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VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal – The New Intercloud?

Apr 5, 2023 | Edge Computing, Equinix, ESXi, HCX, NSX, Tanzu, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN, vSphere

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 vmc-equinix@vmware.com.

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

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

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

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+

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:

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (formerly also known as Tanzu Standard Runtime)
Tanzu integrated services that include open-source packages like Harbor, Fluentbit, Prometheus, Grafana, Contour, Velero, Sonobuoy and Pinniped
Tanzu Mission Control Essentials
NSX Advanced Load Balancer Essentials

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.