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VMware this year has decided to make changes to their licensing in order to better address the needs of their customers. These new packages are tailored to the top use cases from VMware customers in both SDDC and Hybrid Cloud.
You should see increased value with more features in the product editions like log insight being included with vSphere now and added portability of your licenses. New product line up for VMware vSphere and vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) editions:
vCloud Suite (vCS) = vRealize Suite (vRS) + vSphere Enterprise Plus for vCloud Suite:
New vSphere and vSphere with Operations Management See the VMware pricing page for further information.
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 It's that time again and I highly suggest joining in. Not only will you be a part of a great community learning new products but you'll get the chance to offer your input into the direction.
The target audience are customers who have deployed vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 in a portion of their environment. Participants are expected to:
vSphere Beta Program Overview We are excited to announce the upcoming VMware vSphere Beta Program. This program enables participants to help define the direction of the most widely adopted industry-leading virtualization platform. Folks who want to participate in the program can now indicate their interest by filling out this simple form. The vSphere team will grant access to the program to selected candidates in stages. This vSphere Beta Program leverages a private Beta community to download software and share information. We will provide discussion forums, webinars, and service requests to enable you to share your feedback with us. You can expect to download, install, and test vSphere Beta software in your environment or get invited to try new features in a VMware hosted environment. All testing is free-form and we encourage you to use our software in ways that interest you. This will provide us with valuable insight into how you use vSphere in real-world conditions and with real-world test cases, enabling us to better align our product with your business needs. shadow-table Some of the many reasons to participate in this beta opportunity:
With the advent of vSphere 6.0 Update 1 I knew it would be a matter of time until I was engaged to upgrade an environment. My customer had a small size vSphere 5.0 production environment that they wanted upgraded to 6.0. I met with them and helped to educate them on new features of 6.0 and designed an upgrade plan. The customer, due to the new features of the vCenter, wanted to migrate to the vCenter Appliance and if you are not aware, the vCenter Appliance now supports the same infrastructure as the Windows based vCenter.  Some initial challenges I came across with migrating their infrastructure came around the design decisions that were made prior to the migration. Their vCenter server had the vCenter Database installed with the Windows based vCenter server which meant that I would not be able to migrate using the VCS to VCVA Converter. If you are not familiar with the product take a look at it here.
The product makes migrating a Windows based vCenter with an external database very simple. You deploy a new vCenter Appliance with the same name and IP as the current vCenter. Then you deploy the Migration Appliance. The Appliance will gather setting from the Windows vCenter. This is is then shut down and you point the appliance to the external vCenter Database. The security profiles, etc. are migrating into the new vCenter Appliance. Here we are in the future that Back to the Future predicted and I find myself contemplating what the past really looked like compared to now for IT. For those of you that live under a rock and have not seen the movies I will give a brief summarization of the second movie from the trilogy. In "Back to the Future Part II," Marty McFly travels to October 21, 2015, to save his children, yet to be born in "Back to the Future's" 1985. The movie plot is tangled by fixing one thing, McFly, Doc Brown and the villainous Biff Tannen create a number of new mishaps but what remains is the film's vision of a year that was still more than a quarter-century away when the movie was shot and released in 1989.  In the IT realm of things I found myself reminiscing of what the data center looked like back in 1989 when the movie was released not to mention 1985 when the movie itself takes place. So, hold onto your hats, "Great Scott!!", we are going back to the past to revisit the data center before VMware's inception in 1998 and the impact we see today.
In order to bore my reader thoroughly I will give a brief history lesson on computing but don't worry I have added plenty of pictures to stimulate your brains. So, let's fire this blog up to 88 miles per hour and get to the past.
Segmentation It can be extremely difficult to secure and maintain security in your production environment. The traditional security model focuses on the perimeter defense but continued security breaches show that this model is not affective.  Firewall can be deployed at each VM, but that proves to be unmanageable. With NSX 6.1 it is possible to micro segment your network, so that only traffic that is allowed can travel through the network between virtual machines.
Traditionally, network segmentation is a function of a physical firewall or router, designed to allow or deny traffic between network segments or tiers. The traditional processes for defining and configuring segmentation are time consuming and highly prone to human error, resulting in a large percentage of security breaches. Implementation requires deep and specific expertise in device configuration syntax, network addressing, application ports and protocols. Network segmentation is a core capability of NSX. A virtual network can support a multi-tier network environment, meaning multiple L2 segments with L3 segmentation or micro-segmentation on a single L2 segment using distributed firewall rules. These could represent a web tier, application tier and database tier. Physical firewalls and access control lists deliver a proven segmentation function, trusted by network security teams and compliance. Confidence in this approach for cloud data centers, however, has been shaken, as more and more attacks, breaches and downtime are attributed to human error in to antiquated, manual network security provisioning and change management processes. In a virtual network, network services (L2, L3, ACL, Firewall, QoS etc.) that are provisioned with a workload are programmatically created and distributed to the hypervisor vSwitch. Network services, including L3 segmentation and fire-walling, are enforced at the virtual interface. Communication within a virtual network never leaves the virtual environment, removing the requirement for network segmentation to be configured and maintained in the physical network or firewall. 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:
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:
VMware VSAN With significant improvements in scale and functionality new features in VSAN include:
VMware vSphere 6.0 is the next major release since 5.5 and with any major release it is packed with new features and enhancements along with increased scalability. This version comes with some big improvements to VSAN which I'll discuss below. Host ImprovementsIn vSphere 5.5 the maximum supported host memory was 4TB, in 6.0 that jumps up to 12TB. Also, in vSphere 5.5 the maximum supported number of logical (physical) CPUs per host was 320 CPUs, in vSphere 6.0 that is increased to 480 CPUs. The last improvement to the hosts is the maximum number of VMs per host, increasing from 512 in 5.5 to 1000 VMs per host in 6.0 This gives the ability to create some monster VMs.  Fault Tolerance IprovementsFault Tolerance (FT) was introduced in vSphere 4. FT provides protection of VMs by preventing downtime in case of a host failure. FT has never been greatly used due to its design preventing anyone that required multiple CPUs from utilizing FT. FT now supports more than one vCPU and moves from 1 vCPU to 4 vCPU support.
VMware introduced replication in vSphere 5.5. The biggest limitation is that it only provides a single restore point only. This is an immediate show stopper for most customers. Multiple restore points are absolutely essential, because just like "good" data, any corruption/virus/dataloss from the source VM is immediately replicated to target VM, and if you don't spot the problem and perform failover to replica fast enough (before the next replication cycle) - which is going to be impossible in most cases - then you are done. 
a Mobile Cloud model. He says that it's "Technology that disrupts and bridges to the mobile cloud". Strategically aligned businesses, each are focused and free to execute individually or together. The Federation provides customer solutions and choice for the software-defined enterprise and the emerging “3rd platform” of mobile, cloud, big data and social, transformed by billions of users and millions of apps and according to CEO David Goulden, the common vision is "To move from the 2nd platform to the 3rd". Each company plays a significant role in that vision.  This federation offers 5 areas of value:
The idea behind Federation Solutions is simple: shorten time-to-value and reduce implementation risk for these big enterprise IT agenda items. VCE provides Pre-integrated, Pre-tested and Pre-validated Vblock Systems. What the heck is VCE and what exactly does this mean to be pre-integrated, pre-tested and pre-validated? Lets start with a little background on VCE and who they are and more importantly why you should be paying attention to them. Formed by Cisco, EMC, and investments from VMware and Intel. VCE (VMware/Cisco/EMC) is the industry leader in hyper-converged infrastructure solutions or as it is known in the industry as "Converged Infrastructure" and according to the new Gartner study for 2014, VCE finds itself situated in the MAGIC quadrant.  |
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