part of VCF+ as well.

6) What if I cannot connect to the cloud yet or have an air-gapped environment?

If you are not ready yet or are not allowed to connect your environment to a cloud solution like this, you have the following alternatives for the so-called “disconnected” use cases (with term licenses):

  • vSphere Subscription (sometimes called vSphere-S)
  • vCloud Suite Subscription (vCS-S)
  • VMware Cloud Foundation Subscription (VCF-S)

Important: You cannot mix perpetual and VCF+ instances. The same is true for VCF-S and VCF+.

Note: VCF-S can be upgraded to VCF+ but you cannot go from VCF+ to VCF-S.

7) What if I lose my connection to the cloud?

No problem! If you lose your connection to the VMware Cloud, only access to cloud services and the cloud console will be affected. vCenter instances, ESXi hosts, and workloads will continue to run normally and can be managed from vCenter (through the vSphere client). This is true for vSphere+ and VCF+.

8) How many vCenters can be connected to a vCenter Cloud Gateway?

Currently, a vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCG) supports up to 8 medium vCenters. VCF+ customers need to deploy a gateway per VCF instance.

vCenter Cloud Gateway

Note: VMware periodically auto-updates vSphere+ and vCenter Cloud Gateway whenever an update is available. These auto-updates are not applicable for your vCenter Server. You must manually update the vCenter Server whenever an update is available.

9) Can I mix vSphere+ with vSAN perpetual licenses?

Yes, you can continue to use your vSAN perpetual licenses with vSphere+. But as you would expect, you should not mix vSAN perpetual and vSAN+ subscriptions.

10) What about other vSphere+ and vSAN editions?

As I mentioned, vSphere+ includes vSphere Enterprise+ features – vSAN+ has vSAN Enterprise features included.

We can expect that VMware is going to introduce vSphere+ Standard, vSAN+ Standard and vSAN+ Advanced soon. 

Want to know more?

Here are a few additional resources:

 

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

Sep 30, 2022 | AWS, Cloud Native Apps, HCX, Kubernetes, Networking, NSX, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN, vSphere

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.