VMworld 2014 concluded jst
a couple of weeks back. Thought of doing a quick recap. The following is extracted from numerous sources such as
VMware.com and http://vinfrastructure.it/
- VMware EVO:RAIL is
the new VMware’s hyperconverged solution for building Software Defined
Data Center. For more information see the related post. Actually is not clear on which version of vSphere will be base
(the edition will be the Enterprise Plus one).
EVO: RAIL Software
The EVO: RAIL
software bundle is fully loaded onto the EVO: RAIL qualified partner’s
hardware. This software bundle is comprised of:
EVO: RAIL
Deployment, Configuration, and Management
• vSphere
Enterprise Plus, including ESXi for compute
• VMware Virtual
SAN™ for storage
• vCenter Server
• vCenter Log
Insight™
Configuration
EVO: RAIL
Configuration has three options: Just
Go! or Customize Me! or Upload Configuration File.
With Just Go!, EVO: RAIL automatically
configures a default set of IP addresses and hostnames for extremely fast
deployment in a green-field scenario. Configure your TOR switch and click the Just
Go! button. All you have to create are two passwords.
With Customize Me!, customers can specify
the following configuration parameters:
• Hostnames for
vCenter Server and ESXi™ hosts naming scheme
• Networking (IP
ranges and/or VLAN ID): ESXi, Virtual SAN, vSphere vMotion®, vCenter Server, VM
Networks
• Passwords: ESXi
hosts and vCenter Server, optional Active Directory authentication
• Globals: Time
zone; your existing NTP, DNS, and Proxy servers; logging: vCenter Log Insight
or third-party syslog server
Compute
EVO: RAIL is sized
to run approximately 100 average-sized, general-purpose, data center VMs.
Actual capacity varies by VM size and workload. There are no restrictions on
application type. EVO: RAIL supports any application that a customer would run
on vSphere.
General-purpose VM
profile: 2 vCPU, 4GB vMEM, 60GB of vDisk, with redundancy
EVO: RAIL is
optimized for Horizon View with configuration options that allow up to 250 View
VMs on a single EVO: RAIL appliance. Actual capacity varies by desktop size and
workload.
Horizon View
virtual desktop profile: 2vCPU, 2GB vMEM,32GB vDisk linked clones
From the tecnical point of view the EVO:RAIL “building block” is
a 2U system composed by 4-Node unit (just microserver), where each node is an
independent physical server within the 2U enclosure (this make microserver
different, for example, from blades).
The form factor (initially will be only this) has been choosed
for simplify the decision (no choice, just add more node) but also the
deployment and the efficiency.
Each of the four nodes in a EVO:RAIL appliance have (at a
minimum):
- Two Intel
E5-2620 v2 six-core CPUs
- 192GB of memory
- Internal Drive
Bays for the entire appliance – up to 24 hot plug 2.5 drives
- One SLC SATADOM
or SAS HDD as the ESXi™ boot device
- Three SAS 10K
RPM 1.2TB HDD for the VMware Virtual SAN™ datastore
- One 400GB MLC
enterprise-grade SSD for read/write cache
- One Virtual
SAN-certified pass-through disk controller
- Two 10GbE NIC
ports (configured for either 10GBase-T or SFP+ connections)
- One 1GbE IPMI
port for remote (out-of-band) management
- 1 x Expansion
Slots PCI-E
- Dual PSU –
rated between 1600W
Each EVO partner could make something different, but those will
be the minimum requirements, and the form factor actually is fixed (but I
suppose that there will be other form factor, for example for VDI environments
where GPU are needed).
Will be possible scale out up to four Hyper-Converged
Infrastructure Appliance (HCIA), for a maximum of 16 nodes in a cluster
(considering the vSphere limit, will be possible to have more in next release).
The top of rack (ToR) switch is not included in the EVO:RAIL
requirements, but of course will be needed (an possible with good redundancy),
so probably some EVO partners will build a complete offer.
Note that storage will be provided by Virtual
SAN, as could be expected in an Hyper-Converged Infrastructure.
But the most intesting aspect of EVO:RAIL is how easy is deploy,
configure and also manage it:
- Rapid
configuration in minutes
- Simple management with
a pure HTML5 interface
- Easy non-disruptive
upgrades
- Automatically scales out
- VMware vCloud Suite 5.8 is
announced with:
- Improved business continuity and disaster recovery – Self service,
policy based provisioning of DR tiers, increased scalability of
protection and recovery capabilities, improvement on SRM integration with
vCloud Automation Center. It’s now possible to offer SRM as a Service in
vCAC’s self service portal (see alsoVMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.8
First Look).
- Enhanced next-generation applications, such as Big Data Extensions
for Hadoop 2.
- Improved interoperability with NSX.
What's New
VMware
vCloud Suite is an integrated offering for building and managing a VMware
vSphere private cloud based on the Software-Defined Data Center architecture
that enables IT organizations to achieve transformational outcomes. vCloud
Suite 5.8 is the latest release of the suite and has the following
enhancements:
- Proactive support and accelerated support
request resolution -
Support Assistant, a new vCenter Server plug-in, is included in vCloud
Suite and can be configured to automatically collect and transmit ESXi and
vCenter Server log bundles to VMware support. This data is used to
identify latent vSphere environment issues and provide customers with proactive
alerts to prevent downtime and accelerate mean-time to resolution of
issues.
- Expanded big data support - Big Data Extension now supports Hadoop 2 distributions,
which includes YARN cluster resource management, making application
deployment, lifecycle management, rapid provisioning and higher
availability easier for big data applications. Additionally, the Hadoop
Template Virtual Machine now uses CentOS 6.4 as its default operating
system, which increases performance and provides native support for all
Hadoop distributions for use with Big Data Extensions.
- Improved integration for provisioning DR tiers - Provision predefined DR protection tiers to new virtual
machines when using array-based replication. Site Recovery Manager defines
DR protection tiers and makes them accessible through a new vCenter
Orchestrator plug-in. vCloud Automation Center's blueprints enable the
self-service, policy-based provisioning of those tiers for faster
provisioning.
- Policy-based network provisioning - Ability to dynamically provision NSX firewall and routing
services customized to an application's requirements with vCloud
Automation Center.
- Improved business continuity/disaster recovery - New integration between Site Recovery Manager and Virtual
SAN via vSphere Replication reduces the DR footprint with hyper-converged
infrastructure, simplifies protection with policy-based VM-centric
storage, and lowers DR-related CAPEX and OPEX
- Scalable protection and disaster recovery - Improved Site Recovery Manager scalability for array-based
replication.
- Next-generation user interface for disaster
recovery administration -
Streamlined workflows and integration with the vSphere Web Client improve
efficiency of Site Recovery Manager administration and navigation of its
UI.
vCloud Suite 5.8 Components
- ESXi 5.5 Update 2
- vCenter Server 5.5 Update 2
- vCenter Orchestrator 5.5.2
- vCenter Configurations Manager 5.7.2
- vCenter Operations Manager 5.8.3
- vCenter Hyperic 5.8.2
- vCenter Infrastructure Navigator 5.8.2
- vCloud Director 5.5.2
- vCloud Automation Center 6.1
- vCloud Networking and Security 5.5.3
- vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.8
- vSphere Replication 5.8
- vSphere Data Protection 5.8
- vSphere App HA 1.1
- vSphere Big Data Extensions 2.0
- vSphere Update Manager 5.5 Update 2
- vCenter Support Assistant 5.5.1.1
- VMware vSphere 6 (now in public beta) announcements:
- vVOLs were announce in the past year, but of course will be a new
important and interesting feature. Will be interesting see how a host
will be able to handle a lot of “LUNs” (or vVOLs) without too much delay
during bus rescan or VM migration… but can be a big change in the block
level storage world.
- Fault Tolerance in vSphere 6 will support 4 CPUs (finally…
considering we are still using FT 1.0 from several years, but remember
that it cannot, directly, handle application or OS fault).
- VMware vSphere 6 will support cross vCenter vMotion as also long
distance vMotion is enhanced (this could become really interesting in
Hybrid Cloud scenarios).
- Using VMware NSX, network properties will now be vMotioned as well
when using long distance vMotion.
vSphere 6 Technical Deep dive
VMware continues to build out its
hypervisor core management application vCenter with more functionality. There
are no dramatic architectural changes but VMware is moving slowly to pull apart
vCenter into its component parts to be able to run more vCenters at scale and
is creating a central services function.
Platform Services Controller
(PSC)
VMware
is introducing a new component called the VMware Platform Services Controller
(which had a previous beta name of Infrastructure Controller)
SSO was the first component to be spun
out into what is now being built up as the PSC. SSO was first released in 5.1
and had major issues and was rebuilt as SSO 2.0 for vSphere 5.5
vCenter, vCOPs, vCloud Director, vCloud
Automation Center can use the PSC as a shared component.
The PSC now contains the following
functionality:
·
SSO
·
Licensing
·
Certificate Authority
·
Certificate Store
·
Service (Product) Registration
The Certificate Authority and Certificate
Store are new components to at last tame the wild and woefully inadequate
management of vSphere certificates. The new VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA)
can act as a root certificate authority either managing its own certificates or
handling certificates from an external Certificate Authority. VMCA provisions
each ESXi host with a signed certificate when it is added to vCenter as part of
installation or upgrade. You can view and manage these certificates from the
vSphere Web Client and manage the full certificate lifecycle workflow.
Service (Product) registration is a
component that all other services register to and is the lookup service in
vSphere. It is the service that will tell you all the services that are running
in the system.
Other services will be added to the PSC
in future releases.
The PSC is built into vCenter and runs as
a vPostgres database so there’s no additional database to worry about and it
runs in both the Windows and appliance version. The PSCs self replicate and
importantly don’t use ADAM so it can replicate between Windows and appliance
vCenters.
You can either have the PSC embedded
within vCenter Server or run it as an external component to vCenter Server.
VMware suggests if you are running 8 or
less vCenters it is best to use PSC embedded with vCenter. vCenter will then
connect only to its internal PSC.
If you have more than 8 vCenters, VMware
recommends using an external PSC rather than the embedded one. You can then use
the PSC as a highly available and load balanced service shared by your many
vCenters. You won’t then be connected to one PSC but a pool of them.
Just to clarify, the PSC is a new service
and separate from the Inventory Service which handles inventory management of
VMs.
vCenter Server Appliance
(VCSA)
The VCSA has also been beefed up. With
5.1 you could manage 100 hosts and 3000 powered on VMs. vSphere 6 now allows
1000 hosts and 10,000 powered on VMs.
Oracle is still the only external
database supported as Microsoft doesn’t have an officially supported ODBC
Driver for Linux (SLES), the one they do have is only community supported.
vSphere Web Client
Continued performance gains and tagging
improvements along with all new functionality. It still uses Flash which won’t
please many people, will we ever get a native HTML5 web client?
vSphere Client
You may be happy or disappointed to hear
that VMware has decided to keep on the VI Client (C# Client) for one more
release, vSphere 6.0. After that they say it will definitely be gone. Although
the Web Client continues to progress and speed up, customer feedback has been
that they would like to continue to use the familiar older client for now. No
new functionality is being added to the C# Client so although it will be
supported, it is only able to manage an ever decreasing subset of vSphere
functionality.
Install and Upgrade
The vCenter installer for Windows has
been streamlined. We are back to one installer now with all input up front.
There is more and better pre-check functionality. You can choose between
embedded and external (pre-existing) PSCs during installation
The upgrade procedure hasn’t changed
since vSphere 5.5, vCenter is upgraded using the standalone installer or
vSphere Update Manager and ESXi is updated using the .ISO or Update Manager.
·
Fault Tolerance in vSphere 6 will support 4 vCPUs;
·
vSphere 6 will support cross vCenter vMotion;
·
vSphere 6 long distance vMotion is enhanced;
·
Using VMware NSX, network properties will now be vMotioned as well when
using long distance vMotion.
·
Content Library.
·
Virtual Volumes (vVols)
VMware Fault Tolerance
First of all, VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)
is going to support multiprocessor virtual machines. VMware FT
allows continuous availability of multiprocessor virtual machines with
literally zero downtime and zero data loss, even surviving server failures,
while staying completely transparent to the guest software stack, requiring
absolutely no configuration of in-guest software. This feature has been
available from VMware vSphere 4 but it was only supported with single processor
virtual machines. This has been the primary reason that VMware FT is seldom
implemented.
Multiprocessor support for VMware FT has
been the number one improvement for VMware FT requested by end-users.
With VMware vSphere 6 VMware FT will
support 4 vCPU virtual machines.
VMware vMotion enhancements
vMotion is one the features which
pushed VMware VI/vSphere into enterprise IT infrastructures. vMotion is the one
feature which instantly shows the power of virtualization. From VMware VI to
the latest vSphere 5.5, vMotion was only possible within the boundaries of
the same Datacenter and vCenter. So vMotion could be performed in
a single cluster and across clusters in the same Datacenter managed
by a single vCenter Server.
With vSphere 6.0 it will be possible
to perform a vMotion across vCenters Servers, across virtual switches, across
long distances and routed vMotion networks aligning vMotion capabilities with
larger data center environments. vMotion across vCenters will simultaneously
change compute, storage, networks, and management. This leverages vMotion with
unshared storage and will support local, metro and cross-continental distances.
When a VM moves across vCenters, HA
properties are preserved and DRS anti-affinity rules are honoured. The standard
vMotion compatibility checks are executed. Cross vCenter vMotion requires 250
Mbps network bandwidth per vMotion operation.
Before VMware vSphere 6, vMotion
required Layer 2 connectivity for the vMotion network. With vSphere 6.0 vMotion
can be performed using routed vMotion networks.
Another great addition in vSphere 6.0
is being able to do Long-distance vMotion. The idea is to be able to support
cross-continental US distances with up to 100+ms RTTs while still maintaining
standard vMotion guarantees. Use cases are:
·
Disaster avoidance
·
SRM and disaster avoidance testing
·
Multi-site load balancing and capacity utilisation
·
Follow-the-sun scenarios
You can also use Long-distance vMotion to
live move virtual machines onto vSphere-based public clouds, including VMware
VCHS now called vCloud Air.
Content
Library
Content library is a centralized and
distributed location to store handy files you need when installing, maintaining
your infrastructure. Like when you’re installing a new VM, you need an
ISO-file on a central datastore. Most of the time administrators keep their own
copy polluting your infrastructure with all versions and duplicates of the same
content. The vSphere 6 Content Library should solve this, a single
location, which can be replicated to another vCenter Server at the remote
site.
Content to place on the content
library:
·
ISO-files
·
VM Templates
·
Virtual appliances (OVF)
·
Scripts
Features:
·
One central location to manage all content.
·
Support for other file types as well.
·
This content needs to be stored once, but can be shared many times
(vCenter, VCD, vCenter and VCD).
·
Deployment from templates, ISO-file, appliances to host or cluster.
·
Deployment into Virtual Data Center.
Virtual Volumes
Virtual Volumes (vVols) is one the
new features in vSphere 6.0. Virtual Volumes is part of VMware’s Software
Defined Storage story which is split between the control plane with Virtual
Data Services which is all policy driven and the data plane with Virtual Data
Plane which is where the data is actually stored. This completely changes the
way storage is presented, managed and used by vSphere/ESXi, making the storage
system virtual machine-centric. With current versions of VMware vSpher all
storage is LUN-centric or volume-centric.
With VAAI in vSphere 5, storage
operations can be offloaded to the storage arrays. vVols takes this a step
further and makes storage arrays aware of individual VMDK files.
- VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO), a new virtual appliance for simple deployment of OpenStack
integrated with vSphere.
- VMware + OpenStack = Better Together. OpenStack offers already
integration with vCenter/ESX, NSX, vSphere Datastores and VSAN, using
OpenStack Nova, Neutron, Cinder and Glance.
- New is VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) is the combination of
OpenStack and vCloud Suite. A special OpenStack Virtual Appliance will be
available for download. The OpenStack appliance will connect and prepare
you vSphere environment to be used by OpenStack.
Hybrid
Cloud
VMware vCloud Air (already
announced last week) is the new name for vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). A
pricing calculator has also already been released, and VCDX Chris Colotti
shares some information about this new tool:New vCloud Air Pricing Calculator.
Based on top of the IAAS service,
vCloud Air will also deliver DR services, desktop services and platform
services. vCloud Air also includes SaaS-, object based storage-,
automation- and databaseservices and is becoming much more similar (or at least
complete in the offer) like AWS or Azure:
- DevOps as a service
- Database as a service with support for MS SQL Server and MySQL as a
first step. Other database platforms will follow.
- Object based storage VMware vCloud Air Object Storage (based on EMC
ViPR technology) – Designed to offer extremely scalable, cost
effective, and durable storage for unstructured data, VMware vCloud Air
Object Storage will enable customers to easily scale to petabytes and only
pay for what they use. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage will include
lifecycle management, versioning and large object features that will
simplify and reduce management overhead and for highly available hybrid
application deployments.
- Mobility services offered by vCloud Air are:
- Enterprise Mobility Management – Offering an industry-leading
platform for mobile device, application, email, browser and content
management, AirWatch® by VMware solutions will be available this year on
vCloud Air. AirWatch provides a simplified, efficient way to manage an
organization’s mobile footprint across employee-owned, corporate-owned
and shared devices from a centralized console.
- Mobile Backend as a Service (mBaaS) – Organizations will be able
to scale their ability to build mobile applications and integrate them
with corporate backend systems and third-party cloud services through
mBaaS solutions on vCloud Air, offered by leading enterprise BaaS
provider Kinvey, enterprise mobile platform, built.io, and Node.js
community leader StrongLoop.
- Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP) – Developers will
be able to create mobile applications on vCloud Air using mobile web
application development tools from Sencha’s high-performance, HTML5
mobile application platform Sencha Touch Bundle and cross-platform
application development capabilities, including Appcelerator Titanium or
the extensible, integrated Appcelerator Platform.
- Pivotal CF Mobile Services – Enterprise Platform as a Service
leader Pivotal® is extending Pivotal CF on vCloud Air with mobile backend
capabilities such as Push Notifications, API Gateway and Data Sync, all
at enterprise standards of compliance and security.
- Rapid Application Delivery – Customers can create, deploy, manage
and change both mobile and web applications on vCloud Air with the high
productivity application platform from OutSystems.
Automation
and Management
This area has a lot of interesting
new announce (and we can also consider EVO:RAIL another
news for this area).
The interesting part is the cloud
vision of VMware that is still based on a private part (VMware vSphere and
VMware vCloud Suite and on a public part (now renamed in vCloud Air). In this
vision vCAC is a powerful automation tool to be used in the “private” part and
there is a new tool that could be used from the public part.
- vCloud Automation Center 6.1 is announced
- VMware vRealize Suite, a new suite for cloud
management and is a complete stack for managing a SDDC and public cloud
infrastructure (IaaS). Seems something interesting for cloud manament and
also similar to Platform9 (maybe
was the same initial team that has start both projects).
Actually the idea seems similar to the VMware Go tool from some years ago (I think to remember that there was a version to be used as a SaaS, but this one seems more promising and can manage also other clouds.
Network
Virtualization
As written VMware has announce both NSX 6.1 for vSphere
and also NSX Multi Hypervisor 4.2.
- VMware NSX 6.1 for vSphere:
- NSX integrates with vSphere 5.5 and newer;
- Allows integration with external DHCP servers in the physical
world;
- Several different DHCP server can be configured;
- Two stage ECMP support;
- L2 VPN (including VLAN trunking) from two different NSX edges
between two different (stretched) datacenter. This feature is comparable
with the Cisco OTV feature;
- Load balancing improvements: UDP & FTP load balancing is
supported;
- Seamless integration with F5 firewalls;
- Enhancements to the NSX distributed firewall include: reject
action, enhancements to troubleshoot and monitoring;
- VMware NSX Multi Hypervisor 4.2:
- Includes HA/hitless upgrade;
- DHCP relay feauture (same as in NSX 6.1 for vSphere);
- OVS performance enhancements;
- GA in Q3 2014.
- Enhanced integration with VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.1.
Pre-created shared Distributed Logical Routers, dynamic creation of
security groups per application with default isolation policy, create
security groups per tenant, assign security tags per vApp.
End
User Computing
VMware
Horizon 6 was announced several months
ago, but on day 2 of VMworld 2014 VMware made some important announcements in
the End User Computing space:
- VMware, NVIDIA and Google Unveil Future of Graphics-Rich
Applications Delivered on Enterprise Cloud Desktops – More information is
available here.
- VMware and SAP Collaborate to Deliver Mobile Security and
Simplified User Experience for Mobile Applications – More information is
available here.
- VMware Unifies Mobile, Desktop and Content Management With VMware
Workspace Suite – More information here.
- VMware announces New Horizon DaaS Services and Expansion to
Europe – More information in this article.
- VMware Delivers the new Workspace Suite – More in this blog article.
