 Back in October of 2016, VMware announced vSphere 6.5. This introduced a lot of changes to their flagship hyper-visor; you can see an earlier blog I wrote about that here. Now it is that time again for a new vSphere to be announced. The announcement of vSphere 6.7 came with a lot of new features and I will go over each of them in this blog. Let's take a look at these new features:
Let's quickly discuss migration paths. The new version supports upgrades and migrations from vSphere 6.0 or 6.5 only and the current supported migration paths to version 6.7 are as follows:
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 Day 1 began with the general session, where VMware Executives presented to the partner community and reinforced the importance of the partner as the unsung heroes helping to drive the VMware business and most importantly driving value for their customers.
 vRealize Network Insight or vRNI is the newest addition to the range of products from VMware. vRealize Network Insight integrates with VMware's network virtualization platform, NSX. vRNI delivers intelligent operations for your software defined network environment. vRNI does for your virtualized network what vRealize Operations does for your virtualized environment, but only to the SDN environment. With the help of this product you can optimize network performance and availability with visibility and analytics across virtual and physical networks. Provide planning and recommendations for implementing micro-segmentation security, plus operational views to quickly and confidently manage and scale VMware NSX deployment.
Let's take a step back and discuss, briefly, what VMware NSX is and why you should, as a technologist, care about it. NSX is an innovative approach to solving long-standing network provisioning bottlenecks within the data center, and it allows for the integration of switching, routing and upper-layer services into an integrated application and network orchestration platform. With an overlay solution that may not require hardware upgrades, NSX offers customers a potentially quicker way of taking advantage of SDN capabilities by decoupling the network from hardware into a software abstraction layer allowing the end-user to programmatically create, provision and manage networks. Essentially, NSX is doing for your network what vSphere did for your compute environments and we have typically virtualized the compute and storage with vSAN, so adding network virtualization brings the full vision of SDDC giving you a lot of benefits like single pain of glass to manage your environments within vCenter, which a lot of us are already familiar with. With NSX you gain visibility into your network that you may not have today while allowing for division of duties in a secure manner. NSX technology inception is on the rise and as of today, VMware has over 2,600 customers that have implemented NSX and over 50% increase in license bookings.  Back on February 2nd, VMware announced two new products, VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3 and VMware NSX-T 1.1, and the adoption rate has reached new heights for VMware, as Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger mentioned in the Q4 2016 earnings that NSX is on track to bring in $1 Billion in revenue this year. That is impressive especially if you take into account the initial slow adoption rate of NSX.
The customer focused demand for tighter security in the data center with NSX and Micro-Segmentation, Automating IT provisioning while increasing efficiency, and Application Continuity is helping to drive the success of NSX into corporate IT. So what is NSX anyway? As I mentioned in a previous blog, NSX is an innovative approach to solving long-standing network provisioning bottlenecks within the data center, and it allows for the integration of switching, routing and upper-layer services into an integrated application and network orchestration platform. With an overlay solution that may not require hardware upgrades, NSX offers customers a potentially quicker way of taking advantage of SDN capabilities by decoupling the network from hardware into a software abstraction layer allowing the end-user to programmatically create, provision and manage networks. Let's take a look at what's new in version 6.3. You can see the announcement from VMware here.  Today VMware announced vSphere 6.5 at VMworld Europe 2016, the latest version of its industry-leading virtualization platform.
New Features:
The vCenter Server Appliance becomes the core component of the new vSphere environment. The new appliance brings easy deployment and reduces the complexities of managing a vSphere environment by combining the vSphere Update Manager and introduces file-backup and recovery natively with VCSA High Availability. As a side note vSphere HA has been renamed to vSphere Availability inside the client and instead of having one long settings page for vSphere HA, it has now been divided up into multiple sub-pages and organized by the function that the setting is for. You will now see ‘Failures and Responses’, ‘Proactive HA Failures and Responses’, ‘Admission Control’, ‘Heartbeat Datastores’, ‘Advanced Options’. 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.  Back in July of 2016, VMware issued a Field Advisory, announcing bugs for the release of NSX for vSphere 6.2.3. VMware urged its user community, not to upgrade to this version and if you had they came out with a 6.2.3.a release to resolve the issues. The issues that VMware found were that both primary and secondary HA nodes would be placed into Active State, causing network disruption and issues related to the DFW rules causing traffic disruptions.
VMware has now released, back in August, the new version 6.2.4 for GA. This release includes some critical bug fixes previously identified which includes a critical input validation vulnerability for sites that use NSX SSL VPN. You can see the full list what's new in the release notes. Most of the new features were already discussed by me in a previous post you can find here. In this new version the only thing listed as new is a new feature around "Firewall Status API". VMware also has announced the End of Availability (EOA) and End of General Support (EOGS) for Cloud Networking and Security 5.5.x. The date is September 19, 2016 for both. You can see a list of NSX trending issues here. VMware announced on June 9th, 2016 the new version of the NSX platform version 6.2.3. A minor release to their network virtualization platform. The NSX solution is an innovative approach to solving long-standing network provisioning bottlenecks within the data center, and it allows for the integration of switching, routing and upper-layer services into an integrated application and network orchestration platform. With an overlay solution that may not require hardware upgrades, NSX offers customers a potentially quicker way of taking advantage of SDN capabilities by decoupling the network from hardware into a software abstraction layer allowing the end-user to programmatically create, provision and manage networks.  What's NewNetworking and Edge Services
The release notes for NSX for vSphere 6.2.3 can be found here.  Disruptive innovation, is a term coined by Clayton Christensen. The term describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.
For example, take a look at what a company like Uber has done to the taxi service in San Francisco. They don't hire drivers like Yellow Cab. They don't own a fleet of cars. They built an application. An application that has been very disruptive to the taxi industry and is changing the landscape of ride-hailing services. Thanks to Uber, San Francisco's largest yellow cab company is filing for bankruptcy. Yellow Cab Co-op President Pamela Martinez was quoted saying that some of the financial setbacks "are due to business challenges beyond our control and others are of our own making." Yellow Cab's drivers are flocking to Uber, an app-based enterprise, lured by the promise of more riders and better schedules. Yellow Cab has been turned on its head by a disruptive innovation. Uber has disrupted the ride-hailing service industry with a lasting impact which is now moving across the county. Why do I point this out? Because, you are either being disrupted or are the disrupter. Think about that for a second. Ask Yellow Cab how it feels to be disrupted in an industry they felt very secure in before an application took over. Look at companies like Blockbuster. I bet you can tell me who disrupted them? Got it in your mind?  I just recently passed my VCP6-NV and wanted to take some time to blog about the experience and to gather together some resources for those that are looking to pursue this certification.
For those you that may not know much about NSX I will start with a brief introduction and explain why I feel that you should pursue this certification for your company. What is NSX? VMware NSX is the next evolution in software defined everything. It is VMware's network virtualization and security software platform that came from an acquisition of Nicira back in 2012. What does NSX do? NSX de-couples the network functions from the physical network devices in your data center, in a way that analogous to decoupling virtual servers from the physical. NSX natively creates the traditional network constructs in the virtual realm. These include ports, switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, etc. I could write an entire blog just on the features of NSX and the integrations with other third party vendors, such as Palo Alto Networks and Trend Micro; oh wait I did. You can read that in my blog here. But, that is not what this blog is about so let's move on. The VMware Certified Professional Network Virtualization exam, tests candidates on their knowledge and abilities to demonstrate basic virtualization networking skills such as vSwitch, vDistributed Switches, installation & configuration of NSX, and finally administration of NSX. In order to pass the exam you will need to have in depth understanding of these areas. Hands on with both NSX and vSphere are highly recommended. In fact, I believe that VMware recommends at least 6 months of hands-on. I would recommend setting aside dedicated time to go over the following resources along with practicing packet walks and architecture design. These are the resources that I used to study for the exam over a period of 6 months.
Exam Objectives: Section 1 – Define VMware NSX Technology and Architecture
The test consists of 80+ questions in which you have approximately 1 minute per question, which doesn't seem like a lot of time but it is plenty. You can also mark questions for review.. I found that once I completed the exam I had enough time to go back through all the questions once more to check for anything I missed. So, now that I have reviewed what NSX is and discussed the exam the next question is why should you take the exam? Besides certifications being a great way to show value to your company more importantly is that NSX is the next big wave in the virtual realm. I chose to take this exam because I believe that NSX is the next step in virtualizing the datacenter and I wanted to be on the forefront to help lead the direction for my company and our customers. I have the same excitement with NSX that I felt when I first became engaged with ESX. Since taking the exam, I have been between Buffalo and Albany NY, speaking to customers and white boarding their environments. This has lead to better engagements with customers and within VMUG (VMware User Group) where I lead three groups, Albany now Capital District, Syracuse and Rochester. NSX will change the face of networking just as vSphere did for physical servers. If you want to help drive the future direction of your company and help them become more secure, agile and flexible or if your company, like many others, are in the process of developing their cloud strategy then NSX can play a large role in that. |
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