I may have not been to VMworld (Yeah… I get it… Not a good look), but a large crew from SHI absolutely made it out to the event in full force.
Since we at SHI cover products and manufacturers all across every spectrum of the industry we attend A LOT of conferences. This years VMworld was HUGE, but unfortunately not everyone gets to go, so we always get a group of people who did attend to do a bit of a write-up for the rest of us who did not get the opportunity. So in addition to the SEV Ops Video Recap, we have a written one coming straight from some of the Advanced Solutions Group best and brightest members. All credit to: Josh Morrison, John Martin, and Simon Chun. Thanks you for all that you do and your hard work on the below write-up!
VMworld 2018 Updates
vSphere 6.7 Update 1 Enhancements (Tech Preview, GA Fall 2018)
Full-Featured HTML5 vSphere Client
VMware admins have been challenged in the past with having to switch back and forth between the vSphere Web Client and the traditional vSphere Client for full administrative feature support. Beginning in 6.7 U1, this new vSphere Client will become the tool for managing vCenter Server with not only fully integrated management, but also updated and simplified tasks and workflows. Some additional or modified features include:
- Feedback tool to annotate and submit screenshots
- Cluster-level storage overview page
- Download / Upload multiple files from datastore file management page
- Guest OS customization for cloned VM (IP Address, Gateway, etc)
- Guest OS customization for template VMs (IP Address, Gateway, etc)
- Live Refresh and live state of objects across sessions
- Performance enhancements for plug-ins, charts, etc
- Native browser feature support (bookmarks, navigation, zoom)
- and much more…
vMotion for NVIDIA GRID v-GPU Powered VMs
Virtual Machines leveraging NVIDIA GRID vGPUs can now be migrated to another server without end-user disruption or data loss using vMotion. In past versions, all VDI desktops had to be powered off to perform patching and updates thereby disrupting user productivity. This new feature will enable VMware administrators to perform needed infrastructure services and maintenance without interrupting end-users. Additional supported features include workload balancing with DRS, Suspend, Resume, and Snapshots.
vCenter Server Converge Tool
The Platform Services Controller (PSC) is going to be embedded within vCenter moving forward. Announced in 6.7.0, Enhanced Linked Mode with the embedded PSC dramatically simplified vCenter Server management by eliminating the complexities of the external PSC. This includes reducing the number of virtual machines running to support the vCenter architecture, eliminating the need for load balancers for HA, and complex multi-site replication topologies. Up to 15 vCenter instances may be connected via Enhanced Link Mode under this new architecture.
The Converge tool now makes it very simple to migrate external PSCs to the embedded version rather than be forced to rebuild them. This tool is only supported for vSphere 6.7 U1 at this time, so customers will need to upgrade to this version before leveraging the new feature.
Finally, the tool will enable users to move (repoint) a vCenter Server with embedded PSC from one vSphere SSO Domain to another. Now users have the flexibility to combine, merge, or separate vSphere SSO Domains to optimize their organization’s architecture without time consuming and challenging rebuilds or migrations.
Enhancements for HCI and vSAN
A new workflow wizard called “Cluster Quickstart” has been created for vSphere. Administrators who leverage this tool will be able to quickly and efficiently create and configure clusters, add hosts, and ensure those hosts are identical. The configuration includes HA, DRS, Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC), a vSAN datastore, and networking – including Virtual Distributed Switch (VDS). The wizard integrates with known best practices to enable setup of a fully functioning and validated cluster within minutes.
Additionally, I/O controller firmware updates have now been integrated with vSphere Update Manager (VUM). This enables administrators to remediate both software and firmware in one maintenance cycle under a single VUM UI, which is safer and more efficient.
Enhanced Content Library
Customers are now able to import .OVA templates from both HTTPS and local storage. They may also sync content from OVA templates to other vCenter Servers. Content Library (CL) now natively supports .VMTX templates and associated operations such as deploying a VM directly from the CL. Syncing of VM templates to another vCenter Server is not yet supported in 6.7 U1.
vSphere Platinum Edition (GA Fall 2018)
vSphere Platinum in its simplest terms is about driving security down to the applications. Platinum edition will take all of the features and functionality of vSphere Enterprise Plus and layer an emerging product called VMware AppDefense on top leveraging some purpose built vCenter plugins.
VMware Appdefense is a cloud-based AI SaaS service that works in concert with on-prem components to detect the known good state of an application. Not only is the known good state of the application analyzed, but the cloud-based AI is able to leverage its knowledge of other identical applications to make its determinations. With this information, Appdefense is able to detect deviations in behavior from this known good state that may indicate a threat or malicious attack. In addition to being alerted to this deviation, administrators will also have the capability to automate the remediation of that activity by leveraging some of the native capabilities of vSphere and NSX. The remediation process may include (but is not limited to) quarantining the VM, snapshotting the VM (for analysis), sending out an alert, or blocking the detected activity in real time and sending out an alert. NSX is not required to use Appdefense, but it will provide more options for remediation.
Once Appdefense determines the “intentional State” of the workload, the “Principle of Least Privilege” is applied to determine the least privilege security posture the application needs to perform its job. It can also adapt to updates and new code releases over time and leverages integrations with netflow, policy changes, automation engines, developer workflow processes, Ansible, Jenkins, Puppet and more. The goal is to reduce the potential attack surface in the enterprise. VMware calls this “adaptive microsegmentation.”
Check out this video for more information
Under the Hood: vSphere Platinum – VMware Blog
Amazon RDS on VMware (Tech Preview)
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a cloud service that takes the setup, operation, and scale of relational databases and adds an easy button. Amazon RDS manages many tedious tasks including database provisioning, OS and DB patching, backups, point-in-time restore, resource scaling, health monitoring, and HA. These RDS features allow administrators to focus on what’s truly important: development and tuning of the application.
Amazon RDS on VMware has been announced and is currently in tech preview. This will bring the full functionality and simplicity of RDS on-prem to VMware based datacenters. It will enable migration to AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS with just a few clicks and the service will continue to operate on-prem even in the event of network disruption to the AWS cloud. Currently, supported databases include Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB.
Registrations for the tech preview can be submitted at the link below.
Project Dimension (Tech Preview)
Probably the largest benefit VMware Cloud customers realize is the ability to quickly spin up cloud resources while leveraging a familiar VMware software suite. The icing on the cake is that VMware does all of the deployment, patching, upgrades, monitoring, and troubleshooting of those systems. In fact, this maintenance-free experience is what many customers find so attractive about cloud-based services.
Project Dimension is essentially a VMware Cloud deployment, but on-prem. VMware will work with its hardware partners to scope and customize a solution stack at the factory, which is then followed by a plug-and-play experience on-prem. Once Project Dimension servers are plugged in, they will automatically connect to the VMware Cloud and self-configure. All patching, upgrades, monitoring, and troubleshooting will be performed by VMware using the tools and systems currently used to support the VMware Cloud. This enables customers to consume VMware’s Cloud Foundation stack (vSphere, vSAN, and NSX) without having to wrestle with tedious deployments and day two management tasks. Project Dimension also leverages NSX SD-WAN by Velocloud to enable connectivity with other regions, whether they be edge, on-prem datacenter, or cloud.
Introducing Project Dimension – VMware Blog
Project Magna (Early Development)
During his keynote on the first day of VMworld, Pat Gelsinger commented that as our technology continues to advance, the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) is going to morph into the Self Driving Data Center. Project Magna is that early-stage effort to bring AI and machine learning to the datacenter and enable it to essentially drive itself. The goal of Project Magna is to leverage machine learning to drive greater performance and efficiency without administrator intervention.
A brief product demonstration illustrated how Project Magna could model, test, and then reconfigure the network to a different frame size thereby optimizing application performance in real time.
Virtualizing the Edge – ESXi on ARM64 (Tech Preview)
VMware showed a tech preview of ESXi with vMotion and fault tolerance capabilities during the VMworld general session. It was vanilla vSphere, but running on a Marvell Armada 8040 with a 64-bit ARM Cortex A72 processor. The device was said to be sitting in a wind turbine generator, had been up for 184 days, and was running 4 virtual machines. The general use case here is in IoT and Edge computing. VMware has no plans to displace x86 or support 64-bit ARM in the datacenter, but instead will work with select embedded OEMs to evaluate possible use cases for virtualization on ARM.
Project Concord (Tech Preview)
Project Concord is an open-source, scalable, energy efficient, decentralized trust infrastructure for digital consensus and contract execution. In short, VMware is dipping its toe into blockchain. In a decentralized trust infrastructure, consensus protocols validate transactions, meaning all nodes in the blockchain must reach agreement for transactions in order for them to be committed. Use cases for Project Concord could include the guaranteed dissemination and verification of information such as in document distribution, asset and product tracking such as deeds or loans, asset transfer, and certified claims. Check out the link below for more information.
Meet Project Concord: VMware Blog
VMware Cloud Updates (Tech Preview)
- VMware Cloud on AWS is expanding to Asia-Pacific and opening new availability zones worldwide
- VMware Cloud on AWS will be available worldwide in all AWS regions by the end of 2019, including AWS GovCloud
Cheers!
Russ
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