Feb 19 2018

End of General Support for vSphere 5.5 and other Products

So there’s 7 months left from today until vSphere 5.5 and complimentary VMware products go out of General Support. The official EoGS date for vSphere 5.5 is 19th September 2018.

The products going EoGS on that same date are:

Site Recovery Manager 5.5/5.8
vSAN 5.5
vCenter Server 5.5 (including Update Manager 5.5)
vSphere Replication 5.5/5.6/5.8
vSphere Data Protection 5.5/5.8

When products go End of General Support, this typically means those products stop getting updates/upgrades and patches – including any new security/bug fixes! The only support offered is web based Support Requests for assistance on existing patches and bug fixes. Fortunately any issues with Spectre/Meltdown will still be addressed post Sept 19th as they’re classed as existing security issues (phew).

My suggestion is that you start planning your upgrades to vSphere 6.5 now as typically from experience with my customers, an upgrade project tends to take 2-3 months to plan/design and another month to execute.

There are quite a number of differences with 6.5, and I’ve blogged about it previously here:

There are 2 VMware KBs I recommend people reading before planning an upgrade:

Finally the best website to visit to help with any upgrades is VMware’s own Upgrade Center: https://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/upgrade-center.html

Dell EMC updates VxRail software to address Spectre

So Dell EMC have finally released the patches for their VxRail appliances, I know many of my customers were asking about these patches – in a way it’s good it was slightly delayed given how many normal VMware customers experienced issues when patching and how one patch was pulled by VMware!

The good thing about VxRail is that any software patches or updates released have been tried and tested by the Dell EMC CPSD engineering team, so they should be ready for roll out with minimum disruption!

Updates 4.0.401 and 4.5.150 are now available to download from Dell EMC’s support portal.

Release notes can be found here:
https://support.emc.com/docu80740_VxRail-Appliance-Software-4.0.x-Release-Notes.pdf?language=en_US
https://support.emc.com/docu86659_VxRail-Appliance-Software-4.5.x-Release-Notes.pdf?language=en_US

It’s worth noting that at present this patch only contains 2 of the 3 required fixes for Intel to address the Speculative Execution vulnerability (Spectre – Meltdown doesn’t really affect VMware and hence VxRail). The 3rd fix has not yet been released by Intel and Dell EMC basically decided they couldn’t wait any longer as Intel drag their heels!

Jan 15 2018

Spectre & Meltdown Update

So it seems that the microcode patches released by VMware associated with their recent Security Advisory (VMSA-2018-0004) have been pulled….
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52345
So that’s ESXi650-201801402-BG, ESXi600-201801402-BG, or ESXi550-201801401-BG.

The microcode patch provided by Intel was buggy and there seems to be issues when VMs access the new speculative execution control mechanism (Haswell & Broadwell processors). However, I can’t seem to find much around what these issues are…

For the time being, if you haven’t applied one of those microcode patches, VMware recommends not doing so and to apply the patches listed in VMSA-2018-0002 instead.

If you have applied the latest patches you will have to edit the config files of each ESXi host and add in a line that hides the new speculative execution control mechanism and reboot the VMs on that host. Detailed information can be found in the KB above.

Finally William Lam has created a very handy PowerCLI script that will help provide information about your existing vSphere environment and help identify whether you have hosts that are impacted by Spectre and this new Intel Sighting issue: https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2018/01/verify-hypervisor-assisted-guest-mitigation-spectre-patches-using-powercli.html

Jan 11 2018

Spectre & Meltdown Vulnerabilities

So at the beginning of the new year, news broke via The Register that there could be a potential security vulnerability to Intel processors (Meltdown) and how it was a problem which couldn’t be easily fixed by a microcode update because of how the Intel architecture does speculative execution of code (in a nutshell this is how modern processors try to ‘predict’ the code it needs to execute next, before the current executing code produces a result – all modern processors do this to some extent in order to fill its internal pipeline and speed up processing)…. this quickly blew up into a storm where additional vulnerabilities were identified (Spectre) which affects Intel, AMD and ARM processors!

Three closely related vulnerabilities involving the exploit of speculative execution in CPUs were made public:

CVE-2017-5753: Known as Variant 1, a bounds check bypass
CVE-2017-5715: Known as Variant 2, branch target injection
CVE-2017-5754: Known as Variant 3, rogue data cache load

Variant 1 & 2 have been branded as Spectre, with Variant 3 known as Meltdown.

The fallout is spectacular…. lawsuits being filled against Intel…. videos of exploits (proof of concepts) already on youtube….. customers going crazy that Russians/North Koreans could be stealing data from their systems….. all this because chip manufacturers tried to outdo each other by putting speed of processing above security.

The best article I’ve read that explains how Speculative Execution works and how these vulnerabilities could be exploited can be found here: http://frankdenneman.nl/2018/01/05/explainer-spectre-meltdown-graham-sutherland/

It seems that at the moment the only way to minimise your exposure to potential exploits is to patch the OS or Hypervisor, however this isn’t without issues as people have started reporting that it adds an overhead to performance. In all honesty, I doubt personal users will notice a performance hit on their day to day usage (home/office applications or games), it will however impact anyone that undertakes high IO or system-call intensive applications (such as DBs, email, Big-data/data-mining)… a performance hit of between 5-30% depending on application!!

VMware have stated that at present they don’t believe Meltdown to be an issue to their products because ESXi does not run untrusted user mode code, and Workstation and Fusion rely on the protection that the underlying operating system provides. For Spectre, they have released an article detailing their response to the issues and 2 Security Advisories which addresses the vulnerabilities and how they can be mitigated, VMSA-2018-0002 has been superseded by VMSA-2018-0004.

From what I can see, the first Security Advisory consists of security patches to ESXi that addresses the vulnerability to mitigate against leakage from the hypervisor or guest VMs into a malicious guest VM – these were patches made available late last year before the news broke (which makes you wonder how long the industry have known about it).

The second Security Advisory is a full minor update to vCenter (5.5, 6.0 and 6.5) in order to support both newer vSphere ESXi patches and Microcode/BIOS patches to hardware. This seems to be what they call “Hypervisor-Assisted Guest mitigation” which virtualises the new speculative-execution control mechanism for guest VMs so that a Guest OS can mitigate leakage between processes within the VM – and this mitigation requires specific microcode patches from platform vendors which seem to introduce these new ‘speculative-execution control features’. More information on how to apply this Security Advisory can be found here: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52085.

Note: The update patches found in VMSA-2018-0004 will mean that these new CPU features will be exposed to Guest VMs and as such vMotion to ESXi hosts without the microcode or hypervisor patches applied will be prevented. However, if you have an EVC cluster, it looks like vCenter will suppress the new features from VMs to enable vMotion compatibility until all hosts have been upgraded (after which it will enable those features) – unpatched hosts will not be allowed to join an EVC cluster that has been patched.

It’s worth noting that Guest VMs should also have their OS updated with the latest security patches for effective mitigation of these known vulnerabilities!

Finally, VMware have released an article regarding these vulnerabilities and whether their virtual appliances are affected: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52264. It currently looks like vSphere Integrated Containers and vRealize Automation have not been patched yet.

Nov 23 2017

VMware on Microsoft Azure….. interesting!

Earlier this week, Microsoft let slip that they were working with Premier VMware partners on a tech preview to deploy a full VMware stack on Azure bare-metal hardware, co-located with other Azure services.

Initially billed as a ‘stepping-stone’ to full Azure Cloud, Microsoft have made known that “sometimes there are specific VMware workloads that can be more challenging to migrate to the cloud” – and so customers may need the option to run these workloads on a VMware stack in Azure (for the time being). What I can’t quite work out yet is what these “workloads” would be… after all, nearly every workload I’ve ever deployed on VMware can be easily re-deployed on Hyper-V!

Microsoft have mentioned that this new VMware stack on Azure will GA in 2018. What they haven’t mentioned is who they’re working with, who will own and support the service and how it would be licensed…. for a start, it’s very interesting that it’s not being developed alongside VMware, and VMware have come out to say they’re not aware of any of their partners collaborating alongside VMware engineering to deliver this service – in fact VMware have stated it’s being developed independent of VMware and is “neither certified nor supported by VMware…. VMware does not recommend and will not support customers running on the Azure announced partner offering.” – which kind of makes you wonder what happens if a customer encounters problems with this Azure service?!? I highly doubt there will be any enterprise customers taking up this un-supported Azure service!!

I’m not sure why Microsoft have stated that “running your VMware stack in the cloud doesn’t address your hybrid requirements”… surely the fact that having a common framework on-prem and off-prem (ie VMware Cloud Foundation) is that “true consistency across your cloud and on-prem environment” that Microsoft say is missing….?!? Whilst it maybe true that Azure can provide a complete hybrid cloud package, let’s face it their Azure Stack offering is pretty limited – only a select few hardware vendors, no ability for customers to use their own hardware and lack of ability to expand/upgrade – plus I’m not aware of many customers jumping on board the Azure Stack on-prem platform! Also, when it comes to networking, Microsoft’s offering lacks the features of what NSX offers to VMware customers!

Should VMware start getting worried about this new announcement…..? On the contrary, they seem to have embraced the idea and even have the audacity to spin this announcement as Microsoft “recognizing the leadership position of VMware’s offering…. as a superior and necessary solution for customers over Hyper-V…..!!” TBH, they’ve never really seen much damage done to their vSphere install base when Microsoft started releasing tools to help people migrate off VMware, so I doubt this new announcement will trouble their new VMware Cloud on AWS offering.

It’s interesting that it was announce alongside the new Azure Migrate service which helps you discover and plan the migration of your on-prem VMware workloads and then execute the migration with Azure Site Recovery (ASR).

In my opinion, it’s all just a bit of hot air coming from Microsoft to try and take some of the plaudits before next weeks AWS re:Invent conference!

However, I do hope that Microsoft swallow some pride and reach out to VMware and start a combined engineering/development effort as that will go a long way to what every man and his dog wants to see – VMware Cloud on Azure! Only when Azure comes on board will VMware be able to say they are now a “broker of cloud” as only then will customers be given the option to migrate workloads seamlessly between the 2 biggest players in the public cloud market! (TBH given the relationship VMware has with GCP, I can see VMware Cloud on GCP happening first before Azure – although hardly anyone uses GCP!)

I mean, VMware and Microsoft already partner to offer VMware Horizon Cloud on Azure, surely they can put their differences aside and produce the one thing everyone is asking for!

…. watch this space….. (in eager anticipation!)

Oct 25 2017

vSphere Central – new resource centre

A little while back I caught the vSphere blog about vSphere Central being launched and ended up bookmarking the portal to have a look at a later date. I had totally forgot about it till today when I needed to look up the PSC topology diagrams and Google sent me to the new vSphere 6.5 Topology and Upgrade Planning Tool (more on this later). Turns out this portal is exactly like Storage Hub (resource portal for everything vSAN, SRM and storage related)!

Everything technical you need to know about vSphere and vCenter can be found on this portal:

How to install vCenter and vSphere
How to migrate to vCSA
How to upgrade vCenter and vSphere
vCenter and PSC architecture
SSL certificate management
PSC Deployment Types
Product Interoperability Matrix
All the new features in 6.5 explained (vCenter HA, Backup/Restore, etc)

It really is a great resource portal, and even better you can download each section as a PDF! Beats the documentation site for vSphere as it’s far more easier to navigate!

The content is in a range of formats, most of it is text taken from the technical pdf documents, but there are videos and walkthrough demos also scattered throughout the topics.

One of the things launched with vSphere Central was the vSphere 6.5 Topology and Upgrade Planning Tool.

This tool aims to help customers plan and execute both upgrades to vSphere 6.5 as well as new deployments. With this initial release, the tool is focused on the most common upgrade paths and deployments of vCenter Server 6.5. The tool works by asking a series of questions while providing some guidance along the way to help answer those questions eventually making some recommendations on topology and upgrade and deployment steps.

In the past I used to refer to the VMware KB on deployment topologies: https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2147672

Some of the guys in the vSphere technical marketing team then came up with the PSC Topology Decision Tree which was a large poster – https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/04/platform-services-controller-topology-decision-tree.html

This tool was inspired by the Decision Tree poster and extends its capability.

What I especially like about the tool is that after answering a series of questions regarding how I’m planning to design the vCenter/PSC deployment it gives me a recommended Topology diagram and then explains the steps to go about deploying the solution:

topology

Anyways, it’s a great tool…. and the portal is a brilliant collection of resources! Go use it! Bookmark it now…! =)

Oct 16 2017

Horizon Cloud on Azure – GA

Interesting tie up between VMware and Microsoft…. is this the beginning of a new relationship? Have Microsoft woken up (post-VMworld) to the awesome VMware Cloud on AWS and realised they also want in on the party? (although if i’m honest this partnership has been bubbling in the background for a while now).

Anyways, after a round of beta testing in the US, Horizon Cloud has now gone GA on Azure: https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2017/10/vmware-horizon-cloud-on-microsoft-azure-now-available.html

When Horizon Cloud was launched earlier this year, the concept of enabling end-user organisations the ability to deploy feature-rich VDIs and applications across multiple deployment options was very promising. From a single management console, end users are able to deploy virtual desktops onto on-premise infrastructure, to the Cloud, or a hybrid combination of both. TBH, some of this concept was already available in Horizon Air (which came out of the Desktone acquisition), but this is an evolution of that product.

Horizon Cloud is a cross-cloud architecture for VDI – much like how Cloud Foundation is for SDDC – however, in the case of Horizon Cloud, the Portal which acts as the control/management plane resides solely in the cloud (you get a choice with Cloud Foundation’s SDDC Manager), administrators log into this portal to deploy and manage their VDI sessions – whether on prem or cloud.

3 offerings currently:

Horizon Cloud Hosted – so VDI infrastructure provided by VMware (IBM Cloud is currently the only provider), where you just choose the type of desktop and apps to deploy via the portal – DaaS. Infrastructure management/maintenance/SLAs are fully undertaken by VMware.
Horizon Cloud On-Premise – based on HCI technology and acts like a stepping stone to Cloud VDI. VDI stored locally on prem, but management is all from the Cloud, perfect for data-residency issues, for end-users who require high performance VDI, and for IT admins who wish to have greater control over their VDI infrastructure.
Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure – delivering RDS VDI and apps hosted in Azure datacentres. Connecting a customers Azure IaaS subscription to Horizon Cloud. So VMware manages the VDI aspects and Microsoft the underlying infrastructure. Also worth noting that currently only Azure deployments support vGPU-accelerated infrastructure.

Whatever the deployment option, customers will get a VDI infrastructure that’s easily scalable (whether cloud or on-prem) and easy to deploy. The best part is you get the flexibility of subscription based pricing.

With Horizon Cloud on Azure, you can import gold images from Azure marketplace which will then be configured and deployed for Horizon.

One key element of the Horizon Cloud technology is justin-time (JIT) provisioning of virtual desktops and applications. Using the configurations made in the cloud-control
plane, Horizon Cloud leverages VMware App Volumes, User Environment Manager, and VMware Instant Clone technologies to assemble personalised virtual desktop and application environments when an end user logs in, giving IT administrators high flexibility in leveraging the infrastructure.

I like the idea that if I have a persistent VDI deployed in Horizon Cloud, then I can access that VDI or hosted apps whether I’m in the office or on the move (as long as there is data connectivity). I can start writing a document in the office, then leave it open mid-sentence as I leave the office, or jump on a train – I can even power off my endpoint device – then I can re-establish the session and carry on without any interruption… an Always On desktop!

I also like the idea that with Azure, I could deploy a VDI session to the datacentre in the UK, then as I jump on a flight to the US I can re-deploy that VDI session to an Azure datacentre in the US. Although, I’m not quite sure you can migrate live VDI sessions between datacentres yet – I haven’t seen any articles that say you can live-migrate VDIs (but one would think this would be the ideal end-goal).

Hopefully this new VMware-Microsoft partnership will lead onto Microsoft accepting to run Cloud Foundation on Azure (VMware Cloud on Azure) which will then give end users the freedom to move their workloads from on prem to either AWS or Azure!! Almost Cross-Cloud (just need GCP to step up).

Sep 26 2017

VMworld 2017 Europe Wrap Up….

So this blog post has been a bit late coming, mainly due to me coming back from Barcelona with a heavy chest infection and cold… and when you’re sick, you tend to procrastinate alot… =)
Looks like all the excessive late nights, early morning starts, long days, freezing cold breakout rooms (was anyone else cold??) and lack of sleep really took it’s toll on me…. not to mention having to entertain all the customers MTI took out to VMworld this year! Such a hard life I live…. =)

We had a mad 1st day as Monday 11th Sept was Catalonia day and a huge demonstration was planned with demonstrators forming a large X along Carrer de Arago and Passeig de Gracia! The big problem was our hotel was smack bang in the middle of the intersection of the X…. nightmare getting to the hotel, our taxi dropped us off 2km away as there was a huge cordon around the demonstration! What an experience!

It’s a bit strange to be in Barcelona in September when it’s still warm outside… we had some really lovely sunny days…. but to be honest I think the weather was lost on most VMworld attendees as we were all too busy running around the conference centre trying to squeeze in lunch, trips to the solution exchange and all our breakout sessions!

As usual, the layout of the conference centre was annoying…. breakout sessions in hall 8 are miles away from where the solution exchange and VMVillage/Hangspace/HOLs are! I was clocking over 15000 steps a day just walking back and forth between hall 6, 7 and 8! This year they moved Registration over to hall 6 rather than have it by hall 8… totally confusing every VMworld Europe Alumni! =)

I wonder why they don’t use Hall 5 for breakout sessions? I guess maybe it’s because Hall 8 is the only hall that can be split into several rooms??

One thing I did like was the “Expert Bar” where attendees were able to have roundtable sessions with some VMware experts… it was very well laid out, much better than previous years!

This year was the 10th VMworld being held in Europe and we were told during the 1st day general session by Pat Gelsinger that it was the biggest VMworld yet – over 11,000 people attending. This may explain why the conference was laid out as it was…. the solution exchange definitely looked a lot bigger!

Before I go into my wrap up, I have to give a shout out to the new VMTN community programs and especially to Katie Bradley (VMTN Community Manager) and Elsa Mayer, (VMware Blog Program Manager)…. they were kind enough to pass me my VMware vSphere vExpert goodie bag and also explain about the new BlogBeats Program and help me register my blog on the VMTN community! I actually think this is a great initiative for the VMware community, it will also help drive traffic to bloggers who might be a bit on the lazy side (ie…. me!)…. keep up the good work ladies!! =)

It was also nice (if a bit awkward at times) to be recognised as a blogger by a number of attendees as well as vendors within the Solution Exchange… first time that’s happened to me since I started blogging! It’s a shame I was unable to make it to the vExpert party, unfortunately I had too much happening on Tuesday, what with my company sponsoring the Trend Micro Party… Hopefully next year – although maybe there should be more vExpert gatherings organised for UK/London!

The Wrap Up

I’m not really going to say much about the General Sessions, mainly because as per usual it was a repeat of the US ones but with a little European twist to it (see my 2 previous blogs on the US General Sessions)…. Pat did mention the dreadful “GDPR” word and that companies can’t just rely on technology to make them GDPR compliant!
GDPR is one beast of a legal mandate…. nearly every customer I’ve spoken to has heard of GDPR but don’t know what it means! I’m not going to pretend I know everything about GDPR… to be honest I typically just refer people to my colleague – Andy Tang – who’s a GDPR Practitioner! =)
Anyways, VMware Radius has a decent article that talks about GDPR and Addressing Data Security Gaps with VMware…. go have a read!

The whole VR demo looked really cool…. imagine being able to manage your VMware datacentre via VR… picking up workloads and throwing them into different hosts or even into the cloud!! Anyways, it looks like Pat was having fun – and to think the hackathon guys built it in a matter of days… impressive!
It’s amazing what some of the community gets up to… like writing API calls to integrate Amazon’s Alexa with vCenter – William Lam and Cody De Arkland have some great blog articles and demos available (Cody even did a recent vBrownBag podcast on it)!

There was a few new announcements though… An improved Cloud Provider Program was announced to help VMware Cloud Provider partners expand their service offerings, enable simplistic workload migration, more efficient operations and improved automation. Of the 3 announcements, VMware HCX looked the most promising…. in summary:

VMware HCX (more about that in a moment)
New VMware Cloud Provider Platform – allowing partners to rapidly deploy and scale up their cloud infrastructure. It’s a complete stack of VMware’s cloud infrastructure products, including certified reference designs. All built around vSphere, vCloud Director and NSX.
VMware Cloud Verified Partner – this is a new ‘trustmark’ which shows that a cloud provider partner has made a significant investment in VMware cloud infrastructure and offers their own ‘value-add’ services that differentiates them from the rest of the crowd. TBH, at the moment only the really big Cloud players have been given this seal of approval from VMware – CenturyLink, Fujitsu, IBM Cloud, OVH and Rackspace. It will be interesting to see whether smaller cloud providers will gain this new trustmark.

VMware HCX looks like a promising piece of tech…. An integrated solution that helps customers to migrate workloads to the cloud – allowing seamless portability of applications and data between different versions of ESXi, whether on premise or between Clouds (as long as they run VMware)!
Customers have been telling VMware that it’s not just about building the infrastructure, but more importantly how they can gain increased application mobility across multiple clouds. Businesses frequently struggle with the complexity of migrating old workloads, such as old versions of ESXi, to modern environments, be they internal or cloud-based – and this the problem that HCX is going to help solve. It’s like Cross-vCenter vMotion on Steroids, using the network overlay (NSX) to help connect on-premise, old environments to modern environments or to cloud!

At the moment only IBM Cloud and OVH have access to HCX, but I’m sure VMware will end up rolling it out to the rest of their VMware cloud partners!

TBH, I’m still waiting for the announcement of some super-duper CMP solution from VMware that will let me migrate my workloads between AWS, Azure, GCP or my on-prem datacentre… seamlessly…. now that would truly be “Cross-Cloud”…. I guess we’re still a few years away from such a cloud-agnostic solution!

The only other announcement was a new version of the vRealize Suite – vRealize Suite 2017. The new version of VMware’s CMP offers a more comprehensive platform to manage hybrid clouds… nothing excitingly new, just some minor updates to speed up deployment and lifecycle management of workloads. vRA gets support for Admiral – VMware’s Container management platform.

I’m not going to breakdown all the sessions I attended, as previous years I got a slight slap on the wrist for posting up photos of slides which had “confidential” marked all over them… oops…. Plus so many key sessions are now available for playback on the VMworld website or via the Content Catalog: https://www.vmworld.com/en/europe/video/vmworld-on-demand.html
There’s even a load of videos on the VMworld TV youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/VMworldTV

The other obvious highlight from VMworld was winning the Mobile App Game and getting the opportunity to go backstage to meet and greet the Kaiser Chiefs… =)

It’s funny, but all the people who went back stage due to either winning the VMUG competition or the VMware Inclusion draw were all from the UK… How ironic!

TBH, I’m not a big Kaiser Chiefs fan…. but my colleague Andy was, so I brought him along as my plus one…. surprisingly they’re quite down-to-earth guys!

I do have to admit that this year’s VMworld party was one of the better ones I’ve been to (on par with 2015s party band – Fearless)… it was far busier and people actually stayed around and watched the performance… and many enjoyed it too!!

So to conclude…. it was another great VMworld…. the customers we took out all enjoyed themselves and learnt loads, and whilst the geek inside of me was hoping for more announcements I was satisfied with what I got out of the conference.

There’s a clear message coming out of VMware now, Hybrid Cloud is mainstream… it’s now possible to migrate workloads easily between clouds… containers are how the next generation of applications will be deployed (Cloud Native Apps/PKS)… It seems that the vision VMware started 2 years ago of “Any Device, Any Application, Any Cloud” is finally coming into fruition (albeit limited to just VMware or AWS Cloud at the moment).

Roll on VMworld 2018… with Europe back in Fira Grand Via Barcelona, but this time on the 5th-8th November 2018 (I’m told the date was moved due to a change in VMware’s financial year end). VMworld 2018 US will again be in Las Vegas on the 26th-30th August 2018.

Aug 30 2017

VMworld 2017 US General Session Day 2

….. This update is a bit late going up because Tuesday evenings is 5-a-side footie for me…. =)

So what was the General Session on Day 2 all about… well it kicked off with a fireside chat between Pat Gelsinger and Michael Dell, answering a few questions that were submitted the previous evening from attendees. In my opinion there wasn’t any major revelations or probing questions asked/answered, what we do know is that Michael Dell likes Peanut Butter & Chocolate… =P

It’s interesting that Dell thinks that we’re in for some exciting times with AI and machine learning…. although he didn’t quite pin his flag like Zuckerberg and Musk recently… =)
The amount of data created from IoT is stupendous, and the possibilities of using that data are endless – however, companies need to start thinking about how to use the vast amounts of data they have to try and improve processes, products and services – if they don’t then they could be left behind (Just like Elastic Sky Pizza were)!

However, one of the more memorable quotes from Pat was that “Today is the slowest day of technological evolution of the rest of your life!” Great quote, and how true it is…. In IT we live in an ever-changing world!

One thing I did pick up on was VMware Skyline – a new and innovative support technology which will offer pro-active support for VMware solutions. It will consist of a Collector appliance that end-users deploy, it then sits there securely collecting environmental-data from different VMware components (such as configuration, performance, and product usage) whilst performing machine-learning analytics to ensure the overall solution functions correctly. If it detects any changes, events or patterns that will cause a deviation from best practices or validate designs then it will alert the customer. Skyline is aimed at improving support experience through data analytics.

Both Pat and Dell were then joined on stage by Rob Mee (CEO of Pivotal) – it was really interesting to hear that Pivotal Cloud Foundry was being used in over 50% of the Fortune 500 – I wonder what the percentage is in the UK FTSE? Pivotal has be “pivotal” (excuse the pun) in helping enterprises and their digital transformation – how to run legacy production workloads alongside developing new cloud-native applications, yet still providing the availability and security whilst also reducing cost! Pivotal Cloud Foundry addresses all these issues.

The biggest announcement of the day was the unveiling of Pivotal Container Services (PKS) – a partnership between VMware, Pivotal and Google Cloud. Pivotal has been working with Google for a while – Project Kubo – and now with the partnership with VMware, PKS will enable enterprises to deliver production-ready Kubernetes on VMware vSphere and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with compatibility to Google Container Engine (GKE) – all secured by – yup you guessed it – NSX. Pat went on to say that they’re not stopping there and will start to integrate other VMware products such as vRealize Automation and Operations, along with Wavefront (who VMware acquired in May – it’s a “real-time metrics monitoring and streaming analytics platform designed for developers to optimize their clouds and modern applications that rely on containers and microservices”)

Pat, Dell and Rob were joined on stage by Google’s Sam Ramji (VP of Product Management – Developer Platforms). It’s interesting how Google are pouring in vast amounts of their knowledge on containers into Kubernetes – a way of giving back to the community! Sam also announced that Pivotal and VMware were to become as Platinum Members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation – home of Kubernetes.

The rest of the General Session involved a fictitious company called “Elastic Sky Pizza” which was stuck in the past and needed assistance in transforming their business. Loads of demos and presentations showing how VMware’s suite of Cloud products work – including PKS, AppDefense, NSX, Pulse IoT (Edge LIOTA).

PKS looks amazing, but I do still think that containers is an enterprise play – which kind of goes against one of the questions during the fireside chat about looking after the SMB market… this is probably going to be priced above what SMBs can afford!

Aug 29 2017

VMworld 2017 US General Session Day 1

If like me, you’re stuck in a sweltering London enjoying the bank holiday and watching the Game of Thrones season 7 finale, you may have forgotten that over in Vegas the city is just getting over the big fight of Mayweather vs McGregor and is now inundated with people looking to attend VMworld 2017 US.

It’s great that VMware live stream their keynotes, as it gives everyone an opportunity to hear first hand what VMworld will be about this year and also what is being announced!

And it’s of no surprise that VMware have continued to strengthen their vision on “Any Device, Any Application, Any Cloud” with the keynote by Pat Gelsinger. Whilst heterogeneous is a great thing that leads to the consumerisation of IT, it plays havoc with IT admins who’s key focus is to contain and secure a company’s data – and it’s worth noting how much emphasis is being placed on security within VMware – NSX is intrinsic to every solution that was mentioned during the keynote!

The first thing that was covered was how the digital transformation is affecting end users – the goal for any company is to ensure that their employees are well connected, yet the challenge is a complex one when you realise how many different technologies an end user has access to – smartphones, tablets, laptops – even smartwatches and cars now! So how do you deliver an unified workspace securely across multiple technologies?

Simple – Workspace ONE – piecing it all together to give companies a “consumer simple but enterprise secure” solution. Delivered in 3 areas:

Apps and Identity – applications with a consistent feel across multiple devices. Secured by a common identity framework with a simple Single Sign-on experience.
Management and Security – IT in control, delivering consistent management & security. Drastically improving tasks that were previously costly, time consuming, and resource intensive, whilst still in control of data by combining identity and device management to enforce Data Security and Endpoint Compliance.
Desktop and Mobile – Device Management and Compliance provided by AirWatch Unified Endpoint Management, protecting sensitive data as well as conditional access to how that data can be consumed by end-users.

Next Pat went on to explain that virtualisation has led to end-users deploying a private cloud within their own data centres, yet making such a transition is not an easy step – deployment isn’t straight forward, lifecycle management and day 2 operations isn’t always easy, and trying to secure different technologies of a private cloud is painful!

VMware’s goal is to “make Private Cloud Easy“ and that’s where Cloud Foundation comes along – a fully integrated SDDC stack that ‘just works’…. simple… agile… secure! version 2.2 was announced and is now GA.

Pat was then joined by Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, to announce the General Availability of VMware Cloud on AWS. Announced as a tech preview at last years VMworld, it should be noted that it’s currently only available today in the US West Coast region Availability Zone, it will then be rolled out across the East Coast AZ before rolling out to the rest of the AWS global AZs by the end of 2018. So I guess we’re going to expect it in the UK late 2017/early 2018!

VMware Cloud on AWS allows you to seamlessly take a workload running on vSphere in your data centre and migrate it to AWS Public Cloud running a VMware stack – using the same tools (vCenter Server) to manage both your private and your public cloud workloads from a single pane of glass! A consistent feel no matter where your workload resides. What Andy Jassy said was correct – in the past customers hated the fact that if they wanted to consume public cloud, there was no easy way of migrating workloads across without some form of translation occurring. It was also painful and costly to manage as you couldn’t use a single tool to manage both private and public cloud.

VMware’s Cloud Strategy is as follows:

The first 7 VMware Cloud Services were announced as available for consumption.

NSX Cloud is an interesting service that addresses networking and security operational challenges inherent with using multiple public clouds. Unfortunately at launch it’s only available on AWS to protect EC2 workloads (ie native AWS workloads – not vSphere workloads which is what VMware Cloud on AWS gives). It differs from on-premise NSX as it is delivered as a service and managed by VMware.

As I previously said, NSX is a key foundation to every solution at VMware currently:

Security is hugely important… and Pat breaks it down into 3 components:

the need to build it into the infrastructure
the need to integrate with the current security vendor ecosystem
the need to ensure good cyber hygiene and ensure security policies are in place. The 5 pillars of Cyber Hygiene are:
- Least Privilege
- Micro-segmentation
- Encryption
- Multi-factor authentication
- Patching

Two years ago, VMware first began talking about the concept of the “Goldilocks Zone” where the hypervisor sits at the ideal location in the network to improve security. During the keynote VMware announced a new product named AppDefense which looks to be the fruition of Project Goldilocks.

AppDefense allows a virtual machine to learn its manifest and understand what is a good and secure process, it’s then able to determine whether the runtime behaviour of a VM or application deviates from its intended state. Finally it’s able to trigger an automated/orchestrated response to remediate or quarantine any detected anomalies.

Strange that searching the VMworld Europe Content Catalog for AppDefense doesn’t bring up any sessions…. which is a shame as I was hoping to schedule a session after hearing the keynote and reading about it.

Roll on Day 2….

The Virtual Unknown

Category VMware