Cross-Cloud Services | The Virtual Unknown

Hmm…. so that was an interesting announcement from VMware last week!….. although if I’m honest it makes perfect sense!

OVH Group announcing it’s intent to acquire the vCloud Air Business from VMware: https://www.vmware.com/radius/vmware-cloud-air-evolves/

Last year when VMware announced their tie up with AWS – vCloud on AWS – many had already started wondering what that partnership would do to VMware’s own cloud offering. The talking point was made more real when VMware also announced their Cross-Cloud Architecture which would allow a customer to choose which cloud platform to deploy their workloads onto – all from a single common operating environment. Then to make things worse, VMware announced VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud (or what was Softlayer)… an SDDC stack running VMware goodies on IBM Cloud compute!

That triple whammy pretty much made everyone think that vCloud Air’s time was up!!

I had a number of discussions at VMworld Europe last year where we talked about whether VMware would just shut down vCloud Air, or would they migrate it all onto AWS. Although the general consensus was that maybe they would sell off/spin off that part of their business – after all, VMware is a software business and vCloud Air was always seen as a ‘weird’ sibling…. not to mention that it competed against all it’s vCAN (VSPP) partners who were offering their own cloud services built on VMware technology!

I guess there’s no shame in what VMware are doing, Cisco, Dell and HP tried and failed to do what Amazon and Google are doing well at… although surprisingly Microsoft have managed to get Azure up and running well!

In a way, VMware are getting rid of what they probably saw as a hefty investment on infrastructure and hosting for little returns (I doubt there were many customers using vCloud Air to justify the expense of keeping it). Makes more sense to sell it to an existing cloud provider who knows how to sell Public Cloud services and IaaS! Although, I kind of have to wonder what OVH will do given VMware hosted vCloud Air in Equinix/Telstra data centres around the world….. guessing they’ll run down the contract with those providers and bring it all back in house!

In my opinion, selling off vCloud Air is probably a smart move….. VMware’s vision is to enable a customer to run “Any Application on Any Cloud, accessed by Any Device”, and it was going to be difficult to be Cloud-Agnostic if they owned a Public Cloud service! The whole Cross-Cloud Architecture would have produced a conflict of interest if they kept vCloud Air…. now that they’re shot of it, they can concentrate on pushing out their vCloud stack onto Azure and maybe even GCP given that they’re well on their way with the AWS partnership. Why try and beat them at their own game? It’s far easier to embrace them and partner!!

VMware are positioning themselves to be the broker of cloud services…. a single management point that allows end users to decide which public cloud is best for their workloads! In a way it’s a clever move, firstly because it puts the decision-making back with the end user, and secondly it now means that VMware can state that it’s the only virtualisation company that doesn’t tie you into a single cloud vendor (much like how Microsoft tries to ram Azure down the throat of Hyper-V customers).

Interesting times ahead……

So the replay of yesterdays Day 1 General Session is now online:

The biggest announcement is the tech preview of Cross-Cloud Architecture. This is obviously VMware’s next step in their “Any Cloud, Any Application, Any Device” vision.

According to VMware:
“This architecture extends VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy, enabling customers to run, manage, connect and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment. VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture is delivered through VMware Cloud Foundation, a new set of Cross-Cloud Services VMware is developing, and VMware vRealize Cloud Management Platform.”

This new architecture gives customers a set of tools to manage their virtual estate both on-premise and off-premise across multiple clouds – a single pane of glass to manage VMs on the likes of AWS, Azure, Google, as well as vSphere clouds.

Most customers already utilise multiple clouds (unbeknownst to IT) and this new architecture will enable IT to resume control of what is out in the cloud – allowing network and security policies to be applied to workloads being deployed in the cloud. In addition to allowing migration between clouds!

Much like how vSphere ESXi was used to allow you to span multiple server hardware vendors (HP, Dell, IBM), and how NSX allows you to span multiple network hardware vendors (Cisco, Arista, Brocade), VMware Cross-Cloud Services will offer a common platform to overlay your cloud vendors to offer you the ability to deploy your applications across clouds without having to mess around with the underlying cloud services (which are inherently different depending on cloud vendor)!

VMware Cross-Cloud Services will centralize management, operations, networking, security and data management.

It looks like the common Network & Security piece will be handled by NSX – which will include a forthcoming feature called Distributed Network Encryption (DNE).

The Management and Visibility piece will be SaaS based (a cloud service) and allows you to connect your existing public cloud accounts to ingest those workloads into the management platform, it will then show you cost and utilisation across your clouds and allow you to deploy applications across clouds.

The other major announcement was the new VMware Cloud Foundation offering which basically bundles vSphere, VSAN and NSX into a single, fully integrated, SDDC stack that can be provisioned on premise or be run as a service in the cloud.

To quote VMware:
“VMware Cloud Foundation is a next-generation hyper-converged infrastructure for building private clouds that for the first time combines VMware’s highly scalable hyper-converged software (VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN) with the world’s leading network virtualization platform, NSX. Cloud Foundation provides a consistent multi-cloud IaaS that is simple to deploy, operate, and maintain, and gives applications a consistent, scalable and highly available infrastructure services, regardless of where they run”

“The goal of Cloud Foundation is to be able to provision cloud infrastructure like you provision VMs.”

In addition to this announcement was the partnership with IBM Cloud to offer VMware Cloud Foundation as a service.

The key to the Cloud Foundation is the SDDC Manager which will be the tool for IT admins to build and maintain their cloud (making use of a lot automation policies to build the cloud and deploy workloads)

Other announcements include vCloud Availability for vCloud Director, which enables customers to leverage the vCloud Air Network ecosystem (ie VMware Partner cloud solutions) for simple, automated disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) – much like the offering from vCloud Air DR.

VMware vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager has added several major enhancements, including zero-downtime, bi-directional application migrations in and out of vCloud Air. This includes the migration of NSX security policies, providing simple migration of workloads to vCloud Air with no need for any network or security reconfiguration once the migration completes.

It seems that the main takeaway from yesterdays general session was that now it’s time to take back control of your cloud.