In the rapidly evolving world of virtualization, Broadcom’s decision to reintroduce VMware vSphere Standard and Enterprise Plus licenses is making waves across the IT industry. As part of Broadcom’s strategy to address customer feedback, these updates aim to simplify VMware’s licensing options while enhancing value. Starting in November 2024, these changes bring expanded storage capacities, flexible licensing terms, and a renewed focus on meeting diverse customer needs. Here’s what it means for businesses navigating the virtualization landscape.

1. Reintroduction of vSphere Standard and Enterprise Plus
​After a year of consolidation following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, the company has reinstated two licensing options that were removed during its initial portfolio overhaul:

• vSphere Standard: Offers essential compute virtualization features for small and medium-sized businesses.
• vSphere Enterprise Plus: Provides advanced capabilities like distributed switches, enhanced security, and automation, tailored for large enterprises seeking scalability and efficiency.

This move ensures that businesses can select a licensing tier that aligns with their operational needs without being forced into higher-cost bundles like VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

Technology is ever-evolving, and staying ahead of the curve is crucial for businesses in today's fast-paced digital landscape. One such technology that has revolutionized virtualization is VMware vSphere. To further enhance its capabilities and refine its features, VMware offers an exclusive opportunity for enthusiasts and professionals to participate in their vSphere BETA Program. In this blog, we will delve into an overview of the program and discuss some compelling reasons to join this beta opportunity.
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What is the VMware vSphere BETA Program? The VMware vSphere BETA Program is an initiative by VMware that allows participants to gain early access to the latest versions of vSphere and actively contribute to its development. It offers a unique chance to work closely with the VMware engineering team, providing valuable feedback, reporting bugs, and suggesting enhancements before the official release. This program gives participants a firsthand experience of upcoming features, allowing them to explore new functionalities and offer insights to shape the final product.

Reasons to Participate:

1. Influence the Product: By joining the vSphere BETA Program, participants have an extraordinary opportunity to shape the future of vSphere. Your feedback and suggestions can directly impact the features, user experience, and overall performance of the product. This collaboration empowers you to play an active role in shaping the industry-leading virtualization platform.
2. Early Access to New Features: As a beta program participant, you gain exclusive access to pre-release versions of vSphere. This means you can explore and experiment with new features and enhancements before they become available to the general public. Getting a head start allows you to understand the capabilities of the upcoming release and strategize the implementation in your organization.
3. Test Compatibility and Performance: VMware vSphere BETA Program enables you to test the compatibility and performance of the latest release with your existing infrastructure and applications. This ensures a smooth transition and minimizes potential issues during the upgrade process. By identifying and reporting any compatibility or performance concerns early on, you contribute to a more stable and reliable final product.
4. Learning Opportunities: Participating in the vSphere BETA Program provides an excellent opportunity to enhance your technical skills and knowledge. Engaging with the VMware engineering team and collaborating with fellow participants in the community can broaden your understanding of virtualization and its practical applications. It also allows you to stay updated on the latest trends and advancements in the VMware ecosystem.
5. Networking and Community Engagement: The vSphere BETA Program fosters a vibrant community of like-minded professionals and enthusiasts. Engaging with this community opens doors to networking opportunities, sharing best practices, and gaining insights from peers and experts. Collaborating with individuals who share your passion for virtualization can lead to valuable connections and foster professional growth.

Joining the VMware vSphere BETA Program presents an exciting opportunity for virtualization enthusiasts and professionals alike. By actively participating in the program, you can shape the future of vSphere, gain early access to new features, test compatibility, and performance, and engage with a vibrant community. Your involvement in the BETA Program not only enhances your technical skills but also allows you to contribute to the development of a leading virtualization platform. Embrace this chance to be at the forefront of innovation and make a tangible impact in the world of virtualization with VMware vSphere BETA Program.

It's that time again, to begin the process, that probably should have been started a while ago, which is upgrading your virtual infrastructure to vSphere 6.7. 

​The end of general support for vSphere 6.0 is March 12, 2020, and if you are on an earlier version of vSphere, then you are currently running an unsupported version of vSphere and may also need to purchase to new hardware to support the latest version. 

I would like to begin this blog with some of the stated benefits to upgrading your environment.

​The new vSphere 6.7, vCenter appliance delivers major performance improvements from previous versions. First, vCenter Server has 2x faster performance in operations per second. This means better response times for the daily tasks you perform.

​There is a 3x reduction in memory usage and also 3x faster operations relating to VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler. If you would like more detail on these improvements, you can find the details in this blog by VMware.

​There are a lot of great new features and enhancements in the latest version of vSphere and if you are still on and older version than vSphere 6, then there are even more that came with vSphere 6.7. Below is a list of new features relating to vSphere 6.7.

vSphere Quick Boot
vSphere Quick Boot innovation restarts the ESXi hypervisor without rebooting the physical host, skipping time-consuming hardware initialization.
 
Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0
vSphere 6.7 adds support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware devices for ESXi hosts and also introduces virtual TPM (vTPM) 2.0 for VMs, significantly enhancing protection and ensuring integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system (OS). This capability helps prevent VMs and hosts from being tampered with. For virtual machines, vTPM 2.0 gives VMs the ability to use enhanced guest OS security features sought by security teams.
 
Encrypted vMotion
vSphere 6.7 also improves protection for data in motion by enabling Encrypted vMotion across various vCenter Server instances as well as versions. This makes it easy to securely conduct data center migrations or to move data across a hybrid cloud environment—that is, between on-premises and public cloud—or across geographically distributed data centers.
 
Microsoft Virtualization-Based Security (VBS)
vSphere 6.7 introduces support for the entire range of Microsoft virtualization-based security technologies introduced in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. In 2015, Microsoft introduced virtualization-based security (VBS). We have worked very closely with Microsoft to provide support for these features in vSphere 6.7.
 
vSphere Persistent Memory
vSphere Persistent Memory, administrators using supported hardware modules such as those available from Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise can leverage them either as super-fast storage with high IOPS or expose them to the guest OS as nonvolatile memory (NVM).

vCenter Server Hybrid Linked Mode
vSphere 6.7 introduces vCenter Server Hybrid Linked Mode, which enables users to have unified visibility and manageability across an on-premises vSphere environment running on one version and a public cloud environment based on the vSphere platform, such as VMware Cloud on AWS, running on a different vSphere version.

Per-VM Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC)
vSphere 6.7 introduces per-VM Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC), a key capability for the hybrid cloud that enables the EVC mode to become an attribute of the VM rather than of the specific processor generation it is booted on in the cluster.

Simplification of the architecture
One significant change to vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 is a simplification of the architecture and a reversion to running all vCenter Server services on a single instance. With the introduction of vCenter Server with embedded Platform Services Controller instance with Enhanced Linked Mode.

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, 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.

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.

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.

This beta program is different from the past programs in that it is not tied to a specific version or release. This is a new beta program that includes a new beta community. The beta program will continue through multiple releases of vSphere. Participants can expect to see new functionalities and capabilities added on as the program continues on. Participant are expect to:

• Online acceptance of the Master Software Beta Test Agreement will be required prior to visiting the Private Beta Community
• Install beta software within 3 days of receiving access to the beta product
• Provide feedback within the first 4 weeks of the beta program
• Submit Support Requests for bugs, issues and feature requests
• Complete surveys and beta test assignments
• Participate in the private beta discussion forum and conference calls

This program enables participants to help define the direction of the most widely adopted industry-leading virtualization platform. 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. VMware will provide discussion forums, webinars, and service requests to enable you to share your feedback. 

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 you are encouraged to use the software in ways that interest you. This will provide VMware with valuable insight into how you use vSphere in real-world conditions and with real-world test cases, enabling them to better align with your business needs.

Some of the many reasons to participate in this beta opportunity:

• Receive early access to the vSphere Beta products
• Interact with the vSphere Beta team consisting of Product Managers, Engineers, Technical Support, and Technical Writers
• Provide direct input on product functionality, configurability, usability, and performance
• Provide feedback influencing future products, training, documentation, and services
• Collaborate with other participants, learn about their use cases, and share advice and learnings

​You can register for the Beta Program Here!

Security these days can be more of that traditional, needle in a haystack approach, than a true centric security approach to include analytics and alerting. VMware is again shifting to a new paradigm, and that was evident from all the products and messaging that came out of VMworld 2017.

Security is on the forefront of all of our minds and VMware, as the leader in data center technologies, wants to lead the conversation and be the foundation that you are laying down to protect your data, along with adding significant value to you with their partnerships in the security space, like the new partnership announced with IBM around their security products like QRadar.

With increasing attacks on our data centers, take Equifax for example, we must first look at one of our most significant portions of our security foundation, ESXi and work to secure that. We typically start with securing the physical and the edge, throw in some anti-virus and call it secure, but are we secure?

When it comes to data center security, we must start with our foundation, ensure that we have designed it to follow recommended best practices, then evaluate the gaps, and add in products to get us the rest of the way there. This also includes following best practices for end-user access of the environments and not being "lazy" admins just to skip a few steps. We have to lean on trusted partners like Sirius that have developed a security practice that can help us navigate the waters of security because the landscape of security products is immense, as you can see from the picture below.

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.

Security:
VMware is bringing some new capabilities to security in NSX with Application Rule Manager, available in NSX Advanced and Enterprise editions. Application Rule Manager is responsible for the creation of security groups and firewalls for applications based on network traffic flows which  is a sequence of packets from a source computer to a destination, which may be another host, a multicast group, or a broadcast domain. This along with Endpoint monitoring, available in NSX Enterprise, enables you to set profiles for applications inside the guest OS. This gives you end-to-end visibility into applications while simplifying the profile creations.

It is good to note that for security certification and requirements: 

• VMware NSX for vSphere meets regulatory compliance requirements such as PCI DSS.
• NSX meets the security hardening guidance required for installment on Department
  of Defense (DoD) networks. 

Here are a few other updates in NSX 6.3:

• NSX Pre-Assessment Tool based on vRealize Network Insight
• Micro-Segmentation Planning and application visibility
• New Security Certifications around ICSA, FIPS, Common Criteria and STIG
• Linux Guest VM Introspection
• Increase performance in service chaining
• Larger scalability of VDI up to 50K desktops
• NSX IDFW for VDI
• Active Directory Integration for VDI at scale

Automation:
Software Defined Networking with NSX rounds off the Software Defined Data Center vision of VMware, bringing the ability to automate the provisioning of what once was, very manual physical networks, and the security of them. VMware continues to enhance the  integration of NSX Load Balancers with vRealize Automation and offer support for third-party IP Address Management (IPAM) systems. VMware has also enhanced the integration with NSX for vSphere and vCloud Director. These new enhancements will enable new multi-tenant capabilities for our vCloud Air Network partners.

Some other new features found in Automation for 6.3:

• Routing Enhancements
• Centralized Dashboard for service and ops
• Reduced Upgrade windows with rebootless upgrades
• Integration with vRA 7.2 enhancing LB,NAT
• vCloud Director 8.20 support with advanced routing, DFW, VPN
• VIO Updates to include multi-vc deployments
• vSphere Integrated Container Support
• New Automation Frameworks for PowerNSX, PyNSXv, vRO

Application Continuity:
As the adoption of NSX increases VMware is seeing more and more uses cases around Active-Active data center architectures utilizing the network overlay capabilities of NSX allowing for true workload mobility while maintaining ip addresses and consistent security policies across data centers. New enhancements in security tagging while simplifying security policy management across multiple data centers will help to ensure a consistent and reliable virtual network in a multi-vCenter deployment. 

In NSX 6.3 there is also a new ROBO SKU introduced which allows you to take advantage of all these features in a ROBO solution allowing you to simplify the security and management across remote branch offices.

Here are a few other features introduced in NSX 6.3: 

• Multi-DC deployments with Cross VC NSX enhancements for security tags
• Operations enhancements with improved availability
• L2VPN performance enhancements for cross DC/Cloud Connectivity
• Integration with vSphere Integrated Containers

NSX-T
The focus for NSX-T is around emerging application frameworks and architectures like private IaaS on OpenStack and multi-hypervisor support for development teams using dev clouds. NSX-T supports multiple KVM distributions, within the hypervisor kernel, while delivering security with the use of distribute firewalls, logical switches and distributed routers; This includes Red Hat Enterprise and Ubuntu. This means freedom of choice to technologists allowing them to choose what's best suited for their applications. 

Integration with VMware Photon allows IT to deliver security and services to their developers that are building containerized and cloud native applications. NSX can automate the creation of networks and routers when a new namespace/project/organization is created and then secure it all with micro-segmentation policies for containers and pods.

Pricing
As noted above you now have standard, advanced, and enterprise editions. According to CRN, NSX Enterprise is $6,995 per CPU socket; Advanced costs $4,495 per socket and Standard will cost $1,995 per socket. 

​See VMware NSX for more information.

If you are interested in learning more and getting some hands-on lab time with NSX, take a look at VMware's hands-on labs, here.

Today VMware announced vSphere 6.5 at VMworld Europe 2016, the latest version of its industry-leading virtualization platform. 

New Features:

• vCenter Server Appliance
• vSphere Update Manager
• Native HA
• REST-based APIs
• HTML5-based vSphere Client
• VM-level Disk Encryption
• Encrypted vMotion
• Secure Boot
• Enhanced Audit-logging
• vSphere Integrated Containers
• AWS Integration

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’.

To further protect the environment in vSphere 6.5, VMware introduced secure boot which protects both hypervisor and guest OS. This will address security issues around images from be tampered with and denying unauthorized access and prevent the loading of unauthorized components into vSphere environments.

For those that require further security needs around auditing vSphere 6.5 brings enhanced audit-quality logging capabilities.  These forensic logs can help determine who did what, when and where. 

VMware is realizing, that with more competitors and with more and more software start ups in the containers arena, the importance of supporting containers, ie. their own. VMware knows that the world of traditional and next-generation apps need infrastructure that will scale, perform and allow for high availability. 

In this new release VMware delivers vSphere Integrated Containers, which allows for the deployment of containers in a vSphere environment for infrastructure needs. This means you can deploy containers in your environment without the need to re-architect your infrastructure. The new containers environment contains three components - the Engine providing core container run-time, Harbor a registry for container images, and Admiral which is the portal for management. vSphere Integrated Containers provides a Docker-compatible interface to app teams and of course is completely compatible with NSX and vSAN.
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The VMware vSphere Integrated Containers new feature of vSphere 6.5 will be available for vSphere Enterprise Plus Edition customers at no additional charge. Pricing for vSphere starts at $995 per CPU.

​vSphere 6.5 is the foundation for the new partner announcement between VMware and AWS continuing the cloud strategy of any cloud, any application and any device. Of course this is all integrated with the new Cloud Foundation announced by VMware in Vegas at Vmworld 2016.

​To learn more about this announcement read the news release.
For more information on the AWS partnership check out this article.