Tag Archives: VMware

VMware Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub Is Here!

VMware Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub Is Here!

VMware Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub Is Here!

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of VMware Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub! Existing AirWatch Agent customers will see branding updates on iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. New features will be available on iOS and Android. What is Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub? Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub brings together support for BYOD and corporate-owned devices into […] The post VMware Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub Is Here! appeared first on VMware End-User Computing Blog .


VMware Social Media Advocacy

How VMware AppDefense could have helped…

How VMware AppDefense could have helped mitigate the Equifax Data Breach

How VMware AppDefense could have helped…

What Happened On Sep 7th 2017, Equifax – one of the “big-three” U.S credit bureaus – announced on a data breach which may have affected 143 million Americans. This breach jeopardizing victims Social Security numbers, birth dates and for some driver’s license numbers[1]. Since this breach, Equifax made the news on other issues related and The post How VMware AppDefense could have helped mitigate the Equifax Data Breach appeared first on VMware Security .


VMware Social Media Advocacy

VMWorld 2017 – Day One Announcements 8/28/2017

Today, VMware announced a series of products and collaborations at today’s VMworld. Below is a summary:

VMware Cloud Services: Manage, Secure, Monitor, and Automate Cloud Infrastructure and Applications

 

VMware Cloud Services provide a unified approach to gain end-to-end visibility into cloud usage, costs, network traffic, metrics monitoring, and analytics, and deliver consistent security across public clouds and on-premises environments. By enabling IT organizations to manage and secure across clouds, VMware is helping IT organizations balance agility and flexibility with control and governance, across multiple clouds. Today, VMware is announcing its initial set of cloud services:

  • VMware AppDefense™: a data center endpoint security solution that protects applications by embedding application control, and threat detection and response capabilities into the VMware vSphere-based environments on which applications and data live. By leveraging vSphere, AppDefense gains a deep understanding of the intended state and behavior of the applications running on virtual machines and can detect and respond to unauthorized changes. With AppDefense, VMware is helping IT transform security by building on a virtualization foundation and moving to a new security architecture that’s intent-based and application focused. Read the AppDefense news release here.

 

  • VMware Cost Insight™: a cost monitoring and optimization service for public and private clouds that helps IT analyze cloud spend, find savings opportunities, and communicate the cost of services to the business. With Cost Insight, users can understand aggregated cloud costs and identify key cost drivers. Cost Insight provides granular visibility into public and private cloud costs so that IT leaders can map investments to strategic business priorities and ensure cost transparency. Read more about Cost Insight in this blog.

 

  • VMware Discovery™: an automated inventory service that improves cloud visibility and tames shadow IT by bringing together inventory information and cloud accounts from multiple clouds, making it easy for IT to search for and identify workloads deployed from their enterprise. Using native cloud tags and properties that have been identified, customers can group cloud resources even if they span across multiple clouds. With better organization of cloud resources, Discovery allows organization of cloud resources in ways that mirror business needs. Read more about Discovery in this blog.

 

  • VMware Network Insight™: a network and security analysis service offering purpose-built for public clouds and software-defined data centers. Network Insight provides comprehensive network visibility and granular understanding of traffic flows to enable cloud security planning and network troubleshooting. Best practices checks, an intuitive UI and search simplify VMware NSX administration, making it easier for cloud administrators to manage and troubleshoot NSX deployments at scale. Read more about Network Insight in this blog.

 

  • VMware NSX Cloud™: a service that provides consistent networking and security for applications running in multiple private and public clouds, via a single management console and common API. Micro-segmentation security policy is defined once and applied to application workloads running anywhere — in cloud virtual networks, regions, availability zones — and across multiple clouds. Overlay networking enables more precise control over topologies, traffic flows, IP addressing, and protocols used in public clouds. The consistency and control delivered by NSX Cloud enables IT to simplify and scale operations, improve standardization and compliance, and lower OPEX for applications running in public clouds. Read more about NSX Cloud in this blog.

 

  • Wavefront® by VMware®: a metrics monitoring and analytics platform that handles the high-scale requirements of modern cloud-native applications. Wavefront by VMware’s speed, scale, and flexibility empowers DevOps, and developer teams with instant insight into the performance of highly-distributed cloud-native services. Wavefront by VMware’s analytics, query-driven alerts, interactive visualizations, open API, and integrations, all powered by a scalable time-series database, deliver “first pane of glass” visibility to help DevOps teams detect performance anomalies while enabling high availability of key cloud services. Developers can self-serve and adapt Wavefront by VMware analytics to the unique needs of their code while gaining visibility into its production behavior. Read more about Wavefront in this blog.

 

New partners for the hybrid solutions include Fujitsu and its Fujitsu Cloud Service and DXC and its Managed Cloud Services.

 

VMware and HP announce a partnership to add VMware’s Workspace ONE to the HP’s DaaS technology platform for endpoint management.

 

VMware Cloud on AWS – VMware and Amazon announce the availability of VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services.

 

VMware and Dell EMC Partner to Deliver First Data Protection Solution for VMware Cloud on AWS

  • Announced today, VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service running on elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure
  • Dell EMC is the first to offer data protection for VMware Cloud on AWS, including backup and recovery for workloads running in VMware Cloud on AWS
  • Dell EMC Data Domain and Data Protection Suite provide self-service data protection services tightly integrated with VMware vSphere

 

VMware Cloud Foundation: Fastest Path To Private Cloud, On Premises or As A Service
VMware Cloud Foundation is the industry’s most advanced cloud infrastructure platform. It can be flexibly deployed on-premises or consumed as a service in the cloud, and used to run traditional and cloud-native containerized applications. VMware Cloud Foundation accelerates IT’s time-to-market by providing an integrated cloud infrastructure stack that includes a complete set of software-defined services for compute, storage, networking, and security. With new built-in lifecycle management automation, customers can eliminate the overhead of infrastructure-level Day 0 to Day 2 operations. VMware Cloud Foundation provides customers choice among a growing ecosystem of compatible public cloud services, turnkey integrated systems and certified server options:

  • New cloud services — VMware partners delivering services based on Cloud Foundation now include CenturyLink (announcement), Rackspace (announcement), and Fujitsu.
  • New Integrated systems — VMware partners announcing new solutions include the newly updated version of Dell EMC VxRack SDDC and the new releases of HDS UCP-RS, Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX and QCT QxStack.
  • New certified servers — VMware is announcing an expanded list of Cloud Foundation certified server options from Cisco, HDS, Fujitsu, and Lenovo.

 

VMware Integrated OpenStack 4 to Deliver Enhanced Performance and Scale Capabilities
VMware Integrated OpenStack is an OpenStack distribution from VMware that complies with the OpenStack Foundation’s 2017.01 interoperability guidelines. It provides customers with the fastest and most efficient solution to deploy and operate OpenStack clouds on VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) infrastructure — typically without the need for professional services. VMware Integrated OpenStack 4 will support the latest OpenStack release — Ocata — enabling customers to take advantage of new performance and scalability enhancements to core compute and networking services as well as increased support for containers. VMware Integrated OpenStack 4 will introduce several new capabilities and integrations beyond those made available by the community. Additional new functionality will include:

  • Enhancements that enable enterprises to run containerized applications alongside traditional applications in production on OpenStack
  • vRealize Automation™ integration to enable OpenStack users to use vRealize Automation-based policies and to consume OpenStack components within vRealize Automation blueprints
  • Increased scale and isolation for OpenStack clouds enabled through new multi-VMware vCenter® support

VMware is also announcing new pricing and packaging for VMware Integrated OpenStack, which was previously available at no cost to qualified customers. See additional details in the Pricing and Availability section.

vRealize Network Insight 3.5 to Deliver Enhanced Visibility for Networking and Security
VMware vRealize Network Insight delivers intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security across virtual, physical, and multiple-clouds with micro-segmentation planning that can be scaled to thousands of VMs at a time with 360-degree visibility and VMware NSX® operations. VMware vRealize Network Insight 3.5 will provide deeper visibility into the networking and security infrastructure enabling customers to easily monitor NSX deployments and help meet PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance. Key new capabilities will include:

  • The NSX Edge Health Dashboard and NSX Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX) integration to enable NSX customers to safeguard health and access analytics for SDDC flows impacted by NSX firewall rules
  • Support for Brocade MLX, Check Point Firewall and HPE OneView to provide customers with holistic visibility across their virtual and physical networking and security infrastructure
  • The PCI compliance dashboard for NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW) will help customers in verticals such as financial, healthcare and government to build compliance for their NSX infrastructure

This latest release will build on significant capabilities delivered in vRealize Network Insight 3.4, which introduced support for micro-segmentation planning, troubleshooting, and application modeling using native Amazon Web Services (AWS) components.

New VMware vSAN Offering, VMware HCI Acceleration Kit Accelerates the Adoption of Distributed IT
Digitally-driven customers are increasingly in need of enterprise-class infrastructure at remote and branch sites to accelerate decision-making and deliver a level of IT independence to these important extensions of their business or operations. The distributed nature of vertical applications ranging from retail locations to oil rigs to tactical military installations is driving a need for flexible, cost-sensitive infrastructure that can be managed by IT generalists. The new VMware HCI Acceleration Kit brings affordable enterprise infrastructure with familiar, common management from the data center to distributed environments. Powered by the award-winning VMware vSAN software, the new offering delivers server economics to enterprise storage environments with a unique VMware vSphere®-native architecture that can be deployed on a broad choice of hardware platforms certified by VMware vSAN ReadyLabs™. The solution includes VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN standard licenses. The software licenses support single-socket vSAN ReadyNodes, which are available from Dell, Fujitsu, Lenovo, NEC, and Supermicro today. The VMware HCI Acceleration Kit pricing starts at $7,852 per 3-node cluster and the software licenses allow unlimited virtual machines.These new HCI systems based on vSAN will help power edge analytics and enable on-prem deployments of the new VMware Pulse™ IoT Center™ for Internet of Things (IoT) use cases.Read what partners have to say about the new VMware HCI Acceleration Kit.

 

VMware Introduces New vSphere Scale-Out Edition for Big Data and HPC Workloads
VMware vSphere Scale-Out™ edition, a new solution in the vSphere product line aimed at Big Data and HPC workloads. VMware vSphere Scale-Out edition includes the features and functions most useful to Big Data and HPC workloads such as those provided by the core vSphere hypervisor and the vSphere Distributed Switch™. This new solution also enables the ability to rapidly change and provision compute nodes.

VMware vExpert 2017

vExpert is a global recognition provided by VMware for having demonstrated significant contributions to the community and a willingness to share expertise with others. The vExpert group is responsible for much of the virtualization evangelism that is taking place in the world — both publicly in books, blogs, online forums, and VMUGs; and privately inside customers and VMware partners.

I am very honored for the second year in a row to be named VMware vExpert 2017.  You can check out the full announcement here – http://vexpert.me/YX

vmw-logo-vexpert-2017-k

Congratulations to my friends Tom Cronin @virtual_tom and Joe DePasquale @DePasqualeJoe for being awarded vExpert with me.

My New Journey – Into the Cloud

Happy New Year everyone! Over the last few years my work concentration has been, and still will be to a point, working to engineer solutions for my companies virtual infrastructure, and over the last couple years specializing in the vROPs suite of applications and now with the new year here, I have been assigned to work on what my companies direction and strategy will be for our cloud initiative. This doesn’t mean I am moving away from VMware, quite the opposite, I will be digging deeper into what VMware offers as a cloud platform and provider. I will also to some extent still have involvement in ESXi, vSphere, NSX and vROPs. My larger team still covers all of those products; however my focus will shift to private/public cloud. How cool is that right!? This is the industry trend and there is so much opportunity to be involved in engineering some awesome solutions and further grow the cloud footprint (cloudprint??) at work. Its not all going to be me, ill be part of a team, all of us working to provide real value. I’m very excited and feel privileged to be part of this movement.

So what does this all mean for this blog. Not much, except more cool and informative info as I work my way through this. Ill still focus on providing articles and write ups of solutions and information on how VMware deeply integrates with our cloud solutions, and the integration of VMware products. I betting you will still see some vROPs and capacity management stuff too as I transition. Over the last year the articles I have written here have been based around actual challenges or issue or decisions I have had to work through. Expect the same theme, just a focus change to cloud. I love sharing info with my VMUG/VMware community and I hope you will find the info I post will continue to interest you and maybe even help. 🙂

See ya in the clouds!
Dan @anothergeek

Project Home Lab – Part 1 – Hardware

A home lab can be a great resource for any App Dev,  Sys Admin or Engineer.  Its a great tool to learn about the products you are responsible for. I believe the value it will return to the company that you work for is ten fold. Think about it, you are learning at home on your own time, then bringing that knowledge back to your job to apply it towards development projects or support. Its really a win-win. My engineering team and I proposed to our department management a project to provide home labs to our engineering and app development teams. We thought it would be a great way to bridge the communication gap between the two teams and help reduce or eliminate shadow IT. One of the challenges we have come across working in a large company is knowing exactly what our development teams need to perform their job.  Is it containers, OpenStack, or just some other product that allows them to move their projects and initiatives forward?  The answer is probably yes to all or any of those questions and its more than likely already running under their desk.  Our thought was to give the various teams a supportable (internal support) platform to work creatively and learn. Also a direct line of communication from App Dev to Engineering without going through the traditional channels.  We are hoping this will provide a quicker turn around time to engineer the infrastructure to meet the needs of the developers and give them the tools they need.  At least that’s the theory behind this pilot project.  Over the next few posts ill share some of the cool things Im doing with my home lab and ill also let you know any feedback I receive from the teams using it and management.  So lets get to it!

Part 1 – Hardware

When my team first set out to select the right hardware we looked around the internet.  There are many choices and flavors of a home lab to choose from.  Gone are the days where you need some big honking old decommissioned servers that suck power and cause your wife to complain about the sound and cost of electricity.  Today’s home lab is small, quiet, powerful and efficient, and can provide a number of configuration choices for testing all sorts of builds and designs.  Our requirements were pretty simple and standard.  We wanted vSphere (no duh!) and some VSAN (yeah baby!) and a whole bunch of extra storage.  Here is the run down of what we decided to get.

  • 3 Intel NUC kits (NUC6i5SYH) – that’s a Core i5 6260U 1.8 Ghz processor
  • 3 Crucial DDR4 32GB (2×16) DIMM kits – Each NUC will get 32GB of Memory
  • 3 Samsung 850 EVO (MZ-75E2T0B) 2TB 2.5″ SSD SATA 6Gb/s – one for each NUC
  • 3 Samsung 850 EVO M.2 (MZ-N5E120BW) SSD SATA 6Gb/s – one for each NUC (VSAN Cache)
  • 3 StarTech USB 3.0 to Gigabit Ethernet NIC adapter – VSAN traffic will go over this NIC
  • 3 Kingston Data Traveler G4 – USB Flash Drive 8GB – We’ll install ESXi and Boot from them
  • 1 Synology DiskStation 5 Bay DS1515+ NAS Server
  • 5 WD Red Pro NAS Hard Drives (WD8001FFWX) 8TB SATA 6Gb/s
  • 1 Linksys (SE3016) 16 port unmanaged Switch

Full disclaimer here…. I did not purchase the hardware with my own money, my company purchased the hardware for a pilot home lab project I previously mentioned. So yeah I know what you are thinking, what a deal.  I agree, but I really believe my company will get value back for the purchase and with some conditions, they seem to believe that also. You should expect to also purchase licensing. The licenses I’m using are my own.  I have a VMUG Advantage, MSDN and I also get some free VMware licenses for being a vExpert.  Really look at VMUG Advantage, its the best option and its very affordable.  It goes without saying don’t use your production licenses. Info on VMUG Advantage can be found HERE. If your budget is tight, no worries, you can easily scale down (or up) to meet your needs and with all the options out there you should be able to build a really decent home lab.

All the hardware went together really nicely.  I have to be honest, putting together all that stuff really gets my geek flag flying. Its almost a religious experience.  Takes me back to when I was a kid home building PCs; but I digress. :).  You shouldn’t really have any issues connecting all the pieces.  One of the guys on my team did have one NUC only see 16GB of memory, he just needed to reset one DIMM and that was fixed.

In Part 2, Ill go over some design considerations and build out.