VMware Explore 2022 – The 2 minute story around multi cloud in the Virtual Machine & Dev world

VMware Explore 2022 – The 2 minute story around multi cloud in the Virtual Machine & Dev world

Things have changed over the last few years. I have become a dad, my blog was on pause, but now I am back :) And so are our IT-events. Like Olivia Newton-John have foreseen it in 1982 – let’s get physical.

VMworld is now VMware Explore – and a lot has changed. The window for VMware was open just for a short timeframe (a little reference to himym) has decided to not be solo anymore & get part of broadcom. Even though we are in the middle of the takeover and certain scenarios have been discussed I am looking forward to how VMware will present itself during this years VMware Explore. To bring you on track what major topics are going to be the theme I am going to give you a short wrap up about the current state of VMware’s VM & Container/Dev strategy.

Register HERE

As in the years before VMware will have two main conferences in the United States (San Francisco) & Europe (Barcelona). Besides that 4 more 2 day events are coming to countries with a huge growing market around IT.

The topic will remain the same as the last years: multi-cloud multi-cloud & multi-cloud (and for sure workplace :). VMware’s Cloud Console is gaining more and more cloud services. A lot of common products we use are available as a subscription based service & still there is a lot to do from my point of view.

VMware follows certain strategies in the world of multi-cloud. One of those strategies is

“One (cloud) foundation to rule it all”

Within the pure infrastructure & virtual machine space VMware is pushing its cloud foundation (vSphere, vSAN & NSX) into all major clouds for several years now. The goal here is to convince customers & enterprises getting rid of their datacenters to migrate everything as it is in a lift & shift manor to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba, Oracle Cloud or one of the plenty VMware Cloud Provider’s out there.

And if you don’t want to go to the cloud? If you simply want to keep your datacenter or choose a partner as a co-location for your datacenter VMware is going to give us surely more insights in vSphere+ & vSAN+: the new subscriptions around vSphere & vSAN included in a centralized cloud console. What would be the target of the business to go that road?

This strategy is is something we have seen for years now. What are the challenges for VMware & it’s partners? Convince companies that it is more useful to keep the current operations models you have to today & migrate it to the cloud. That will just works when you talk to companies that are satisfied with how the IT is operates today. Otherwise the CIO will prefer a way to migrate to the native infrastructure service instead of putting it on a vmware-in-the-middle stack.

If you have a solution based on vSphere/vSAN/etc. running today, that satisfies the business goals but lacks scaleability, availability (in terms of – I need that solution on all continents within days) and maybe operability the VMware Cloud Story is just great. IMO the best way to get the quick wins of lift & shift projects into the cloud.

But since most cloud initiatives also wants to reduce the amount of legacy VMs with a concrete set of things like cpu, memory & disk we need to talk about modern applications that are not just installed on a ‘fat’ system. We need to talk about applications that scale out if required & scale down to zero once they are not used. The answer to that is:

tanzu

tanzu

tanzu

Now you see it :) VMware’s Tanzu is an interesting name for all tools & solutions around developing application & running them. Over the years the story around kuberentes has changed a lot and seems to be finally finalized (the story is finalized not the products & velocity of features / products within tanzu).

Within the comdivision team we did some cool stuff around the infrastructure part of tanzu & if someone would ask me what the goal here is I would say the following.

The cloud native landscape is huge and to get things here up & running from scratch is nearly impossible for enterprises.

With tanzu & its tools VMware tries to make a lot of those things consumable in an easy fashion. From an infrastructure point of view Tanzu Kubernetes (Grid) clusters are the key.

You run this K8s conformant (VMware supported) cluster everywhere (on vSphere/EC2/Azure VMs), manage it centrally with the SaaS solution Tanzu Mission Control.

If you want to create new clusters -> Just do it. If you want to scale out k8s clusters -> Just do it. If you want to extend clusters with services from the Cloud Native landscape? -> Just do it.

With just do it I mean -> run a simple cmdlet for the pros or click on the proper buttons in Tanzu Mission Control.

From my point of view what Cloud Foundation is the core foundation for the infrastructure within all the clouds, is the Tanzu Kubernetes (Grid) cluster for everything cloud native.

So I am really looking forward on new things coming into the cloud native world & I am really hoping that broadcom will follow VMware’s current strategy in the cloud-native space.

Better together: #vSphere 7 and #NSX-T 3.0 OR We are slowly getting friends ;)

Let me start with a quote I wrote down 5 years ago (wow did time pass by).

IMO this quote is still correct (maybe I should have used network & security skills) and really changed the quality of services I can deliver within the IT field. My NSX journey startet at this time with homelabbing and learning NSX-v from the one and only fellow comdivision partner & friend Matthias Eisner.

NSX-v; NSX-T; NSX Datacenter; NSX Cloud; NSX Advanced Load Balancer; NSX Intelligence.

Woa woa woa ….. that’s a lot of NSX…. Remember; NSX is not a single product. NSX is a suite of network & security products fullfilling VMware’s dream: Deliver every network & security service in software.

NSX-v (or NSX for vSphere) has been the software defined networking solution for vSphere evolved from the product vCloud Networking & Security. We were able to to create software-defined VXLAN networks or software defined network services with edge services gateway in a simple manor & create microsegmentation around vSphere based virtual machines.

It was good but it was a product around vSphere and not a real network product (which made it easier for me to get started with it).

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#VMworld Europe 2016: New Products and Product updates (including vSphere 6.5 / vSAN 6.5)

[Update] During the conference I added further information and links to the specific new features, etc.

I am honest right now. I was a little disappointed when I attended the VMworld in the US from an announcement perspective. The whole situation changes a few months later during #VMworld EU in Barcelona. The ‘VMware announcement season was opened by the interesting (and maybe unexpected) deep partnership with Amazon’s AWS.

During the General Session VMware did not stop with their announcements and Pat Gelsinger talked among other about new products within the VMware portfolio:

  • vSphere
  • vSAN
  • vRealize Automation
  • vRealize Log insight
  • Site Recovery Manager
  • vRealize Operations

For sure the announcement of vSphere 6.5 is the most interesting one since we were quiet disappointed with the 6.0 release and the announcement feature are removing some of the constraints we had so far in architecting our environments.

vmworld_eu

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#VMworld US 2016: New Products and Product Updates

During (and around) VMworld 2016 VMware has lifted many of their products to a new level to enable their customer a better and more agile software-defined datacenter than ever (wow, that sounded a lot like a marketing term. Therefore, back to facts).

The following post summarize the products and some of its enhancements that have been announced or even released so far.

During day 1 of VMworld the .next version of vSphere hasn’t been released. Once this is done the article gets extended. I am still hoping for any new here.

IMG_5102

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vSphere console: black screen on Windows 10 & Windows 2012 R2

If you have a black-screen on the vSphere console (no matter if using .NET client, Web-Client, Remote-Console, etc.) typically the following things help you out:

  • Having the correct port opened between your client and the ESXi host where the virtual machine is running on (TCP: 903)
  • Correct working DNS: Your client must be able to lookup the ESXi FQDN
  • Permissions

For sure there are many more things… most of them are well documented nowadays… so check them out.

There might be another reason if you use Windows 10 or Windows 2012 R2 (Not sure how it is in the older versions) where the symptoms (a black screen) might be similiar, but the problem is not vSphere related (even though it seems to be).

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Let’s learn #VMware #NSX

Version 1.1 (Date: 02/November/2015)

In the new post series let’s learn I will try to summarize useful links, classes, lectures and recommendations to learn specific topics. I used many of those resources to pass my VCP6-NV exam and thought it might be useful to share them with everyone.

NSX

In this part I am going to show you ressources to learn about VMware’s network virtualization’s product: NSX. I will try to update this post from time to time. Let’s start with initial version 1.0

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Welcome to vLenzker – Welcome to #VMworld Barcelona 2015

Hello World

This is the first article on my new VMware and virtualization related blog vLenzker. In the last years I blogged exclusively with Mathias Ewald on vxpertise.net. After many hacks on our blog (and the loss of multiple articles) I decided to start again from scratch and use my traditional nickname as the name for my blog.

The topics and content will remain pretty much the same. I will try to explain problems, facts, solutions I observe during my daily doings as an independent VMware consultant and instructor. Anyway my first blog post will be a non-technical related one. VMworld Barcelona is just around the corner and I want to give some advice for those of you who might visit this brilliant city and event for the first time.

VMworld header

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