Tag Archives: Vmware

Google in Talks with Rackspace for VMware Support

Today, news hit the stands that VMware was going to offer its VMware “cloud” services in both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud platform.

Another piece of information that came about is that Google is in talks with Rackspace to provide VMware support for “VMware on GCP” as a product. A senior VMware executive, who wanted to remain anonymous, spoke with me about Google’s concerted effort to work with Rackspace on getting them to support any and all VMware deployments on GCP. Executives of both the companies met about three weeks back in San Antonio to discuss and begin early product development to build an operational support model.

Rackspace has one of the world’s largest hosted VMware footprint with about ~98000 single tenant virtual machines and growing at around 2500 virtual machines a month. The VMware business generates an estimated $450 million dollars a year for Rackspace and it is no doubt that GCP is looking to get a good chunk of it.

Interestingly, there has been little discussion done over VMware support on the Azure platform, so that is yet to be seen.

All this will look good for Apollo Equity when it goes public with Rackspace before end of this year. They are already halfway finished in getting there and insider sources say that they will be going public before the end of this year and aim to reach an asking price of $78 a share!

 

Posted in: Virtualization / Tagged: , ,

VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network And The Emphasis Towards Networking

Dell EMC world is underway and new announcements and products are expected. Well, seems like we weren’t disappointed with VMware’s announcement introducing the Virtual Cloud Network.

VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network is built on technologies such as NSX and is an agile network and security fabric that connect apps, data and users regardless of their placement. This means apps running on AWS, GCP and private cloud can be brought under one network and security fabric simplifying scope of security and management. VMware is pushing towards the idea of having a singleton network fabric that can extend to multiple clouds and environments. The aim here is to have network evolve into a secure, programmable and a flexible fabric.

VMware’s virtual cloud network suite of products consists of,

  1. NSX SD-WAN – Powered by the recently acquired VeloCloud,  NSX SD-WAN provides the solution for connectivity and security across WAN. With NSX driven SD-WAN, you can now extend segmentation beyond your datacenter and seamlessly into multiple clouds/endpoints.
  2. NSX Cloud – Provides network and security solutions for public and private clouds.
  3. NSX Datacenter – Provides networking solutions for within the datacenter including containers and bare metal environments.
  4. NSX Hybrid Connect – Enables connectivity and seamless mobility between private and public clouds.

The Emphasis Towards Networking – VMware is finally coming in with a complete suite of networking products as it sets its sights on raising its profit margin by dominating the SDN market. For many years VMware was seen as a company that did not get networking right and VMware with the launch of Virtual cloud network is changing that perception. VMware, recently has been noted to have earned significant business with NSX and these investments into networking are a clear sign that network and security are part of the inner circle that is crucial for VMware’s success.

Analysts estimate that the network and security market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 4.74% from 2017 to 2022 and the market today is estimated to be around $5 billion and growing. With VMware taking the prime spot of being the leader that ties in network and security across multiple clouds, it shouldn’t be a surprise if it takes a bigger chunk of the network and security market.

Posted in: Virtualization / Tagged: , , ,

CAN VSAN NETWORK RUN ON VXLANS?

An interesting question, if VSAN networking can be done/configured on VXLANS backed by NSX?

The answer is No and this is to avoid a circular dependency.

“However, very often, the question of compatibility is asked in the context of being able to place the vSAN network traffic on an NSX managed VxLAN/Geneve overlay. In this case, the answer is no, NSX does not support the configuration of the vSAN data network traffic over an NSX managed VxLAN/Geneve overlay. This is not unique to vSAN. The same restriction applies to any statically defined VMkernel interface traffic such as vMotion, iSCSI, NFS, FCoE, Management, etc.

Part of the reason for not supporting VMkernel traffic over the NSX managed VxLAN overlay is primarily to avoid any circular dependency of having the VMkernel infrastructure networks dependent on the VxLAN overlay that they support. The logical networks that are delivered in conjunction with the NSX managed VxLAN overlay are designed to be used by virtual machines which require network mobility and flexibility.”

Now you know..

Posted in: Virtualization / Tagged: , , ,

VMware Security Advisory

VMware blog announced a security advisory today.

The advisory documents a hard to exploit denial of service vulnerability in the implementation of the OSPF protocol in NSX-V Edge (CVE-2017-4920). This issue is present due to incorrect handling of link-state advertisements (LSA). NSX-V Edge 6.2.8 and NSX-V Edge 6.3.3 address the issue.

More Info VMSA-2017-0014

Posted in: Virtualization / Tagged: , ,

SDDC Era …

A post that went online on Monday.

Been preoccupied lately with loads of work and SDDC stuff but time to get back to sharing and caring!

The Software-Defined Data Center Era is Here

Posted in: Technology / Tagged: ,

So Sensitive… vRA

vRA is very sensitive. All the users, all the permissions and all the DEM workers have to be all set and happy or else you will start missing tabs in vRA which causes you to break your head.

I started missing the Reservations tab and it was frustrating! Yes it was.

There was this decent KB that made me realize how important it is to add users and connect to their appropriate permissions in vRA.

Here is the KB article.

Posted in: Virtualization / Tagged: , ,

VMWorld 2016 Session Voting Open!

VMworld session voting is open so please take a moment to vote for mine [Session Voting is open May 12 – May 26 at 11:59 pm PDT.]

Path to Enterprise IT Transformation – Strategy and direction

Understanding Enterprise Cloud Service Brokerage Model

Understanding Converged infrastructure use case

Why DevOps should manage your IT and not the other way around

Understanding Software Defined Networking – Use Cases, Strategy and Road map

Locking down your Cloud

Six Steps to build your own Hybrid cloud

Hope to see you there in August!

Posted in: Virtualization / Tagged: , ,

New NSX Versions

VMware today announced new NSX versions

New NSX Offerings

Standard Edition: Automates IT workflows, bringing agility to the data center network and reducing network operating costs and complexity.

Advanced Edition: Standard Edition plus a fundamentally more secure data center with micro-segmentation. Helps secure the data center to the highest levels, while automating IT provisioning of security.

Enterprise Edition: Advanced Edition plus networking and security across multiple domains. Enables the data center network to extend across multiple sites and connect to high-throughput physical workloads.

See more at: http://www.vmware.com/products/nsx/compare.html#sthash.Cd9wHe5e.dpuf

Posted in: Virtualization / Tagged: , ,

Learning VMware NSX – The Book!

Learning VMware NSX, Ranjit Singh Thakurratan, eBook - Amazon.com 2016-01-31 23-27-52My first book about deploying and using VMware’s NSX network virtualization platform is out for pre-order. It was indeed a challenge to write a book.

I spent most of last year writing the book and its finally all set to release soon. It has been an interesting but tough journey and writing the book wasn’t easy at all!  Adding to the challenge was the fact that the publisher wanted to keep the book to less than 200 pages. That however was a blessing in disguise, more readers will be willing to read a quick 200 page book about NSX rather than a 600 page gorilla.

The book is available on Amazon and is published through Packt Publishing. The kindle version is available now with the paperback shipping in early March.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1785886886/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_lySQwb0753P2J 

Below are some highlights about the book,

Screen-Shot-2016-01-31-at-8.39.12-AM

To know more about me click here.

Posted in: Virtualization / Tagged: , ,

vSphere HTML Host Client (Updated!)

**Did the original post a while back but there are new updates as picked up from virtual-alan**

Updates

  • Add a new CD/DVD drive to a new or existing VM

  • Add a new network adapter to a new or existing VM

  • Add a new hard disk to a new or existing VM

  • Create a VM from a cluster

  • Migrate compute resource of a VM to a cluster and set vMotion priority

  • Change Agent VM settings for a Host

  • View Lockdown Mode in Security Profile settings of a host

  • View Certificate information for a host

  • Add a new cluster workflow (basic)

  • Remove a cluster

If you love the improvements in the web client, or may be you are a linux shop wanting to test or play with VMware ESXi and wished you could manage your ESXi host with a web client and not with the windows c# client then we may just have a solution for you!

This is my host now (no vCenter)

VMware ESXi - localhost.localdomain 2016-01-17 13-54-51

Meet ESXi Embedded host client! This tech preview VIB will do wonders for you! Once you install this VIB (Vmware install bundle) you will get your web client up and going. Now you can’t use this to manage your vCenter so watch out there.  This is still a tech preview so don’t deploy this in production is my advise although I won’t tell if you don’t! And if you are wondering – this vib was written in HTML and Javascript.

Some of the things you can do with this fling,

  • VM operations (Power on, off, reset, suspend, etc).
  • Creating a new VM, from scratch or from OVF/OVA (limited OVA support)
  • Configuring NTP on a host
  • Displaying summaries, events, tasks and notifications/alerts
  • Providing a console to VMs
  • Configuring host networking
  • Configuring host advanced settings
  • Configuring host services

So basically everything you can do with a c# windows client. This is awesome especially for *nix users!

Below is the process to install it in your host. Do this at your own risk 🙂

  1. Download the offline bundle from here.
  2. SCP this into your standalone ESXi into a /tmp directory
  3. SSH into your host and install the VIB with the below command.

    >esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/esxui_signed.vib –force

  4. Log out and go to httpps://hostip/ui

Below is how it looks to me.

VMware ESXi - localhost.localdomain 2016-01-17 13-59-20

My opinion is this is a good progress and this feature would be great. At the end there shouldn’t really be need for a vCenter to provide a rich web interface.

If you want to read more – click here.

 

Posted in: Virtualization / Tagged: , , ,