VMware Cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered and integrated cloud offering developed by VMware and AWS. Through this hybrid-cloud service, organizations can deliver a stable and secure solution to migrate and extend their on-premises VMware vSphere-based environments to the AWS cloud running on bare metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure.

VMware Cloud on AWS has several use case buckets that most customers find themselves falling into some overlap. The first of these use cases is for organizations looking to migrate their on-premises vSphere-based workloads and to extend their capacities to the cloud with the data center extension use case.

The next, is for organizations looking to modernize their recovery options, new disaster recovery implementations, or organizations looking to replace existing DR infrastructure.

The last one that I will mention, is for organizations looking to evacuate their data centers or consolidate data centers through cloud-migrations. This is great for organizations looking at data center refreshes.

VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered, sold, and supported by VMware and its partners like Sirius Computer Solutions, a Managed Service Partner. Available in many AWS Regions which can be found here and growing.

Through this offering organizations can build their hybrid solutions based on the same underlying infrastructure that runs on VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Cloud Foundations. ​

Day 1 began with the general session, which was a lot different than the previous year where the VMware Executives laid out their vision for the partner community. This general session was focused more correctly on the audience in attendance.

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.

VMware announced VMware Cloud Foundation back in the general session of VMworld 2016. Cloud Foundation is a unified platform for private and public clouds.

Let's start with defining the term "Clouds". This term has been thrown around a lot and some take this term as "In the Cloud" off premises platforms, but some use the term more all inclusive which includes both "On-Prem" and "Off-Prem" platforms. Wikipedia defines this term as "computing that provides shared computer processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand".  For this blog I am using the definition of cloud as the latter. I think of cloud as all inclusive of both off and on-prem platforms for providing resources. I know some feel as though cloud was meant to replace the "on-prem" private cloud and yes, that will ultimately be the direction in years to come, but for now we live in a world of hybrid-cloud and that is what Cloud Foundation is here to assist us with.

Now that we have cleared that up, let's move on to Cloud Foundation from VMware. Cloud Foundation brings together, VMware's vision for SDDC where compute, storage, and networking services are decoupled from the underlying hardware and abstracted into software as pools of resources allowing for IT to become more flexible and agile while also allowing for better management, into an integrated stack for cloud. This is done by defining a platform common to both private and public clouds.

The cloud is all about agility and flexibility, but agile and flexible can look different to different people. For app developers, it could be one cloud service provider. For marketing, it might be another. For IT, a third third-party provider could be the preferred platform. As a result, enterprises today have a new challenge: how to manage multiple clouds.

A unified cloud offers several advantages to enterprises. By managing multiple clouds through a single management system, enterprises can better control security, ensure regulatory compliance, enforce business policies, and share data between applications. A unified cloud also allows enterprise to deploy virtual desktops faster and manage them more efficiently in a multi-cloud environment.

Healthcare is a good example of how unified cloud management can make a difference. The healthcare industry is marked by merger and acquisition; new employees are added, apps are migrated, access privileges and policies change, etc. Managing all of this change across multiple clouds can be complex and time consuming, resulting in critical delays as new physicians and staff are onboarded. With unified management solutions like Citrix Workspace Cloud, however, managing apps and users in a multi-cloud environment is no different than managing them in a single cloud from a process perspective, meaning that you can onboard personnel and update apps in minutes rather than days or weeks. In other words, you have the flexibility and agility that attracted your enterprise to the cloud in the first place.

Although Citrix isn’t the only vendor in this space, they have a leg up on many of their competitors because of their history in the application delivery space. Many enterprises already have Citrix skills in place (e.g., their apps may already be deployed through XenApps), so there’s an existing comfort level with Citrix’ logical approach to cloud management. If you’re looking to reduce your cloud opex even further, Rolta AdvizeX can manage your unified cloud/Workspace environment for you.

Unified cloud management is a sound part of any cloud strategy, but maybe you don’t have a cloud strategy in place. If not, Rolta AdvizeX can help you create one through our Cloud Advizer services. With Cloud Advizer, we identify which apps and use cases can benefit the most from the cloud, and then help you migrate and manage them.

Increasingly, cloud isn’t becoming an “either/or” but an “and/and” proposition for enterprises as cloud decision-making becomes decentralized. Unified cloud management from Rolta AdvizeX and Citrix can restore clarity to your cloud strategy and avoid cloud confusion.
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http://www.advizex.com/blog/app-environment-getting-mighty-clouded/

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger announced a new hybrid cloud strategy today along with a series of product updates, including a new version of vSphere, VSAN, VVOLs, a distribution of OpenStack and integrations of NSX with vCloudAir.

The new vision laid out by VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger is one of a "Seamless and Complete Picture," of Any Device, Any Application and One Cloud. ​

VMware spoke with their customers and found that they are looking for three key areas when it comes to IT:

• Instant Technology
• Fluid Technology
• Secure Technology 

VMware is uniquely positioned to assist customers with these areas, enter the One Cloud architecture, based on best-in-bread products in compute, storage and networking virtualization.  

With a foundation of vSphere 6.0 and new features including One Management, whether on premise or off, NSX built into vCloudAir, VSAN,  and VVOLs the architecture is designed to bring a unified cloud. CEO Pat Gelsinger states that "customers increasingly need a software-defined infrastructure to enable the level of speed, agility and flexibility to respond to the challenges of IT."

VMware vSphere 6.0
VMware is raising the bar again with more than 650 new features in vSphere 6.0. Some of the newly announced features include:

• New Enhancements in 2D and 3D graphics for VDI with the ability to deploy 500 VMs 13X faster than the previous version of vSphere 5.5. 
• Scale and Performance enhancements to support application scale-out like Hadoop, Platform as a Service and new vCloud Native applications.
• Availability is increased through Zero Downtime migration features for long distance vMotion migrations (100ms roundtrip which use to be 10ms) and continuos availability through FT for larger vms, supporting up 4 vCPUs.
• Improvements to the vSphere Web Client with over 100 enhancements.
• Integration with OpenStack which is now included for Enterprise Plus customers.

• VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.0 will support 1000 hosts and 10,000 powered on VMs.

VMware VSAN
With significant improvements in scale and functionality new features in VSAN include:

• All Flash architecture introduced enabling quadruple its performance to 90k IOPs per node with low latency.
• Addition of enterprise class snapshotting and  instant cloning.
• Fault Domains (Rack Awareness) means that the name node knows where each data node server is and in which rack. This ensures that you can write data to 3 different data nodes that are not on the same physical rack, which helps prevent data loss due to data node and rack failure.