vSphere Archives

Pat kicked off the VMworld keynote session today with a series of announcements covering areas including cloud, data center and Kubernetes. It is hard to keep up with all of these announcements at VMworld. Here is a list of most (if not all) of the announcements that were made today. I will be writing a series of blog posts covering the specifics of each of the announcements and this post is intended to provide a quick list of announcements and the resources that will help you learn more about them.

Project Pacific

Project Pacific brings the container and Virtual Machine worlds together. VMware’s previous attempt at this was with offerings like vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) but this is a whole new solution that brings containers, Kubernetes and VMs natively into vSphere, running as peers on ESXi.

Product page: https://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/projectpacific.html

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/08/introducing-project-pacific.html

VMware Tanzu

As Pat mentioned in his keynote, Kubernetes community is growing and is a technology that is sought out by most of the enterprise customers. As this adoption grows, it bridges the gap between developers and IT operators. Project Tanzu is VMware’s answer to how their customers can transform the way they build applications on Kubernetes.

Tanzu portal: https://cloud.vmware.com/tanzu

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/2019/08/26/vmware-completes-approach-to-modern-applications/

Tanzu Mission Control

This has been an ask for a long time. A manager of a manager kind of setup where a customer can manage their Kubernetes deployments across different cloud and on-premises environments in a single management pane. Tanzu Mission control is the answer to this requirement.

Product page: https://cloud.vmware.com/tanzu-mission-control

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/2019/08/26/vmware-tanzu-mission-control/

CloudHealth Hybrid

CloudHealth has done a great job in providing cost optimization benefits to customers for many years now. Fitting into the VMware story of hybrid cloud, it was announced today that Cloudhealth will start supporting vSphere and VMC on AWS environments, making it a single platform that can provide visibility into usage and cost across entire hybrid cloud deployments.

Product page: https://go.cloudhealthtech.com/cloudhealth-hybrid.html

Announcement Blog: https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/blog/cloudhealth-hybrid

Secure state

In the ecosystem consisting of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments, security becomes crucial. Secure state provides the ability to understand your cloud’s security and compliance posture by visualizing object relationships and mapping associated violations, metadata, and changes to objects.

Product page: https://go.cloudhealthtech.com/vmware-secure-state

Announcement Blog: https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/blog/advancing-cloud-security-vmware-secure-state

vRealize Automation Cloud

VMware Cloud Automation Services (CAS) has been around for a while and has been providing a SaaS option for customers who are planning to leverage native clouds and cloud-agnostic blueprints. CAS has been renamed into VMware vRealize Automation Cloud (vRAC). VMware vRealize Automation Cloud streamlines multi-cloud infrastructure and application delivery, enhances visibility and cross-functional collaboration and provides continuous delivery and release automation. It is a bundle comprised of three services: Cloud Assembly, Service Broker, and Code Stream.

vRealize Automation 8.0

vRealize Automation 8.0 comes with feature parity with the vRealize Automation Cloud (formerly Cloud Automation Services) SaaS service that was announced today. vRealize Automation 8 removes the need to run Windows VMs for IaaS services and packs all the required services into a single VM that run these services as separate containers. This makes it easy to develop and fix each service independently without affecting the other services. The new version also supports Action Based Extensibility (ABX) which is an alternate way of developing workflows as opposed to creating them on vRO.

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2019/08/vrealize-automation-8-whats-new-overview.html

vRealize Operations 8.0

vRealize Operations 8.0 has a lot of feature enhancements with support for VMC on AWS and CloudHelath integration. It also comes with continuous support along with the HA feature it had in the previous versions. The new version also introduces intent-driven performance optimization for VMware Cloud on AWS with cross-cluster workload balancing and rightsizing.

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2019/08/whats-new-in-vrealize-operations-8-0.html

vRealize Operations Cloud

This has been a long-pending announcement. vRealize Operations is now available as a SaaS service which can be used to monitor the multi-cloud workloads in a pay-as-you- go model. This fits in very well with VMware’s story of developing products on the cloud and then rolling them out to on-prem customers.

Announcement Blog: https://cloud.vmware.com/community/2019/08/26/vrealize-operations-self-driving-operations/

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.0

This version of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) finally catches up with the rest of the vRealize Suite of products. The vRSLCM product has evolved to be the go-to deployment tool that can deploy vRealize Suite of products in an automated way saving many hours in deployment time and resulting in faster time to value of vRealize Suite of products.

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2019/08/vrslcm-8-0-whats-new.html

Azure VMware Solutions: General Availability

Azure VMware solutions was announced during the Dell Tech World this year delivered by Virtustream and CloudSimple. This is an offering that makes the VMware’s enterprise-class SDDC solution available on the native Azure cloud. It was announced that the Azure VMware Solutions will go GA on some of the Azure regions and customers will be able to leverage this to migrate their existing vSphere workloads into Azure-hosted VMware environments.

Product page: https://cloud.vmware.com/providers/azure-vmware-solutions

Announcement Blog: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/updates/azure-vmware-solutions-is-now-generally-available/

VMC on DellEMC : Initial Availabilty

This was a much-awaited announcement at VMworld 2019. This is a very good option for a customer who is looking to deploy and consume infrastructure in a pay-as-you-go managed service model. The solution will be delivered on VxRail hardware and also comes with SD-WAN integration. This is a block under the overall Project Dimension story that VMware announced at VMworld 2018

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/08/announcing-initial-availability-of-vmware-cloud-on-dell-emc.html

NSX Intelligence

Pat mentioned this while talking about the Virtual Cloud Networking (VCN). While vRNI provides the traffic flows and visibility across the products in the VCN and other portfolios, NSX intelligence provides an in-depth analysis of network layer and suggestions on how to improve the performance and design of your network infrastructure.

AVI Network integration into NSX portfolio

AVI network will now be part of the NSX and VCN portfolio and will bridge the crucial gap that the portfolio has in the space of advanced firewall and Application load balancing.

Let me know if I have missed any announcement and I will add it to the list.

In this blog post I will cover detailed step-by-step deployment of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) management domain (learn more about management and workload domains here). This is the first post in the multi blog post series covering the vRealize Suite deployment on VCF.

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) is a tool that automates the lifecycle management of the vRealize suite components. vRSLCM is currently available for the customers who have purchased any of the vRealize suite bundles (Standard, Advanced or Enterprise). Starting from VCF 3.7, we can now leverage the vRSLCM capabilities inside the SDDC Manager to deploy and manage the vRealize Suite components such as vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight. The SDDC Manager calls the vRSLCM APIs to deploy the vRealize suite of products and to perform day 2 lifecycle management tasks such as patching and up-gradation. The vRSLCM and SDDC Manager together cut down the deployment time of the SDDC and vRealize products substantially and this results in faster time to value. Customers can start deploying workloads on the infra on day 1 as the SDDC Manager automates most of the deployment tasks.

To start the deployment of the vRealize components, we first need to deploy the vRSLCM component. This can be downloaded from the “Bundles” section in the SDDC Manager UI. The download components will only show up if an account with the license entitlement is added under the “Repository Settings”.

We can find the install bundle that contains the OVA for vRSLCM. The size of this bundle is around 5GB. We need to make sure we have downloaded the install version that related to the VCF deployment. For instance, there are two files for vRSLCM. One with vRA, vROPS and vRSLCM packed into a single bundle and is of 13GB size. This is only compatible with version 3.5 of VCF.

Once the bundle is downloaded, we move to the deployment process of vRSLCM. The tab to deploy vRSLCM can be found under Administration>vRealize Suite

Click the Deploy button to kick off the deploy process. The UI presents us with a list of pre-requisite checklist that needs to be in place before the actual deployment begins. One of the pre-requisite is to pre-download the OVA which we did in the previous step.

Once we have made sure that we have all the pre-requisites covered, we click “Begin”. We enter the network details in the first page and proceed.

The next set of info we need to provide is the appliance details. Note that we need to only provide the FQDN and the DNS details, it then resolves the FQDN and automatically assigns that IP to the VM.

We review the details we have provided and click “Finish”. This kicks off the vRSLCM deployment process.

This takes anywhere between 30-45 mins to complete. Once complete, the link for the vRSLCM components is shown on the SDDC manager UI.

One thing to notice here is that once vRSLCM is deployed and is up and running, the vRLI which was earlier deployed as part of VCF bring up process and management domain deployment will now be moved under vRSLCM.

We have successfully deployed vRSLCM on VMware Cloud Foundation and we will look at deploying vRA and vROPS using vRSLCM through SDDC Manager UI in the upcoming posts.

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VMworld US 2019 – Day 1 announcements : Tech in the age of Any