Future Proof Your Data Center for Cloud

The movement toward a hybrid cloud, software defined data center, has been on-going for years now. We have seen the virtualization of compute, storage, and now networking. In this blog, I will be discussing this journey: where we started, where we are going, and why you want to be on this journey.

Traditional data center models are still very prevalent and accepted by organizations as the defacto model for their data center(s). If you have ever managed a traditional data center model, then you know the surmounting challenges we face within this model. 

What comprises the traditional data center model? A traditional data center model can be described as  heterogeneous compute, physical storage, and networking managed by disperse teams all with a very unique set of skills. Applications are typically hosted in their own physical storage, networking, and compute. All these entities-physical storage, networking, and compute- increase with the growth in size and number of applications. With growth, complexity increases, agility decreases, security complexities increase, and assurance of a predictable and repeatable production environment,  decrease. 

Characterizations of a Traditional Data Center:

• Heterogeneous hardware environment
• Complex workloads
• Uses different management and monitoring tools
• The cost of running traditional data center is much higher since different application have different requirements
• Increased costs and complexities  for disaster recovery
• 80 percent of time spent on maintenance and keeping lights on
• Requirements for specialized skill sets increased
• Increase in power, heating, and cooling costs​ ​
• Complex support matrix which can include multi-vendors
• ​Life-cycle management concerns and upgrade complexities 

Challenges around supporting these complex infrastructures can include things like slow time to resolution when an issue arises due to the complexities of a multi-vendor solution. Think about the last time you had to troubleshoot a production issue. In a typical scenario, you are opening multiple tickets with multiple vendors.  A ticket with the network vendor, a ticket with the hyper-visor vendor, a ticket with the compute vendor, a ticket with the storage vendor, and so on and so on. Typically, all pointing fingers at each other when we all know that fault always lies with the database admins.

The challenges aren't just around the complexities of design, day to day support, or administration, but also include challenges around lifecycle management. When it comes to lifecycle management, we are looking at the complexities around publishing updates and patches. If you are doing your due diligence, then you are gathering and documenting all the firmware, bios, and software from all the hardware involved for the update/patch and comparing that information against Hardware Compatibility Lists and Interoperability Lists to ensure that they are in a supported matrix. If not, then you have to update before going any further. This can be extremely time consuming and we are typically tasked with testing in a lab that doesn't match our production environment(s) ensuring we don't bring any production systems down during the maintenance window.

The first attempt at reducing the complexities we face with the traditional model was when we witnessed the introduction of converged infrastructure. Converged introduced us to a pizza delivery model for infrastructure. Meaning, we gather our requirements, place an order, and have it delivered ready to be consumed on premise. This new model to infrastructure brought with it a reduction in complexities that are inherent with the traditional model.

What is converged infrastructure? Converged infrastructure is an approach to data center management that packages compute, storage, and virtualization on a pre-integrated, pre-tested, pre-validated, turnkey appliance. Converged systems include a central management software.

These pre-built appliances reduce concerns with support issues due to the fact that the vendor supports the entire stack. You gain that "one throat to choke" when issues arise. You are no longer required to open multiple tickets with multiple vendors. One call to the supporting vendor and they handle troubleshooting for the hyper-visor, compute, and storage. This can increase resolution time when issues present themselves.

You gain a reduction in data center footprint which, in turn, reduces power and cooling costs. I worked with a customer and reduced their multi-rack traditional data center to a single rack solution. The cost savings were tremendous, as they were able to reduce the costs of not only the power and cooling, but also the space they paid for at the collocation. 

With converged, you also gain a reduction in lifecycle management. When an update comes out from the vendor, they have already pre-validated and pre-tested the update/patch and know how it will affect your production environment. This means that you can gain back all the time it takes for you to check the firmware, bios, and software against the HCL, etc. This can be a tremendous benefit allowing you to deploy new updates/patches with assurance.

VMware Validated Designs was also introduced to provide comprehensive and extensively-tested blueprints to build and operate a Software-Defined Data Center. 

With the VMware Validated Designs, VMware also allows for more flexibility with a build your own solution. Think of Validated Design as a prescriptive method to SDDC. You follow the detailed guides and are ensured of a specific outcome. Unlike the vendor pre-validating and pre-testing the solution, then building it for you in an appliance approach, VMware handles everything but the build.

This approach has four benefits:

1. Accelerated Time to Market. Following a VMware Validated Design, streamlines and simplifies the usually complex design process of the SDDC, shortening the deployment and provisioning cycles.
2. Increased Efficiencies. A VMware Validated Design provides detailed, step-by-step operational guidance to greatly reduce time and effort spent on tasks. Such as setting up monitoring and alerts, developing backup and restore procedures, and ensuring compliance with industry standards.
3. De-risk Deployments and Operations. Rigorously tested and continuously validated, the VMware Validated Designs reduce uncertainty and potential risks associated with implementing and operating the SDDC by ensuring interoperability and compatibility of all software components included in the design.
4. Drive IT Agility. The VMware Validated Designs are designed for scalability and to support a broad set of use-cases and diverse types of applications, helping IT to respond faster to the needs of the business.

The converged model does still present some challenges. You may not be able to move to the latest hyper-visor software when it comes out but most don't like to be the guinea pig anyway.

Another challenge is with storage. Although storage is packaged and supported in this model, you still have to manage it as with traditional storage arrays. For example, if you need to build a new VM, typically we need to:

• ​Request storage for the new VM. This can flow through a change control which can complicate things further.
• Once approved, the storage administrator has to carve out the space on the array, while ensuring that this is provisioned to the correct tier of storage as to meet the required IOPs and space objectives.
• This may or may not include masking or zoning so that this is presented correctly to the hosts that the new VM will reside on.
• Once this has been completed, the administrator responsible for the hyper-visor environment now has to ensure:
  • The hosts see the newly provisioned LUN(s).
  • Format and associate any storage policies.
• Then the VM can be created and placed on the newly provisioned storage.
  ​

As you can see, there is a lot of touch points and complexities in this model. 

To further simplify the traditional model of infrastructure, VMware brought us the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) vision with the  hyper-converged model. 

What is hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI)? Hyper-converged infrastructure allows the convergence of physical storage onto industry-standard x86 servers, enabling a building block approach with scale-out capabilities. All key data center functions run as software on the hyper-visor in a tightly integrated software layer, delivering services that were previously provided via hardware through software.

Reducing the complexities of traditional storage administration while taking the intelligence of the array and bringing it into the software layer. Take the previous example above. Now, when we provision a VM, the storage is provisioned along with it. There is no need to log into the storage array and provision the LUN, or zoning and masking,  to present the newly created storage to the hyper-visor environment.

Management of the storage is performed through the vCenter server web interface that you use to manage the rest of the hyper-visor environment. 

The hyper-converged environment further reduces the footprint at our data center(s) and the complexities we have in both traditional and converged environments. This new model of deploying an infrastructure gains us five benefits:

1. Cost efficiency: Optimizing infrastructure costs is a major appeal of HCI, which can drive better performance while at the same time reducing TCO.
2. Agility: HCI makes it easier to launch new cloud services, supporting enterprises that want to easily package and migrate new workloads. HCI helps cut deployment down to a matter of minutes.
3. Scalability: HCI can help enterprises move aggressively toward more flexible infrastructure and data centers.
4. Software-defined storage: Storage is software-defined which means the storage nodes act as one highly-reliable and redundant pool of storage. Should one node go down, the rest will remain unaffected.
5. Application modernization: Businesses can integrate containers, VMs, and storage, providing greater flexibility and creating the ability to virtualize applications that traditional VMs can’t handle.

With hyper-converged, we have moved compute and storage into software defined. This simplifies the environment while gaining all the benefits from a converged infrastructure. 

To recap, we have talked about where we began with the traditional data center model and all the challenges listed above with administering a traditional environment.  Along with all the added benefits of converged and now hyper-converged infrastructures. Remember, that at this point, we have software defined the compute and the storage, but what about the network? 

In 2012, VMware acquired Nicira and one year later introduced network virtualization with NSX. To further the SDDC vision of an all software defined data center, VMware virtualized the network. We now have compute, storage, and networking in the software stack.

This year at VMworld 2017, VMware introduced the next logical iteration to the journey of SDDC with VMware Cloud Foundations. 

VMware Cloud Foundations, encompasses the best of  VMware Validated Design and all the benefits of hyper-converged. It brings the three software defined solutions, compute, storage, and networking into a single packaged managed by the SDDC Manager. I wrote a previous blog about VMware Cloud Foundations you can find here to gain more insight.

Why do we want to be on this journey? VMware Cloud Foundation provides the simplest way to build an integrated hybrid cloud. They do this by providing a complete set of software defined services for compute, storage, network, security and cloud management. Allowing the user to run enterprise apps- traditional or containerized- in private or public environments along with being easy to operate with built-in automated lifecycle management. 

This new model has four use cases:

• Cloud Infrastructure: Cloud Foundation is a fully virtualized infrastructure. Cloud administrators have the ability to expand and contract the underlying infrastructure to meet their changing business needs. Lines of business have the flexibility to deploy a wide variety of operating systems and applications.
• IT Automation: Cloud Foundation provides performance management, capacity optimization, and real-time log analytics. IT automation accelerates the delivery and ongoing management of personalized, business-relevant infrastructure, application and custom services. All while improving overall IT efficiency. 
• Hybrid Cloud: Organizations can build a true hybrid cloud with common infrastructure and consistent operational model, connecting on-prem and off-prem data centers to make them compatible, stretched, and distributed.
• Virtual Desktop: Cloud Foundation simplifies the design and implementation of a VDI environment based on VMware Horizon. Thus, making VDI deployments faster and more secure.

To begin your journey toward this new infrastructure model and future proofing your data center for cloud, you begin with upgrading your current vSphere 5.x environment to 6.5. By upgrading to vSphere 6.5, you put your current infrastructure in an optimal place to take advantage of the latest vSAN and NSX deployments along with the following benefits you gain from the new features in 6.5.

Benefits of vSphere 6.5:

• ESXi Secure Boot: Secure Boot now leverages the capabilities of the UEFI firmware to ensure that ESXi not only boots with a signed bootloader validated by the host firmware but that it also ensures that unsigned code won’t run on the hyper-visor. ​UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, is a replacement for the traditional BIOS firmware that has its roots in the original IBM PC. 
• Virtual Machine Secure Boot: SecureBoot for VM's is simple to enable. Your VM must be configured to use EFI firmware and then you enable Secure Boot with a checkbox.
• Enhanced Logging: vSphere 6.5 introduces enhanced logging. Logs have traditionally been focused on troubleshooting and not security. Complete logs are now sent via the syslog stream for actions like "VM Reconfigure". Logs now contain more complete information, so notices of something changing you will now see what changed it changed from and what it changed to. You can then take actions against the information collected like rollback the change if it caused an issue.
• VM Encryption/vMotion Encryption: VM encryption works by applying a new Storage policy to a VM. It is Policy driven. You’ll be able to encrypt the VMDK and the VM home files. There are no modification within the guest OS. You can run different OS's like Linux, Windows, etc. and can be run from different storage like NFS, block storage, and VSAN. The encryption is happening outside of the Guest OS and the guest does not have access to the keys. The encryption works also for vMotion but both the source and the destination hosts must support it.
• vCenter High Availability: In vSphere 6.5 vCenter has a new native high availability solution that is available exclusively for the vCenter Server Appliance. This solution consists of Active, Passive, and Witness nodes which are cloned from the existing vCenter Server. The vCenter HA cluster can be enabled, disabled, or destroyed at any time. There is also a maintenance mode so planned maintenance does not cause an unwanted failover.
• Native File-Based Backup / Restore: New in vCenter Server 6.5 is native backup and restore for the vCenter Server Appliance. This new out-of-the-box functionality enables customers to backup vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller appliances directly from the VAMI or API. The backup consists of a set of files that will be streamed to a storage device of the customer’s choosing using SCP, HTTP(s), or FTP(s) protocols. This backup fully supports vCenter Server Appliances with embedded and external Platform Services Controllers.
• VUM is now included in the VCSA no longer requiring a separate Windows Server: VCSA 6.5 now includes Update Manager out of the box. It has all the features of Windows VUM but is much easier to manage and benefits from all of the new enhancements in the VCSA for performance and resiliency. Customers can also use the migration tool to move from a Windows-based vSphere management environment to the VCSA in order to benefit from these enhancements. 
• Predictive DRS: Predictive DRS is a new feature in vSphere 6.5 that leverages the predictive analytics of vRealize Operations Manager with the powerful resource scheduler algorithm of vSphere DRS. Together, these two products enable workload balancing for certain VMs before resource utilization spikes occur, potentially eliminating a great amount of resource contention that might have occurred in the past.

As you can see from the picture above the journey doesn't end with VMware Cloud Foundation but continues to progress toward the true hybrid-cloud solution that was announced this year out at VMworld 2017. The new announcement was a new partnership between VMware and Amazon.

This new offering is an on-demand service that will allow you extend your on-prem data center to the Amazon cloud, which is running VMware Cloud Foundation on physical hardware in Amazons cloud data center. This means no converting of workloads in order to take advantage of a cloud architecture because this is running the same SDDC applications you are running today. 

VMware Cloud on AWS is ideal for customers looking to:

• Migrate applications to the public cloud.
• Develop entirely new applications.
• Extend the capacity of their data centers for existing applications.
• Consolidate on-premises data centers.
• Quickly provision development and test environments.

​
VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered, sold, and supported by VMware as an on-demand, scalable cloud service.

This new model is the most flexible and agile model for future data centers. This will allow you to transform your business from hardware dictating where applications reside to applications driving the business in a hybrid cloud model and gaining the ability to easily migrate applications to where it makes most since in alignment with the business requirements and objectives.

References:

• VMware on AWS
• Dell/EMC, VxRail hyper-converged
• VMware Cloud Foundation
• VMware NSX
• VMware vSAN
• Upgrade to vSphere 6.5​