#VMworld 2019 EU: #SDDC, Containers and Cloud Products: Announcements and Releases

Around VMworld Europe a lot of new products have been announced and released. The following post will give you a high-level overview and might be a kick-start to dive deeper into certain products or solutions.

When I should summarize VMware’s vision in 3 words (which exists now for multiple years), it would be:

‘bridge the gap’

Bridging the gap between server, storage, network and security; bridging the gap between operations and developers; bridging the gap between multiple clouds …….

It’s a physical constant that complexity rises over time (entropy). A proper way to deal with complexity is abstraction and therefore creating a proper common interface that can be used from a higher level.

The new announced products and further enhancements of existing products foster this bridging approach. Let’s have a look at some of the new products.

Project Pacific

The purpose of project pacific (which will be part of the next vSphere version) is to integrate Kubernetes as a simple-to-use feature within a vSphere cluster.

In general Kubernetes (or K8s) consists out of certain components and an API that can be used by developers to access & create infrastructure in a declarative way.

Within the vCenter you will be able to create a supervisor cluster that includes all relevant Kubernetes components & utilizes the vSphere hosts as container nodes (utilizing a vSpherelet instead of Kublet mentioned in above graphics).

My Opinion:

Since January I confront my self with containers & kubernetes. The terms are dropped at customer sites all of the time. Why? Developers want to utilize K8s within the internal IT. The big problem: The internal IT has no idea how to deliver an enterprise k8s platform. PKS could help here, but has certain drawbacks as well. Including a fully functional K8s stack into vSphere as a cluster feature is pretty great. Developers will be able to consume infrastructure services with native kubernetes APIs and on a long term we will be able to properly utilize all infrastructure components for our VMs and Containers as well via simple APIs. A API driven SDDC… here we come.

Status: Announced

Related links:

Project Tanzu Mission Control

Tanzu has been announced during VMworld US in San Francisco. The idea behind Tanzu is, that it creates a mangement platform for all kind of kubernetes cluster in a consistent way. Kubernetes cluster can be utilizwed from Google Cloud, AWS, PKS vSphere (with project pacific) with an identical operations model.

My Opinion:

Using multiple clouds i difficult… why? I really like the statement: the cloud is not a place, it’s an operations model. You need to establish security, workload-lifecycle management, data-protection in every cloud. If you are not able to unify that (which for sure creates huge and new challenges) you will still have high internal operational expenditures for utilizing services on multiple clouds.

Having a single management plane for ALL Kubernetes (On-Prem, Google Cloud, Azure, AWS) can be a game changer. NSX-T unifies the security & network, Project Tanzu gives you a unique interface about all clusters & pods in the world. Really looking forward to see more about it.

Status: Announced

Related links:

VMware Cloud

VMware is not just aiming bridging the gap between certain technology stacks, but also across multi-clouds.

Step 1) Create a common software-defined datacenter (SDDC) platform

Step 2) Bring that SDDC technology to all kind of service & cloud providers

Within this year VMware technology is not just available with over 4000 Service Providers in die VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP) but also already available in AWS.

Besides that VMware started to bring the same SDDC into all kind of cloud providers

My Opinion:

Step 1 – the common SDDC – involved a validated design & deployment with the core products vSphere, vSAN/vVol, NSX to make every infrastructure component consumable in software. There are still things to improve, but the direction is quite clear.

Step 2 – Bringing the VMware SDDC stack to all cloud providers and hyperscalers will truly simplify the creation of a true hybrid cloud. Including cloud resources with the hybrid linked mode into your own vCenter and interconnecting the environments via HCX is cool. While VMC on AWS is a VMware product and first class citizen (developed & operated by VMware), the other solution will be operated by partners. On the other side the underlying platform remains the same (VMC on AWS has always the newest version), so that for certain use-cases and customers I know the integration of an Oracle cloud (no one likes it, but nearly all have it) or Azure cloud might be useful.

Status: Released (VMC on AWS & VCPP) / Announced (Microsoft, Oracle)

NSX-T .Next

Between VMworld US in San Francisco and VMworld EU in Barcelona a few announced products have been released. NSX-T is one of them. NSX-T is evolving at a high speed and will replace NSX-v sooner or later. What’s the difference? NSX-v has been a vSphere only product, while NSX-T allows us to create software defined networks within multiple hypervisors (KVM, vSphere), clouds (AWS & Azure) and physical server.

With NSX-T 2.5 NSX Intelligence has been introduced as well, that will helps us to get further insights into present & past flows simplifying the creation of microsegementation / firewall rules. As long as we stay in the virtual world NSX Intelligence will give us all we need to identify issues and flow characteristics. You want to have a hollistic look including the physical network? vRealize Network Insight is your thing.

Besides that the announcement of NSX Distributed Intrusion Detection is big. VMware is doing a lot in becoming a new big player within the Security field.

Whats’s New:

  • Too much for this little section. Check out the release notes :)
  • NSX Distributed Intrusion Detection has been annouced

My Opinion:

NSX-T is the next gen software-defined network tool in our environment. Until today I haven’t had any customer engagements or delivered NSX-T trainings to customer or partners. I will attend a livefire training at the end of the year and plan to work with it within Q1 of 2020. What I have seen so far in labs, demos & sessions is quite cool. I have done a lot of NSX-v jobs in the past and still struggle how to migrate them properly to NSX-T in the future. Luckily the end-of-support statement for NSX-v has been extended for one year to January 2022. That should be enough time to work out proper migration plans.

Status: 2.5 (including NSX Intelligence) Released & NSX Distributed IDS announced

Related links:

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