New in vSphere 6.0 Update 1

New in vSphere 6.0 Update 1

Disclaimer - VMware has not relived official repeat notes. All info has been taken from VMWorld 2015 session INFO5060 What’s new with vSphere 

The upcoming release of vSphere 6.0 Update 1 in Q3 2015 contains several new features and improvements along with the requisite bug fixes that normally accompany VMware's Update structure. Here are some of the new capabilities for vSphere 6 U1.

vSphere vCenter Appliance

Easy install update and upgrade

• vSphere update manager support in web client – The Update UI points to VMware’s online repository can also configure it to use an ISO or a existing repository (VUM will still require a separate Windows system)
• Upgrading vSphere 6.0 VCSA to Update 1, can now be accomplished by an in-place upgrade or sometimes refer to as a build-2-build. Just mount the U1 ISO to your existing VCSA 6.0 appliance to perform the upgrade. 

Continued improvements in web client – performance and layout have been improved to more closely match the installable client.

Faster evacuation time for maintenance mode – Get those VMs moved in a hurry for a speedier evacuation to maintenance mode.

Certificate authority management - Simplified management in Web Client for certificate management, you won’t be forced to use the CLI to move certificates around.

Throughput enhancements vs using windows vCenter server – According to the presenter along with the VCSA supporting the same sizing scenarios as the Windows Server vCenter Install and improved throughput over Windows, U1 will boast another 20% increases in performance over the Windows install.

The VCSA now supports both vCenter Server as well as ESXi as a deployment targets. Pre U1 ESXi was the only available target.

The ability to convert a single server VCSA deployment to an external Platform Services Controller or PSC. This allows starting with a simple Embedded VCSA deployment and as they get comfortable with the VCSA and want to scale out to an External PSC you can, this allows you to use features like Enhanced Link Mode.

A new Platform Services Controller UI that uses the same backend as the PSC configurations found vCenter Web UI. This way provides the ability configure SSO when the Web Client is unavailable. Troubleshooting should get a lot simpler.

I will update this post as new information is reviled. 

VMworld 2015 Anouncements

This year's VMworld doesn't seem as energetic as the last few years to me but one thing is for sure there 23000 people are here soak it all in. Most of the announcements so far are Cloud driven, a path that VMware has embraced strongly. here's the list sorry if I leave something out.

EVO SDDC Manager

EVO SDDC Manager is a single solution that contains the VMware vRealize Suite, NSX 6.2, VSAN 6.1 and vSphere 6. The solution is designed to be deployed in a two-hour timeframe and starts with just eight servers needed. Customers can grow their Software-defined Data Center a single host at a time after the initial deployment. The eight-host model supports 1,000 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) virtual machines (VMs), or 2,000 VDI VMs to start. EVO SDDC Manager supports the creation of a virtual rack design, known as a workload domain. Work domains provide ways of supporting non-disruptive lifecycle automation, such as patching workload domains through vMotion technology. Availability of EVO SDDC is expected in the first half of 2016

Hybrid Networking Services

VMware vCloud Air’s Hybrid Networking Services that combines intelligent routing, encryption, WAN acceleration, VXLAN extensions and direct connect capabilities from a VMware Private Cloud to vCloud Air. In the past, customers would use VMware vCloud Connector to migrate workloads from a VMware private cloud to vCloud Air using a copy process. This has been tightly integrated into vSphere using Content Libraries to allow administrators to synch VMs between private and public clouds. Now, however, we have Hybridity Actions available. Using a hybridity action from the vSphere Web Client, an application is no longer subject to a disruption when moving to vCloud Air under the vSphere replication process. Customers now have the choice to select either vSphere replication or the cross-cloud vMotion. This new announcement really excited the audience as VMware takes another step in the vMotion realm, by first moving vMotion into a long-distance vMotion process, and now onto cross-cloud.


vSphere Integrated Containers

The last major announcement from today’s keynote talks about vSphere Integrated Containers. This announcement is about how to build cloud-native applications that leverage both cloud infrastructure and frameworks within a distributed model. By using integrated containers, virtual admins can view and manage containers directly within the vSphere Web Client, while DevOps can continue to manage containers directly within the VM. From a security perspective, the integrated containers will also provide hardware-level isolation.


Im still working on more info and will continue to update this post as needed.

Run Linux Containers on vSphere using Lightwave and Photon

It looks like the vsphere administrator that also support Linux containers may have gotten a little help thanks to two new open source projects.

For those of you that need a little intro into Linux Containers The Linux Containers (LXC) feature is a lightweight virtualization mechanism that does not require you to set up a virtual machine on an emulation of physical hardware. The Linux Container allows you to run a single application within a container (an application container) whose name space is isolated from the other processes on the system in a similar manner to a chroot jail. Making running many copies of application configurations on the same system a viable option over lots of VMs running on a host.
An example configuration would be a LAMP stack, which combines Linux, Apache server, MySQL, and Perl, PHP, or Python scripts to provide specialised web services.

If you are still with me let's take a look at project Photon and project Lightwave.

From the VMWare blog

Two open source projects were just announced by the Cloud-Native Apps group: Project Photon and Project Lightwave. Both of these projects will be foundational elements for running Linux containers and supporting next-generation application architectures. This marked a big milestone in the lifecycle of VMware Cloud-Native Apps, and at first glance may seem to be a lot more relevant to application developers than the traditional vSphere audience, but there really is a great tie-in to the Software-Defined Data Center. 

From the project Photon site

We recognized the need to expand our customers’ capabilities for developing and running cloud-native apps. Our customers let us know they wanted to take advantage of new technologies such as containers that allow them to easily package their applications as well as scale them in real-time, so we aimed to provide easy portability of containerized applications between on-prem and public cloud. We knew that our customers needed an environment that provided consistency from development through production, to smooth integration and deployment and speed time to market. To address these challenges, we have introduced Project Photon, a lightweight Linux operating system for cloud-native apps. Photon is optimized for vSphere and vCloud Air, providing an easy way for our customers to extend their current platform with VMware and run modern, distributed applications using containers. Photon provides the following benefits: Support for the most popular Linux container formats including Docker, rkt, and Garden from Pivotal Minimal footprint (approximately 300MB), to provide an efficient environment for running containers Seamless migration of container workloads from development to production All the security, management, and orchestration benefits already provided with vSphere offering system administrators with operational simplicity.

From the Lighwave site
Lightwave is an open source project comprised of standards-based, enterprise-grade, identity and access management services targeting critical security, governance, and compliance challenges for cloud-native apps. The project’s code is tested and production-ready having been used in VMware’s solutions to secure distributed environments at scale. Here are a few of its features: Multi-tenancy to simplify governance and compliance across the infrastructure and application stack and across all stages of application development lifecycle Support for SASL, OAuth, SAML, LDAP v3, Kerberos, X.509, and WS-Trust Extensible authentication and authorization using username and password, tokens and PKI infrastructure for users, computers, containers and user defined objects Project Lightwave pairs well with Project Photon (which we also announced today), our lightweight Linux OS optimized for cloud-native applications, to provide an enforcement layer for identity and access management via VMware vSphere and vCloud Air

So it looks like there may be a fairly simply way to move over to a VMware based Linux Container infrastructure with enterprise level security and backing. These projects could very well change the standard enterprise model for public and private cloud application hosting.

vSphere 6 - The next Generation

Go ahead cringe at the title. Feel better now?

OK so this month VMware announced vSphere 6, looks like a lot has changed. Here is the breakdown

From the VMware Press release

"VMware vSphere® 6, the newest edition of the industry-defining virtualization solution for the hybrid cloud and foundation for the software-defined data center. With more than 650 new features and innovations, VMware vSphere 6 will provide customers with a highly available, resilient, on-demand cloud infrastructure to run, protect and manage any application. VMware vSphere 6 will be complemented by the newest releases of VMware vCloud® Suite 6, VMware vSphere with Operations Management™ 6, and VMware Virtual SAN™ 6."

 Seems like a big deal right? Ill break down a little bit of what matters to us, the engineers:


What’s New in VMware vSphere 6.0?
Compute

• Increased Scalability – Increased configuration maximums: Virtual machines will support up to 128 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 4TB virtual RAM (vRAM). Hosts will support up to 480 CPU and 12TB of RAM, 2,048 virtual machines per host, and 64 nodes per cluster.
• Instant Clone – Technology, built in vSphere 6.0, that lays that foundation to rapidly clone and deploy virtual machines, as much as 10x faster than what is currently possible today. 

Storage

• Transform Storage for your Virtual Machines – vSphere Virtual Volumes* enables your external storage arrays to become VM-aware. Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) allows common management across storage tiers and dynamic storage class of service automation. Together they enable exact combinations of data services (such as clones snapshots) to be instantiated more efficiently on a per VM basis. 

Network

• Network IO Control – New support for per-VM Distributed vSwitch bandwidth reservations to guarantee isolation and enforce limits on bandwidth. 
• Multicast Snooping - Supports IGMP snooping for IPv4 packet and MLD snooping for IPv6 packets in VDS. Improves performance and scale with multicast traffic.
• Multiple TCP/IP stack for vMotion - Allows vMotion traffic a dedicated networking stack. Simplifies IP address management with a dedicated default gateway for vMotion traffic.

Availability

• vMotion Enhancements – Perform non-disruptive live migration of workloads across distributed switches and vCenter Servers and over distances of up to 100ms RTT. The astonishing 10x increase in RTT offered in long-distance vMotion now makes it possible for data centers physically located in New York and London to migrate live workloads between one another.
• Replication-Assisted vMotion – Enables customers, with active-active replication set up between two sites, to perform a more efficient vMotion resulting in huge time and resource savings – as much as 95 percent more efficient depending on the size of the data.
• Fault Tolerance (up to 4-vCPUs) – Expanded support for software based fault tolerance for workloads with up to 4 virtual CPUs.

Management

• Content Library – Centralized repository that provides simple and effective management for content including virtual machine templates, ISO images and scripts. With vSphere Content Library, it is now possible to store and manage content from a central location and share through a publish/subscribe model.
• Cross-vCenter Clone and Migration – Copy and move virtual machines between hosts on different vCenter Servers in a single action.
• Enhanced User Interface – Web Client is more responsive, more intuitive, and more streamlined than ever before.

So how does vSphere 6 compare with previous versions? Its Different to say the least (feature set)

*Image from vmwarearena.com

Configuration maximums were increased. Quite a big difference.

*Image from blogs.vmware.com

Also New!

vSphere Content Library provides a centralized repository that provides simple and effective management for content including VM templates, ISO images, and scripts.  With Content Library, it is now possible to store and manage content from a central location and share through a publish/subscribe model.

Support for OpenStack clouds with the release of VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO). VIO has made vSphere not only compatible, but optimized for OpenStack through many core integrations.  VMware Integrated OpenStack is an add-on package.

Just Passed the VCP550D

I took the VMWare VCP550D delta exam to day since my VCP5 was going to expire in March 15th 2015. The test cost $120 and is 65 questions long with a 75 minute time limit. their isnt a lot of time and as a matter of fact I failed the test the first tie due ti running out of time. this time I passed with a score of 500.

I used the following resources to pass this test:

• The VMware mylearn website 
• The exam blueprints
• This Whats New video

All the documentation needed is in the blueprint. Some of the questions I had to think on consisted of vSphere Editions, vCOPs (badges and what elements make them up) and Distributed Switches. the wording on those questions seems like it's meant to throw you off, read them slowly. there are also questions for  vSAN, VDP, and Replication, along with the standard VCP questions.

If you qualify for the test take it soon before time runs out.

2015 vExpert!

Well it finally happened I was granted the honorary title of vExpert. this has motivated me to kick up the blogging. Look forward to more post from me in the future.

I wan to cover some of the following but am also taking request.
vSphere 6
Horizon 6
Nutanix NOS 4.1
and more randomness

I really want to thank the VMWare vExpert selection pannel for selecting me for 2015