VMware Showcase Keynote – Multi-Cloud Strategies to Operate at Scale-Summary

VMware Showcase Keynote – Multi-Cloud Strategies to Operate at Scale - My notes

The session presenter was Joe Kinsella

The evolution of the cloud has taken 10 years to get where it is today, we have moved from the cloud being used by developers and IT departments for test and dev, to where we are today running business productivity apps across a broad range of industries.

Primarily the cloud was used as IaaS, it is now for much more including Functions as a Service, modern apps, AI, machine Learning, and much more.

Customers are embracing multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud deployments, and using the flexibility and functions of each public cloud vendor to tailor their systems to provide the best user experience.

Just when we think we’re there, new innovations come along daily, along with new features to further boost productivity and the user experience, this gives us a dynamic environment in which to develop systems to give us the competitive edge.

Why move to the Cloud?

They’ll be a number of factors as to why companies move to the cloud and here’s a few.

·         Agility

·         Innovation

·         Consumption based model

·         On demand infrastructures

·         Global datacenters

However, a challenge of a multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud model is management, how do we manage multiplatform efficiently? This can in turn lead potentially to an increase in operational costs.

This can be for a number of reasons.

Number one is the speed of change, new features are added on a fast pace, which we have to leverage to give us efficient apps.

Number two is the distributed management of multiple clouds, sometimes apps are team based and designed by departments, rather than by IT, management interfaces can be different across all clouds. This may mean that potentially companies have multiple cloud accounts for multiple vendors, which in turn may mean that we have a completely distributed set of security issues to worry about.

Number tree is pervasive multi-cloud, companies now not only look after their own apps, but now have multiple SaaS based solutions as well, their CRM system may be running on VMware vSphere, their messaging and collaboration systems maybe running on Microsoft Azure, their web front ends maybe hosted in AWS, and test systems in Google Cloud.

How to be Successful in a Multi-Cloud World

Four factors are taken into account.

1)    Cost and visibility - As the cloud is based on a service model, sometimes costs can be unpredictable, so we need to understand our workloads and identify waste, and then optimise the services.

2)    Governance and Security - Need to push out to teams the information required in order to ensure best practices are followed based on policies, also managing the security of the business in the public nature of the cloud.

3)    Automation - Deploy, manage and maintain systems within a policy framework, the automation of policy decisions, allows system to grow and contract as required. If waste is identified automation can quickly release that resource to further manage cost, rather than awaiting an email or alert to be actioned by IT.

4)    Service Integration – Integrating on-prem systems and giving them on-prem and cloud visibility for optimal system management.

VMware Multi-Cloud Management

CloudHealth by VMware  

·         Provides Multi-Cloud Visibility,

·         Cost management by uncovering hidden costs, monitoring increases in spend, and making impactful changes based on custom recommendations.

·         Cloud Security, by allowing policies across business units, and receiving proactive notifications on potential security risks.

·         Cloud Governance, easily maintaining control over the cloud environment with custom policies and workflows based on how the business should be ran.

VMware Secure State

·         Identify and Increase Visibility. Better understand your cloud’s security and compliance posture by visualizing object relationships and mapping associated violations, metadata, and changes to objects.

·         Correlate & Mitigate Risk. Prioritize issues based on smart risk scores and gain deep insight into misconfigurations, complex violation chains, anomalies, and activities.

·         Automate & Scale Security. Receive immediate notifications to proactively detect threats within seconds and build security guardrails to automatically remediate violations.

·         Collaborate & Organize. Distribute cloud security responsibilities and empower developers to focus on critical issues by eliminating false positives.

Bitnami

·         To accelerate application delivery for multi-cloud and Kubernetes.

vRealize Automation for Cloud

·         Self-Service Hybrid Cloud. Out-of-the-box experience for VMware Hybrid Cloud on par with public clouds.

·         Multi-Cloud Automation and Governance. Apply consistent orchestration & guardrails across all clouds.

·         Delivery with DevOps. Embrace DevOps and expedite infrastructure and application deployment.

·         Kubernetes Workloads. Manage PKS and Kubernetes clusters and container apps.

Wavefront

·         Is a SaaS-based metrics cloud monitoring and analytics platform that lets you visualize, query, and alert over data from across your entire stack (infrastructure, network, custom app metrics, business KPIs, etc.)

·         Massive scale built for the enterprise.

·         Ask questions and get instant insights to quickly diagnose and fix application and operational issues.

·         Create smart alerts to alert on things that matter.

·         Enable better collaboration between Dev and Ops teams since they can see data and get insights from one single platform.

VMware Multi-Cloud

With the VMware product stack, the following is possible, you can Build, Run, Manage, Connect, and Protect across your multi-cloud / hybrid-cloud.

VMware has support in AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud.

VMworld 2019-General Session 2-Summary

VMworld 2019 US General Session 2 

Presented by Ray O’Farrell

Ray in this session focused on Digital Transformation, and how the infrastructure and apps work together to give an excellent user experience.

The session also focused on how IT is no longer just about IT companies, but how different industries need to leverage the technologies available to become more efficient and productive in order to not be left behind their competitors.

The Problems of Modern Apps

Problem 1 - How to build modern applications that is repeatable, secure, and allows developers to be productive.

Problem 2 – How do we take advantage of all the new multi-cloud infrastructures.

With the above four questions should be asked.

1.    How do I build and run the applications?

2.    How do we connect to and secure those applications?

3.    How do we manage those applications?

4.    How do we give the best application experience?

The above should be a cyclic journey and ever evolving.

VMware have technologies to help in all of the above.

Build and Run

VMware Tanzu gives the following functionality

It can be used to build modern apps using Existing, Open Source, or Cloud native technologies.

It can run those apps via Enterprise Kubernetes, in any of the following locations, those being On-prem, Public Cloud or on Edge devices.

The apps can then be managed via Kubernetes for Developers and IT across Multi-cloud, Multi-Cluster, and Multi-Team

From the build point of view, Pivotal can be used to build theses apps, and we can package the apps via Bitnami.

To run we now have VMC on Dell EMC, and this allows the customer to order the kit via the cloud interface and then build the kit, Dell build the kit and install the kit.

To allow running of Kubernetes natively with VMware vSphere, VMware have announced Project Pacific. This technology makes the Application a unit of control, very similar to a running VM, the app can be limited, and those flows down to all components of the apps.

Project Pacific allows developers to deliver applications in an automated fashion, but still within the guard-rails defined by IT Operations.

From an enterprise point of view, customers maybe running a multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud environment application, customers need to manage these applications centrally and efficiently, the product to use is Tanzu Mission Control which uses an application centric control model. This allows for complete management of the app without having to use multiple consoles on multiple clouds.

Connect and Protect

How do we manage complex service level agreements in a multi-cloud world?

We can leverage the built in capabilities of NSX-T, by creating Service Level Objective policies. This can define acceptable levels of latency, and error rate for our applications.

The app can then leverage NSX Service Mesh to return back to an acceptable level of performance.

How can we successfully implement micro-segmentation in an ever-changing dynamic environment?

We can leverage a new capability of NSX called NSX Intelligence which allows granular planning and troubleshooting of the underlying infrastructure. The product can create automated policies and allow simulation before publishing policies.

  

How can we classify and mitigate vulnerability and critical security events for infrastructure and apps?

VMware can leverage the AppDefense plugin within vSphere, which can then leverage Carbon Black to identify vulnerabilities within applications, the vulnerabilities can then be patched.

Manage

Across multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud we need consistent management. VMware have a product called WaveFront, which provides enterprise observability as a service for all teams and at scale.

The product collects millions of metrics to a data lake and then pinpoints the offending metric to identify issues.

Wavefront can also switch into vRealize Operations to identify and fix the issues with the infrastructure, Project Magna can also be leveraged to provide AI driven adaptive optimisation and self-tuning for vSAN

How do we proactively optimise cost overruns on Cloud before they happen?

CloudHealth by VMware allows customers to manage the sometimes unexpected cost of the cloud across multi-cloud environments.

User Experience

We need to onboard employees as quickly as possible, so that they have a great employee experience.

This can be achieved by using Horizon Desktop as a Service, Horizon can be provisioned on-prem, or VMC on AWS, or within Microsoft Azure, and all this can be provisioned from the VMware Horizon management console. This is also a GUI driven wizard.

For application support VMware have Workspace ONE that allows management of any device, with any operating system, with any app, in any location.

Emerging Technologies

ESXi or ARM, low cost virtualisation hosts.

Cross Cloud vMotion, run apps and multi-cloud services without boundaries.

To watch the entire General session 2 go to VMworld.com

VMworld 2018 Barcelona General Session 1 Replay

This is a short blog post.

I've been fortunate this week to be at VMworld 2018.

The replay of an interesting session is now available.

VMworld General session 1 replay

Enjoy, it lasts for 1 hour and 43 minutes

The Virtual, virtual datacentre demo

Virtual, Virtual Datacentre – Future of Cloud Management?????

At VMworld last week, we had a demo of the Virtual, Virtual Datacentre during the General Session on day 1.

The demo was presented by Alan Renouf and Pat Gelsinger.

The introduction was pitched as a possible future of cloud management and may mean that IT people will never have to interact with a real person ever again.

Bear in mind that this was created as a concept in a Hackathon (lots of people working together to produce a software project), and was completed in a day and a half.

With the VR headset in place Pat entered the Virtual Datacentre and was presented with a virtual representation of a VMware datacentre.

He could approach the four hosts and see the hardware running the VMs, also he could pick up the VMs and was presented with information relating to the operating system, CPU, Memory, disk, and network information of the VM, also the resources were colour related, Green equals good, red equals bad.

With the VM in hand it could be migrated by simply placing onto a different host, or deleted by simply placing them into the bin.

The best part of the demo for me was the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS), I this part of the demo, Pat picked up a VM and threw it at the cloud, and the VM migrated with no operating or VM downtime.

Pat then entered the cloud and was asked to look at the cluster, the cluster had some red, and this was due to lack of resources on the cluster.

Brian the virtual support chap popped up and gave some suggestions.

Pat enable a new host using AWS elastic DRS, this has the functionality to spin up a new ESXi host and migrate VMs to it, in order to alleviate the overloaded cluster.

Alan then said that the code would be available via their GitHub site

To watch the demo, scroll through to 48 minutes of the VMware General session, youtube video.

Enjoy.