Category Archives: VMware

Virtualization, VMware, VMworld

VMworld EU – Live from Barcelona Day 2

Hello All! Another day at VMworld Europe and more information on what’s new in the VMware ecosystem.  As their recent press release has made obvious, VMware has gone all in with making their ecosystem more developer friendly:  REST-based APIs, Container Support, expanded PowerCLI to name a few.

 

vSphere 6.5

VMware vCenter Server® Appliance – The new vCSA appliance has made many significant improvements.  From the migration path to the ability to now have HA to the new scales of what it can manage.  There are now fewer and fewer reasons to stay with the windows version of vCenter, though there are still some use cases.

REST APIs – gives developers, DevOps, and Operations teams greater flexibility and automation options.

VMware vSphere Client – Goodbye flash-based web client, hello HTML5!, VMware listened to customer feedback and created an interface that is more responsive and (hopefully) more resilient.

VMware vSphere Integrated Containers™ – by getting in on containerized applications in a fashion that is consumable by their existing VMware infrastructure/employees, VMware is making it easier for their infrastructure and development teams to work together more cohesively.

 

VSAN 6.5

iSCSI Support – will enable Virtual SAN storage to be presented as an iSCSI target for external physical workloads including clustered applications such as Microsoft SQL Server with Failover Clustering on a limited number of physical servers.

Containers Support – Virtual SAN will provide persistent data layer for containerized applications via VMware vSphere Integrated Containers.

Two-node Direct Connect – having an option for ROBO sites gives customers more flexibility & options.

Expanded PowerCLI – now that PowerShell is available Linux and Mac, the new PowerCLI integrations will be even more useable.

 

vRealize Automation 7.2

AWS, Microsoft Azure, and container support will give IT and DevOps teams greater flexibility in deploying cross-cloud, multi-tier applications.   In addition, Log Insight 4.0 and vRealize Operations 6.4 were announced and will with all of the aforementioned technologies.

 

In addition, the vBrownBag Tech Talks that I’ve been helping to create have proved to be a great resource of exposure to new technical topics.  We’ve published the VMworld Europe vBrownBag tech talks here.  We recorded 21 videos!  Next week I’ll be doing the OpenStack Summit Tech Talks, so expect many more videos in the coming week!

More to come! In the meantime, register for our upcoming webinar. CTO Chris Ward will be doing a full deep-dive into all of the biggest VMworld announcements.

Chris Williams – GreenPages Enterprise Consultant

 

Virtualization, VMware, VMworld

VMworld EU – Live from Barcelona

Hello all,

There have been a lot of great announcements coming out of VMworld EU this week.  Here are the exciting items that have been announced so far:

vSphere 6.5 vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)

A lot of great changes have happened to the vCSA over the past few years.  It can now run significantly more hosts/vms.  There are less steps involved in spinning it up as opposed to the Windows version.  And NOW (finally!) one of the last reasons for keeping the windows version around has been addressed:  vUM!  VCSA 6.5 now has Update Manager integrated.  You can now upgrade from 5.5 or 6.0 (windows OR appliance) to 6.5, including vDS configuration.  It has a brand new HTML5 web client, though it doesn’t yet have feature parity with the old version, that will be addressed.

VMware Cross-Cloud services

This is the thing that I’m the most excited about and the one that has me asking “What took you so long?”.  Cross-cloud services will enable connectivity to public cloud providers for the “seamless integration of workloads”.  It will enable you to (for example) run your DB on premises, your application tier in AWS, and your web front end in Azure.  I asked some of the AWS guys here about the technical details but they haven’t been ironed out quite yet.  This offering is slated to be available “Mid 2017” and will be purported to also have “Elastic DRS” – an ecosystem that allows you to burst across clouds.  In the event of a workload spike, you would be able to provision more VMs locally via vRA and use Auto-Scale Groups to increase the number of EC2 instances in AWS to handle the increased demand.  VMware also announced that NSX micro-segmentation would also function within the public cloud providers – this will give you additional security granularity on top of native firewalls, security groups and network access  control lists.

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More to come! In the meantime, register for our upcoming webinar. CTO Chris Ward will be doing a full deep-dive into all of the biggest VMworld announcements.

Chris Williams – GreenPages Enterprise Consultant

Miscellaneous IT, VMware, VMworld

GreenPages in Barcelona for VMworld EU – vBrownBag TechTalks schedule

Our own GreenPages enterprise consultant, Chris Williams, is over in Barcelona right now helping to host the VMworld TechTalks for vBrownBag.  He’ll also be doing the Tech Talks for the OpenStack Summit next week.  Tons of great technical content will getting posted over the course of the next 2 weeks.

If you are up (very) early, the live feed can be found here: https://goo.gl/WZYHAP .

Otherwise the content will be recorded and posted on http://vbrownbag.com

Here is the schedule for this week (please note times are in CEST):

Tuesday 18th Wednesday 19th
11:00 vExpert Daily with Mike Letschin vExpert Daily with Mike Letschin
11:30 Michael White – Veeam – Use the cloud to protect your baby pictures and so much more
11:45 Mike Resseler – Veeam – Why a cloud architects capabilities differ from a data center architect Alan Renouf – Everything changes with PowerCLI from now
12:00  Steve Flanders – Fun with Log Insight APIs
12:15 Amit Panchal – Career Disruption 101 – Brand is King Steve Flanders – Let’s Talk about Log Insight Webhooks
12:30 Ather Beg – Work/Life Balance for the “Elderly” IT Professional Matt Gillard – So you want to migrate your legacy workloads to the Cloud?
12:45 Faizan Yousaf – VCP6
1:00 Luc Dekens – The “Community” part in the vSphereDSC resource module
1:15 Kyle Grossmiller – Pure Storage – Cisco CVD:  Large scale virtual desktops with Horizon 7 Chris Bradshaw – The Amazing World of IT in Higher Education
1:30  Dean lewis – Documentation doesn’t have to be daunting
1:45
2:00 Keith Norbie – an overview of the EUClaunchpad.com  Juan Lage – Cisco – ACI Micro Segmentation
2:15 Cody Hosterman – Pure Storage – Storage as a service using vRealize Automation and Orchestration Continued
2:30 David Klee – Performance Perspectives Joerg Lew – Scaling vRealize Orchestrator (vRO)
2:45 Tim Hynes – PowerCLI – where to start?
3:00 Mark Brookfield – Automating SRM with PowerCLI  In Tech We Trust Podcast
3:15 Continued
3:30 Ron Fuller – Understanding DVS Port Mirror Options
3:45
4:00 VMUG IT hosted by Andrea Mauro in Italian
4:15 Continued
4:30
4:45

 

Virtualization, VMware, vSphere

vSphere ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 End-of-Support is August 24th!

VMware’s vSphere ESXi 5.0 and 5.1, which is the hypervisor included in vSphere 5.0 and 5.1, is going to end of support (EOS) this summer. Effective August 24, 2016, VMware will no longer offer General Support for these editions. Basically, this means no phone or email support regardless if you are current on your Subscription and Support (SnS) or not.

Now is the perfect time to upgrade. If you are current on our SnS you can upgrade to vSphere 6.0 for free.

vSphere 6.0 has many new changes that include increased stability, network I/O control and vMotion enhancements that are ideal for any cloud environment and make it an attractive upgrade.

Here are some of those new features:

From a compute standpoint, vSphere 6 increases configuration maximus. VMs now support up to 128 vCPUs and 4TB vRAM. Hosts will support up to 480 CPU and 12TB of RAM, 1028 VM per host and 64 nodes per cluster. vSphere 6 can close and deploy VMs 10x faster and the new NVIDIA vGPU offers accelerated graphics to virtualized solutions.

For networking, vSphere 6 offers support for per-VM Distributed vSwitch bandwidth reservations. This allows for the enforcement of bandwidth. With a dedicated network stack, vSphere 6 simplifies IP address management with a default gateway for vMotion traffic.

vSphere 6 has many vMotion enhancements that make it ideal for customers to upgrade.  vMotion can  now perform more increased long distance, non-disruptive live migration of workloads across virtual switches and vCenter Servers over distances of up to 100ms RTT.  That allows datacenters in Boston and Dublin to migrate workloads between one another because the increase is 10 times faster.  I know Aer Lingus is fast, but this offers a whole other level of “legging Shenanagans” (translates: fast things going on). With Replication-Assisted vMotion, it allows for active-active replication between two sites performing a more efficient vMotion, resulting in an expanded time and resource savings (which can be up to 95 percent more efficient).

vSphere also has other notable enhancements such as:

  • Support for latest Windows operating systems (Windows 10)
  • Support for instant clones in Horizon/VIEW 7 environments
  • Better multi-site/multi-vCenter support via Platform Services Controller (PSC) and shared vCenter services
  • Support for latest server hardware and Intel processors
  • Optimized Single Sign-On via PSC
  • Web based management interface

Assistance in Upgrading:

With all these enhancements comes significant architectural changes which may involve updating existing designs, specifically around vCenter. There are net new components and capabilities within vSphere 6 which have major architectural considerations.

If you’re not familiar with these changes, mistakes can inadvertently be made in design or deployment which could back you into a corner making it difficult to get out of. The upgrade is not a few clicks. It’s not a simple download the code and run-setup scenario. GreenPages has already mapped out the mine field to be able to help customers with a successful upgrade to a supported version, as well as potentially greatly enhancing the current infrastructure capabilities. If you have already made the upgrade on your own, we can also run a health check to validate your environment. Don’t hesitate to reach out!

 

By Rob O’Shaughnessy,  Director of Software Sales & Renewals

 

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CRN’s “Power 100: The Most Influential Women of the Channel 2016”, Why Smart IT Leaders Connect with Maria Dinallo and Parallels

CRN’s “Power 100: The Most Influential Women of the Channel 2016”, Why Smart IT Leaders Connect with Maria Dinallo and Parallels Maria Dinallo, Parallels’ Senior Director of Channel Sales has been honored in CRN’s “Power 100: The Most Influential Women of the Channel 2016”. CRN Power 100 honorees were selected on the basis of their […]

The post CRN’s “Power 100: The Most Influential Women of the Channel 2016”, Why Smart IT Leaders Connect with Maria Dinallo and Parallels appeared first on Parallels Blog.

data protection, News & Analysis, Shadow IT, VMware

24% of businesses expect a cyberattack within the next 90 days

Hacker performing cyber attack on laptopResearch from VMWare has highlighted 24% of office workers and IT decision makers believe their organization will be the victim of a cyberattack with the next 90 days, mainly due to the belief that the threats are advancing at a faster pace than a company’s defences.

Although the statistics imply the event of a cyberattack is becoming normalized within the industry, the findings do also suggest investments from enterprise organizations are not meeting the demanding trends of security, as 39% of the respondents believe one of the greatest vulnerabilities to their organisation to a cyberattack is threats moving faster than their defences.

“The issue around accountability is symptomatic of the underlying challenge faced as organisations seek to push boundaries, transform and differentiate, as well as secure the business against ever-changing threats”, commented Joe Baguley, CTO of VMware in EMEA. “Today’s most successful organisations can move and respond at speed as well as safeguard their brand and customer trust. With applications and user data on more devices in more locations than ever before, these companies have moved beyond the traditional IT security approach which may not protect the digital businesses of today.”

While security could be seen as something of a sound-bite for board-level execs in recent months, the importance of spreading cybersecurity awareness and responsibility throughout the organization have been made clear by the IT department. Of the IT decision makers who were surveyed as part of the research, 22% said the board should be most aware of the necessary actions to take following a significant data breach, and 40% said the CEO should be this person.

Industry insiders have commented to BCN in recent weeks that the use of security comments by execs highlighted the importance of cybersecurity has been an effort to appease customers and stakeholders, and there is little follow through in terms of investment in new technologies. Research from the Economist Intelligence Unit also backs up these comments as its own survey said only 5% of UK corporate leaders consider cyber security a priority for their business, contradicting comments made by execs in the press.

Shadow IT was another area which featured in the report, as unauthorized devices and software are seemingly still plaguing IT decision makers throughout the industry. 55% of the IT decision makers surveyed believe their own employees are the greatest security threat a company faces, which is also backed up by the statistics that 26% would use their personal device to access corporate data and almost a fifth, 16%, would risk being in breach of the organisation’s security to carry out their job effectively.

“Security is not just about technology. As the research shows, the decisions and behaviours of people will impact the integrity of a business,” said Baguley. “However, this can’t be about lock-down or creating a culture of fear. Smart organisations are enabling, not restricting, their employees – allowing them to thrive, adapt processes and transform operations to succeed.”

Financial Results, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Quarterly Earnings, VMware

Leadership restructure has little impact as VMWare reports 5% growth

VMWare campus logoVMWare has reported healthy growth during its Q1 earnings call despite disruptions in the management team over the period.

Revenues for the first quarter were reported at $1.59 billion, an increase of 5% in comparison to the same period in 2015, though license revenues saw a drop of 1% to $572 million. The company now expects second-quarter revenue of $1.66 billion to $1.71 billion, compared with analysts’ average estimate of $1.66 billion.

“Q1 was a good start to 2016, both for results and against our strategic goal of building momentum for our newer growth businesses and in the cloud,” said Patrick Gelsinger, CEO at VMWare. “Our results were in line with our expectations for the period and support our outlook for the full year.”

Over the course of the period, there may have been concerns surrounding changes in the leadership team, and how a restructure would impact the performance of the business on the whole. Carl Eschenbach announced last month he would be leaving his post as VMWare President and COO to join venture capital firm Sequoia Capital as a Partner. CFO Jonathan Chadwick also left the business in January.

Eschenbach joined the firm in 2002 as VP of Sales, was appointed as co-President and COO in 2011 and eventually as the stand-alone President in 2012. During Eschenbach’s time at VMWare, revenues grew from $31 million in 2002, to more than $6 billion in 2015. The changes in leadership would not have appeared to have stifled the company’s performance, as its cloud business units performed healthily over the first quarter.

“We think on the executive side, it really is the combination of being able to attract new players than – I mentioned Rajiv (Rajiv Ramaswami, GM, Networking and Security) we brought in a leader for China, Bernard (Bernard Kwok, Greater China President); we’ve been able to continue to attract talent,” said Gelsinger. “We’ve also had commented on our very strong bench, and – like Maurizio (Maurizio Carli, VP Worldwide Sales), we had brought him over from Europe a year plus ago to prepare for this eventuality, and so we had been grooming and preparing for these transitions.”

The company also reported healthy growth for its cloud business unit, including NSX, VSAN, End-User Computing and vCloud Air Network. The company highlighted standalone vSphere license bookings were less than 35% of total bookings, a figure which was more than 50% two years ago. The team claim this reduction demonstrates the product offering has been successfully diversified.

“Turning to hybrid cloud. Total bookings for vCloud Air Network grew over 25% year-over-year,” said Zane Rowe, CFO at VMWare. “We see significant interest from cloud and service providers around the world wanting to utilize our hybrid cloud technologies. For example, as Pat mentioned earlier, IBM will be delivering a complete SDDC offering based on VMware’s technologies across their expanded footprint of cloud data centres worldwide. vCloud Air also performed well in Q1 with large enterprise customer adoption.”

In terms of long-term strategy, Gelsinger outlined a three-point plan to facilitate VMWare’s growth in the cloud market segment. Firstly, the business will consolidate its position in the private cloud space, a segment which it describes as the ‘foundation of our business’. Secondly, through the vCloud Air service and vCloud Air Network, the company aims to encourage its customers extend their private cloud into the public cloud. And finally, connecting, managing and securing end points across a range of public clouds, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

End-User Computing, Horizon 7, VMware

VMware Announces General Availability of Horizon 7

Yesterday, VMware announced the general availability of VMware Horizon 7. There are a number of new capabilities that are worth catching up on. According to our CTO Chris Ward, the biggest one is Instant Clone, which is a big architectural change vs. having to use View composer. A few other changes that VMware highlights are:

  • Transformational user experience with Blast Extreme
  • Applications with Modernized Lifecycle Management
  • Smart Policies with Streamlined Access

For more information, here is VMware’s blog post from yesterday that covers what’s new with Horizon 7.

 

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

 

EMC, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, VMware

EMC and VMware launch hyperconverged VxRail appliance

EMC2Storage vendor EMC and virtualiser VMware have jointly launched a family of hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) for VMware environments. The plug and play gadgets are meant to simplify infrastructure management in departments experiencing high growth.

The VxRail appliance family combines EMC’s data services and systems management with VMware’s software such as vSphere and Virtual SAN. The intention is to create software defined storage natively integrated with vSphere in a single product family with one point of support. The all-flash VxRail appliances could simplify VMware customer environments and boost performance and capacity in a simple plug and play operation, the vendors claim.

The appliances were jointly engineered to integrate virtualisation, computing, storage and data protection in one system with a single point of support, say the vendors. Since they can be aggregated at great scale, the estate of appliances can grow from supporting two virtual machines (VMs) to thousands of VMs on a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ basis.

Starting prices for small and medium businesses and remote offices are around $60,000, with options for performance intensive workloads to be catered for with up to have 76 TB of flash. The appliances will run EMC’s data services including replication, backup and cloud tiering at no additional charge. In addition RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, Virtual SAN, vSphere Data Protection and EMC Data Domain are all available.

Meanwhile VCE VxRail Manager will provide hardware awareness with timely notifications about the state of applications, VMs and events. VxRail Appliances can use EMC cloud tiering to extend to more than 20 public clouds such as VMware vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Virtustream. These can provide an additional 10TB of on-demand cloud storage per appliance.

“The new appliances put IT organisations on a path to eliminating complexity and collapsing cost structures,” said Chad Sakac, President of the Converged Platforms division of EMC.

According to ESG research on hybrid cloud 70% of IT respondents plan to invest in HCI in the next 24 months. The new appliance family is due out n Q2 2016.

vCloud Air, Virtualization, VMware, vSOM, vSphere

VMware Licensing and Product Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

VMware dropped some news this week regarding their product and licensing lineup. VMware announced the End-of-Life (EOL) of some familiar friends, slight additions to other products, and increasing and decreasing pricing.  There are a lot of moving parts so sit tight and let me walk you through what’s going on.

First some VMware licensing goodbyes

Like rolling your pants and B.U.M. Equipment t-shirts, some things just go out of style, and the same holds true for vSphere Enterprise, vSphere Standard with Operations (vSOM) and vSphere Enterprise with Operations (vSOM.)  VMware will no longer offer these three products starting June 30, 2016.  So what are your options?

  1. Continue to purchase vSphere Enterprise, vSphere Standard with Operations (vSOM) and vSphere Enterprise with Operations (vSOM until June 30th. You can continue to renew your subscription and support until March 2020.
  2. Buy vSphere Enterprise Plus and vSOM Enterprise Plus instead. For existing vSphere Enterprise and vSOM Enterprise licenses, VMware is offering a 50% off upgrade promotion until June 25, 2016
  3. If you are standardized of vSOM Standard, you will now just purchase vSphere Standard and vRealize Operations Standard 25-Instance Pack

Cue the memorandum music.  It was nice knowing you.

Price Increase to note: vSphere Enterprise Plus with Operations increasing by $150 per CPU

Well hello.

vRealize Suite is introducing a new flavor; vRealize Suite Standard Edition. Like vRealize Suite Advanced and Enterprise, vRealize Standard edition will include Operations Advanced, Log Insight Analyst, and vRealize Business for Cloud. vRealize Advanced adds Automation Advanced and vRealize Enterprise adds Automation Enterprise and Apps Monitoring.

vRealize is moving from a 25-Instance model to a per CPU license and will include a Portable License Unit (PLU.)  PLU includes 15 OSI’s (Operating System Instances) to be used in the cloud (i.e vCloud Air, Amazon etc. allowing you to switch from on-prem hosts and public and non-public clouds).

vCloud Suite is releasing version 7 and the new suite will simply be two products.  The new vCloud Suite 7 will include vSphere Enterprise Plus (like it always has) and one of the corresponding vRealize Suites:

  • vCloud Suite Standard:  vSphere Enterprise Plus & vRealize Suite Standard
  • vCloud Suite Advanced:  vSphere Enterprise Plus & vRealize Suite Advanced
  • vCloud Suite Enterprise:  vSphere Enterprise Plus & vRealize Suite Enterprise

vCloud will continue to be licensed by the CPU and it will also come with 15 PLU instances.

vCloud Enterprise will no longer include Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Enterprise, as this can be purchased a la carte via a 25-VM pack.

Sidecar.

vCenter Standard Server and Log Insight are teaming up to form one product. Moving forward, vCenter Standard Server will include 25 instances of Log Insight for vCenter Server. There are no changes to vCenter Foundation Server, however, there will be a price increase of $1K for vCenter Standard.  The new MSRP for vCenter Standard w/ Log Insight will be $5,995.  Log Insight retailed for $5K, so the addition of it is actually a cost savings. Like Cognac, Cointreau and a touch of lemon, I hope the new vCenter Server leaves a good taste in your month.

Run Down on Price Changes

All price changes effective March 1st.

  • vCenter Standard will be $5,995 up $1000 (however it includes Log Insight which was a $5K value)
  • vSOM Enterprise Plus increasing +$150
  • vRealize Advanced down -$500
  • vRealize Enterprise down -$2,200
  • vCloud Suite STD increasing +$500
  • vCloud Suite ADV increasing +$500
  • vCloud Suite ENT down -$2,000

 

Try a free vSphere Optimization Assessment 

If you have any questions or are looking for more details, please reach out.

 

By Rob O’Shaughnessy, Director of Software Sales and Renewals

 

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