VMware CloudHealth Multicloud Platform

VMware CloudHealth platform helps customers gain control of their public cloud environments while enabling them to achieve faster business outcomes.

Most customers have advanced from early adoption of cloud using IaaS, PaaS and SaaS applications, basic infrastructure services and single cloud provider, to a stage of relative cloud maturity where you are now considering multiple cloud providers and using more advanced application services to build cloud native applications

The first encounter with cloud complexity is often due to lack of visibility, overshooting of cloud spend or through a cloud migration project, the challenges quickly evolve, resulting in a need for a more robust solution that extends beyond the basics to provide richer insights across performance, security and resource management

 

• CloudHealth is the leading cloud management platform designed to drive increasing business value at every stage of your cloud journey.

• Through a single pane of glass, CloudHealth enhances the transparency of cloud usage and its overall impact on cost, performance, and security.

• Our platform consolidates data across multiple cloud providers, on-premises environments, and integration partners, to provide visibility across your infrastructure.

The results customers have achieved leveraging this platform is what gets me excited about what this means with CloudHealth as part of VMware. CloudHealth will continue its mission of helping customers run applications and infrastructure in the cloud in the most cost effective and efficient manner.

 

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

VMware Connect Learning (previously VLZ) - now FREE for 12 months

There have been a couple of branding changes at VMware:

    VMware Education Services is now known as VMware Learning
    VMware Learning Zone is now known as VMware Connect Learning

VMware Connect Learning is a huge library of self-paced training and videos which you can use to learn about new technology, new products, new features, or pecific use cases. It has Basic and Premium options which work as annual subscriptions - learn more about it here

There was a promotion started earlier this year which gave a FREE Premium subscription for 6 months - the exciting news (and the reason for this post) is that the promotion has been extended to give a full 12 months access!

There's no reason to wait - the promotion is available til the end of October - head to the subscription page now and sign-up!

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

vSphere Clustering Service (vCLS) - vSphere 7 Update 1

vSphere Clustering Service (vCLS) is a new capability that is introduced in the vSphere 7 Update 1 release. It’s first release provides the foundation to work towards creating a decoupled and distributed control plane for clustering services in vSphere.

The basic architecture for the vCLS control plane consists of maximum 3 virtual machines (VM), also referred to as system or agent VMs which are placed on separate hosts in a cluster. These are lightweight agent VMs that form a cluster quorum. On smaller clusters with less than 3 hosts, the number of agent VMs is equal to the numbers of ESXi hosts. The agent VMs are managed by vSphere Cluster Services. Users are not expected to maintain the life-cycle or state for the agent VMs, they should not be treated like the typical workload VMs.

 VMware vSphere Cluster Service architecture 

Cluster Service Health

The agent VMs that form the cluster quorum state, are self correcting. This means that when the agent VMs are not available, vCLS will try to instantiate or power-on the VMs automatically.

There are 3 health states for the cluster services:

• Healthy – The vCLS health is green when at least 1 agent VM is running in the cluster. To maintain agent VM availability, there’s a cluster quorum of 3 agent VMs deployed.
• Degraded – This is a transient state when at least 1 of the agent VMs  is not available but DRS has not skipped it’s logic due to the unavailability of agent VMs. The cluster could be in this state when either vCLS VMs are being re-deployed or getting powered-on after some impact to the running VMs.
• Unhealthy – A vCLS unhealthy state happens when a next run of the DRS logic (workload placement or balancing operation) skips due to the vCLS control-plane not being available (at least 1 agent VM).

 vSphere client and click the view where you can see all the VMs, you'll find there is a new folder created called vCLS that contains the vCLS VMs. You should not rename the vCLS folder or rename the vCLS VM(s).

 Automation and vCLS

For customer using scripts to automate tasks, it’s important to build in awareness to ignore the agent VMs in, for example clean-up scripts to delete stale VMs. Identifying the vCLS agent VMs is quickly done in the vSphere Client where the agent VMs are listed in the vCLS folder. Also, examining the VMs tab under Administration > vCenter Server Extensions > vSphere ESX Agent Manager lists the agent VMs from all clusters managed by that vCenter Server instance.

Every agent VM has additional properties so they can be ignored with specific automated tasks. These properties can also be found using the Managed Object Browser (MOB). The specific properties include:

    ManagedByInfo
        extensionKey == “com.vmware.vim.eam”
        type == “cluster-agent”

    ExtraConfig keys
        “eam.agent.ovfPackageUrl”
        “eam.agent.agencyMoId”
        “eam.agent.agentMoId”

vCLS Agent VMs have an additional data property key “HDCS.agent” set to “true”. This property is automatically pushed down to the ESXi host along with the other VM ExtraConfig properties explicitly.

VMware vSphere Cluster Service, which is responsible for maintaining DRS operations in the event of vCenter Server unavailability. There will be more services added to future releases. I imagine that vSphere would be capable of managing not only vSphere services, but probably also some networking services, storage, or application services.

 

vSphere 7 Update 1

vSphere continues to deliver the ability to scale your infrastructure to meet the demands of modern application workloads such as Kubernetes clusters/pods, or high-performance application workloads. 

 

Let’s glance at the increased scalability numbers and see how it can benefit you in your journey towards application modernisation.

vSphere 7 update 1, the total number of ESXi hosts in a vSphere Cluster is now increased to 96 hosts compared to 64 hosts in a previous release. Starting from vSphere 7 Update 1, you can run up to 10000 VMs in a vSphere cluster compared to 6400 VMs in vSphere 7.

Starting from vSphere 7 Update 1, we now support a maximum of 768 vCPU and 24 TB vRAM per VM, leaving competitors far behind in this category. These scales are well suited to support memory-intensive database workloads such as SAP HANA and EPIC Cache Operational Database.

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

VMware vSphere with Tanzu

vSphere 7 Update 1, VMware has extended the capability of vSphere with Tanzu (formerly vSphere 7 with Kubernetes) to more fully support your existing vSphere environment.  The fastest way to provide developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure to DevOps teams is through vSphere with Tanzu.

We are embedding a Kubernetes control plane into vSphere and deploying Kubernetes agents onto ESXi hosts – turning them into Kubernetes worker nodes.  The Kubernetes Agents are called Spherelets.  The embedded kubernetes cluster is managed through a service that is part of vCenter.  We call this the Supervisor Cluster.

 Enabling Kubernetes exposes a set of capabilities in the form of services that can be consumed by Developers.  Primarily, DevOps teams can use the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service to do self service deployments of their own Tanzu Kubernetes clusters.   TKG clusters are fully compliant, upstream aligned Kubernetes clusters that can be controlled by developers.  Self-service deployment is done by submitting a straightforward cluster specification to the Supervisor Cluster Kubernetes API.

 

vSphere with Tanzu is a developer-ready infrastructure, that delivers:

    The fastest way to get started with Kubernetes – get Kubernetes infrastructure in an hour:

• Configure an enterprise-grade Kubernetes infrastructure leveraging your existing networking and storage in as little as an hour *

• Simple, fast, self-service provisioning of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters in just a few minutes.

• A seamless developer experience: IT admins can provide developers with self-service access to Kubernetes namespaces and clusters, allowing developers to integrate vSphere with Tanzu with their development process and CI/CD pipelines.

• Kubernetes to the fingertips of millions of IT admins: Kubernetes can be managed through the familiar environment and interface of vSphere. This allows vSphere admins to leverage their existing tooling and skillsets to manage Kubernetes-based applications.  Moreover, it provides vSphere admins with the ability to easily grow their skillset in and around the Kubernetes ecosystem.

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

vSphere Lifecycle Manager - vshere 7 vLCM

vSphere Auto Deploy is a great feature that uses PXE boot infrastructure together with vSphere Host Profiles to provision and customize ESXi hosts. Depending on the ESXi host configuration, enforced by its attached Host Profile, state information is stored on the ESXi host itself or by the Auto Deploy server. When the Auto Deploy server manages the state information for ESXi hosts, it is referred to as a stateless installation.

Sphere 7, the new vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) is introduced. vLCM is a powerful new approach to simplify consistency for ESXi host lifecycle management. Not only for the hypervisor itself, but also for the full stack of drivers and firmware for the server hardware powering your virtual infrastructure. This blog post details vLCM support for vSphere Auto Deploy.

Stateless vs Stateful

using Auto Deploy, which is part of the vSphere Enterprise+ license, there’s some infrastructural components used. Think about a TFTP host for the boat-loader used by Auto Deploy, DNS and DHCP (configured with option 66 and 67), and a syslog target for logs and dumps next to your vSphere infrastructure that contains the Auto Deploy feature.

Customers have multiple options in Auto Deploy. There’s several configuration options how ESXi is run on the physical host. Options are:

   Stateful Install: When a host is booted for the first time, the host profile configuration states Auto Deploy is to install ESXi on local host storage. All consecutive host boots, only the local storage is used until the image profile configuration is changed.

    Stateless: Auto Deploy is used to install ESXi in memory on the target host. The state information of the ESXi host is managed by Auto Deploy. No local storage is required.
    Stateless Caching: Similar to Stateless installations. However, the ESXi image and configuration is cached on local storage. If communication with the Auto Deploy server is disrupted, the host is able to boot using the cached data.

vLCM (Manage with a single image) the following screen provides information about the prerequisites.

When configuring the Auto-Deploy “Deploy Rule”, select a vLCM managed cluster to be the “Host Location” to use Auto Deploy with vCLM. By doing so, there is no need to provide an Image Profile because vLCM will automatically create it from the selected cluster

Migrate from stateless to stateful

Auto Deploy environment from stateless to stateful? This is as easy as re-configuring the Host Profile used in the deploy rules. Moving to a stateful installation does require host local storage, to verify if your host is equipped with local storage. Be sure to check the url vSphere 7 – ESXi System Storage Changes to get a better understanding of what is required and recommended for ESXi host local storage in vSphere 7.

Select the Host Profile as used in the Auto Deploy Deploy Rule. This is where you need to change the System Image Cache Configuration to ‘Enable stateful installs on the host’. The process of changing the Host Profile configuration

once ESXi hosts reboot, the ESXi bits are installed on the host local storage. The installation is persistent, fully supported by vLCM

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

vSphere 7 Hands-on Labs

VMware Hands-on Labs are hosted lab environments where anyone can try VMware products with no installation or experience required. Each lab is accompanied by a lab manual which guides the user through a set of exercises used to demonstrate product capabilities and use cases. VMware Hands-on Labs are available for free to anyone and are great tools to learn a new product or feature or even study for an exam. And, since these are fully functional lab environments, users have the ability to go off-script and explore, test, and learn as they see fit.

New vSphere 7 Hands-on Labs (HOLs for short). These HOLs focus on our latest vSphere offering and allow users to check out its new capabilities without having to download and install in their environments.

   VMware vSphere – What’s New                     -  HOL-2111-01-SDC
   VMware vSphere – Advanced Topics              -  HOL-2111-02-SDC
   VMware vSphere – Security Getting Started   -  HOL-2111-03-SDC
   VMware vSphere 7 with Kubernetes               -  HOL-2113-01-SDC

These vSphere 7 Hands-on Labs have about 4.5 hours of brand new exercises and content to help users learn all about our new vSphere 7 release.

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