What is vSAN ESA?

vSAN ESA will unlock the capabilities of modern hardware by adding optimization for high-performance, NVMe-based TLC flash devices with vSAN, building off vSAN’s Original Storage Architecture(vSAN OSA). vSAN was initially designed to deliver highly-performant storage with SATA/SAS devices, the most common storage media at the time. vSAN 8 will give our customers the freedom of choice to decide which of the two existing architectures (vSAN OSA or vSAN ESA) to leverage to best suit their needs.

vSAN Express Storage Architecture

This new architecture will showcase some innovative ways of processing and storing data. vSAN 8 with ESA will introduce structural changes like a new log-structured file system (vSAN LFS), a new write-optimized log-structured object manager, and a new object format. All these changes will help vSAN ESA achieve near device-level performance and store data and metadata in an extremely fast and efficient way.

vSAN 8 using either architecture

vSAN 8 with vSAN Express Storage Architecture will bring innovative updates that deliver supreme performance and efficiency levels, enhanced resilience, simplified operations, and ease of management. We believe the vSAN ESA can help our customers capitalize on the benefits of the latest generation of hardware to run the most demanding workloads with the highest levels of performance and efficiency.

Additional enhancements for vSAN in vSphere 8 Update 2:

• Integrated File Services for Cloud Native and Traditional Workloads.
• Improved Performance for Disaggregated Environments.
• New AF-0 ReadyNode profile for small deployments.
• Default Auto-Policy Intelligence for optimal vSAN SPBM policies.
• Improved Clarity with Cluster Capacity Reporting.
• Improved Security Through Enhanced Key Management.
• Intuitive Detection of VMs and Disks Consuming the Most Resources.
• Improved Detection of Performance Bottleneck in Stretched Clusters.
• Simplified configuration for 2-Node and Stretched Clusters.

vSAN Express Storage Architecture is ideal for all of our customers and cloud providers moving to this latest generation of hardware.  Delivering space-efficient and highly resilient storage without any performance compromise, using all claimed storage devices for capacity, and new compression enhancements significantly change the mathematics in favour of the vSAN ESA.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

What’s New with VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1

VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1* delivering key enhancements across storage, networking, compute and lifecycle management to enable customers to scale their private cloud environments and improve resiliency. 

VCF Support for vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA)

VCF 5.1 is enhanced support for NVMe storage platforms with new support for vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) that enables customers to deploy next generation servers that deliver higher performance, more scalability and improved efficiency.  By co-existing with vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA), vSAN ESA is an architecture designed to achieve all-new levels of efficiency, scalability, and performance optimized to exploit the full potential of the very latest in hardware to unlock new capabilities for VCF customers. 

Networking and Security Enhancements

The VCF 5.1 released contains several enhancements which simplify the configuration of advanced networking and security.  The most impactful change is the improved SDDC Manager workflows, which allow administrators to configure new workload domains and clusters with multiple physical network adapters and multiple virtual distributed switches prepared for NSX.

Other networking enhancements have been made which further leverage NSX, with a simplified and compliant topology for stretched clusters configured for vSAN OSA, and the ability to configure edge clusters without 2-tier routing.

These fine-tuned networking enhancements allow Administrators to deliver highly performant networking and security topologies which can be easily scaled and lifecycle managed.

Key enhancements available with VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1 include:

• VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle Cloud Management integration.
• Lifecycle management updates, including asynchronous prechecks and support for vSphere Lifecycle Manager images in VCF management domains.
• Numerous networking enhancements for vSAN Stretch clusters, NSX Edge clusters and enhanced SDDC Manager workflows. 
• The VMware Identity Broker service allows Administrators to connect to third party/external identity providers (IDPs) for handling and processing identities, credentials and authentication (including multifactor authentication).  OKTA is now supported as a 3rd party VMware identity broker in VMware Cloud Foundation environments.
• New Terraform provider for VMware Cloud Foundation that enables the ability to use Infrastructure as code to deploy, operate and manage VMware Cloud Foundation with machine-readable definition files to achieve a specific desired state.   

Accelerate Data Driven Innovation in VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Cloud Foundation from the release of the next generation of VMware Data Services Manager, as well as partnerships and Tech Previews with Google Cloud and MinIO, all of which will help customers accelerate their data-driven innovation.

VMware Live Recovery 

VMware Live Recovery, a new solution that provides protection against ransomware as well as disaster recovery across VMware Cloud in one unified console. VMware Live Recovery is designed to help organizations protect their VMware-based applications and data from a wide variety of threats, including ransomware attacks, infrastructure failure, human error, and more. By bringing together the functions of established products VMware Site Recovery Manager and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery with Ransomware Recovery – and combining them under a unified, flexible, and SaaS based console – customers can realize comprehensive enterprise protection within a single solution.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

VMware Cloud on AWS Sizer

VMware Cloud on AWS Sizer

Extend your private cloud vSphere workloads to AWS Cloud — securely, rapidly and easily. Get started to estimate the resources required to run various workloads within VMware Cloud on AWS.

The vSAN Sizer (at https://vsansizer.vmware.com) is a sophisticated sizing tool that will step you through the process of sizing your performance and capacity needs accurately.  The vSAN Sizer will be updated to accommodate running vSAN using the OSA, or ESA.  The desired architecture can be selected during the sizing process.

VMware Cloud Sizer is a free online service that helps customers assess workloads and estimate required resources to run virtual machines in VMware Cloud on AWS environment efficiently.  It is a vital tool for capacity estimations used for migration project planning and can also provide insights for greenfield deployment and extension of the existing VMware Cloud environment.

Sizer helps customers to estimate the number of hosts required to run their virtual machines (VMs) and currently supporting VMware Cloud on AWS.

Depending on your requirements, VMware Cloud Sizer provides customers rough estimates based on industry averages or can be used for more accurate information using performance data of customer’s workloads.

 

Once a customer gets estimates from the VMware Cloud Sizer, they could work with the VMware Cloud Economics team to evaluate the financial aspects of the migration and build TCO.

Together with simplified profile settings, UI enhancements and Quick Sizer which now also supports external storage VMware Cloud Sizer becomes an even more handy tool making it essential for capacity planning.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

Azure VMware Solution

The Azure VMware Solution allows organizations to maximize their investment in Microsoft workloads, creating a highly cost-effective pathway to cloud migration and application modernization. This solution offers the unique opportunity to run VMware as an integrated Azure service, thereby allowing organizations seamless access to their existing applications while enjoying the power of Microsoft's globally scalable cloud platform.

Azure VMware Solution

• VMware SDDC integrating VMware vSphere, 
• VMware vSAN
• VMware NSX 
• Storage
• Networking on Azure
• Bare-metal infrastructure
• Offered in more than 24 Azure regions worldwide
• Azure service jointly engineered with VMware, delivered, operated, and supported by Microsoft
• Operational consistency with on-premises VMware infrastructure
• Integrated with Azure Portal and Resource Manager
• Large-scale workload portability with included VMware HCX Enterprise
• Deploy in just a couple of hours, scale up/down in minutes
• Fast access to native Azure services
• Extend with VMware attached services and partner solutions

Solution to Cloud Migration Challenges 

• Consistent VMware infrastructure in Azure means workloads run with no changes
• Live migrate apps in bulk with no downtime using VMware HCX
• Retain essential VMware SDDC features like high availability, microsegmentation, and storage efficiency
• VMware skills, operations, and automation transfer directly
• Manage, monitor, and protect with familiar tools like vCenter and Aria Operations

Migrate to Azure VMware Solution  - Top Use Cases

Data center migration -  Reduce your on-premises infrastructure footprint with a simple migration of sphere-based workloads to Azure in a non-disruptive, automated, and scalable fashion. Microsoft manages the platform, and you get the agility, reliability, and scale of Azure.

Data center extension - With flexible payment plans, quickly scale out data center capacity on-demand to meet seasonal, temporary, or regional needs. Host virtual desktops on Azure VMware Solution with VMware Horizon or other VDI platforms.

Application migration and modernization - Get exclusive licensing and support savings for Microsoft OSes and apps. Enhance and extend apps using Azure backbone network connections to hundreds of Azure services or the VMware Tanzu platform.

Disaster recovery to the cloud - Use the VMware stack deployed in Azure as a fully consistent on-demand disaster recovery site to protect your on-premises infrastructure with VMware Site Recovery Manager or partner solutions.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

VMware Aria Migration!

  

IT teams must decide not only where to deploy new workloads and applications, but also whether to transfer existing workloads and apps as organisations transition from a single dedicated infrastructure to a flexible multi-cloud approach. The latter offers a variety of difficulties in relation to the essential processes of analysing, planning, modernising, carrying out, and operationalizing the migration of workloads across various clouds.

VMware Aria Migration is designed to be a one stop shop multi-cloud migration service. It helps simplify and accelerate one of the most difficult tasks many organizations face in their multi-cloud journey. It identifies and migrates workloads and applications to the optimal cloud, based on your goals for security, performance, cost, and time.

Over time, we plan to release three core migration capabilities – assessment, planning, and execution. With this initial release, VMware Aria Migration provides the assessment capabilities. 

The migration assessment capability is FREE! Yes, you read that correctly. VMware will be offering migration assessment capabilities for free. The free assessment service reduces the time and effort required to scope a planned migration and understand its target cloud requirements as well as TCO impact. Free also means that there is no requirement to subscribe to any other services to create migration assessments using VMware Aria Migration.

VMware Aria Hub components and integrations

VMware Aria Hub provides a single user interface that integrates existing management solutions to focus on entity and application management. It also provides business insight analytics that help you keep your applications and the underlying entities as healthy as possible.

What are data source accounts

The connection accounts for your cloud data sources so that VMware Aria Hub can collect data from those systems. The collected data is stored in the VMware Aria Graph database. VMware Aria Hub can then manage your discovered cloud entities both uniquely within VMware Aria Hub and by using integrations with your other VMware Aria services.

What is VMware Aria Graph

With regard to VMware Aria Hub, the Entity Data Service (EDS) stores collected data in the VMware Aria Graph database and reconciles the entity IDs for entities collected from both your data sources and from the integrated VMware Aria services.

What are applications

An application is a collection of business-defined resources and services that operates as a business application. It is not the software or code that makes up a software application.VMware Aria Hub discovers applications using the application discovery service. The service analyzes entity metadata, such as tags and properties, to identify clusters of resources.

What are secure cloud findings

To ensure that your managed resources comply with defined rules, VMware Aria Hub provides findings. VMware Aria Automation for Secure Clouds generates findings when it detects a configuration state that violates the active native or third-party security rules.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

Vmware vSphere 8 update 1

 

Vmware vSphere 8 Update 1 release. Customers gain from improved operational effectiveness for administrators, accelerated performance for more demanding AI/ML workloads, and increased security throughout the environment with this release. According to our new release approach, vSphere 8 Update 1 has officially reached initial availability. General availability will follow.

Enhance Operating efficiency

In vSphere 8, vSphere Configuration Profiles were introduced as a tech preview with some limitations of not supporting vSphere Distributed Switch and NSX. If you have not checked this functionality, read my blog post on what’s new in vSphere 8, which explains this functionality in more detail. But In vSphere 8U1, vSphere Configuration Profile is now fully supported and allows administrators to apply the homogenous configuration at the cluster level.

So you can set the desired configuration at the cluster level in JSON format and check the compliance of the hosts in the cluster; if they are not compliant, you can remediate the hosts to become compliant. But one point to remember, If the cluster has a Host profile attached to it, you will get a warning to remove the Host profile when you want to move to vSphere Configuration Profile. When you transition, you can no longer attach host profiles to the hosts within the cluster. vSphere Configuration Profiles now supports vDS configuration, and it can be activated when you create a new cluster, but environments with NSX still can’t use this technology.

Supercharge Workload Performance

Enhancing the performance of AI/ML workloads is becoming more difficult for organisations. The size of AI/ML workloads is continuously growing, and more GPUs are being used. GPU demand is increasing at an accelerated rate.

Support for NVIDIA NVSwitch: With Update 1, vSphere 8 dramatically speeds up AI/ML application performance with support for NVIDIA NVSwitch (up to 900GB/s bidirectional speed with NVLink on Hopper), which connects up to 8 GPUs per host and up to 8 GPUs to the same VM.

Security

Today's organisations face higher security concerns. Security upkeep can be time-consuming. The security of mission-critical workloads is already boosted by vSphere's built-in security features, and Update 1 adds the following capabilities

• Okta Federated Identity Management for vCenter​: Update 1 expands vCenter support for 3rd party identity providers to Okta, in addition to Active Directory, OpenLDAP, and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). Admins using Okta can log in once for both vCenter and NSX Manager.​ Multi-factor authentication with Okta can also be enabled. This capability improves both efficiency and security for customers’ environment.
• Support for Fault Tolerance of VMs Employing vTPM: Fault Tolerance provides continuous availability for a VM by maintaining an identical VM that can quickly failover in the event of a failure. Fault Tolerance for a VM employing a vTPM module is now supported. This capability helps admins achieve continuous availability and security for mission-critical VMs.

 

                          

• ESXi Quick Boot Support on Servers with TPM 2.0 Chips: Quick Boot is used in lifecycle management activities like patching, upgrades, etc., and saves considerable time. With update 1, TPM 2.0 does not need to be disabled for Quick Boot. Hence, this enhancement saves both life cycle management time for the admins and eliminates security gaps​.

 I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!