Category Archives: Virtualization

Everything about Virtualization

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!

 

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Azure Stack Services

Azure Stack does not “Everything” that public cloud Azure does. Only a subset of services are available today but this is a growing list. Many customers confuse over this and it is important to clarify before any Azure Stack conversations begin.

Azure Services on Azure Stack includes PAAS and IAAS. Ideally, Azure stack is best used when you want these PAAS services on your on-prem datacenter.

PAAS

Azure App Services – All your websites, easy to host service

Azure Functions – Serverless deployment of your code

Service Fabric – Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices and containers.

Kubernetes – Deploy Kubernetes clusters and manage them.

Cloud Foundry – Pivotal cloud foundry on Azure stack.

IAAS

Virtual Machines – Linux and Windows virtual machines including VM scale sets.

Docker Containers -Linux and Windows containers

Networking – Virtual network, load balancer, and VPN Gateway.

Storage – Blobs, Tables, Queues and Disks.

Key Vault – Application keys and secrets for password encryption and checkouts.

Hope this quick write up helps.

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Learning VMWare NSX – VCP6-NV

It is always amazing to hear from my readers any feedback about the book. Today I heard from a Senior Engineer that he passed the VCP6-NV and that the Learning VMware NSX book series was of great help. This is great to hear, as an author, I feel more motivated to write more and help each other.

delighted

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Last Year 2017

Fresh as it was yesterday, last year 2017, I was with Rackspace and was proud to represent the company at DellEMC World 2017. I was the face of the company’s main marketing campaign and it was an exciting time for me.

Enjoy the video

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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.

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Most Things Can Be Containerized

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Getting Started with NSX-T

NSX-T is heating up and is quite exciting! If multi-cloud is your forte and we know the drive towards multiple cloud adoption is increasing. Here is a good way to get started!

NET 1510BU: Introduction to NSX-T

Speaker: Andrew Voltmer, Dimitri Desmidt

Andrew and Dimitri will provide details on NSX-T platform and its capabilities across various environments.

Download NSX-T Introduction

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VSAN NETWORK CHATTER

What goes on on the VSAN Network? Let’s take a brief look at that so we can understand the different types of chatter that goes on this network.

First things first, there is the communication that takes place between all the hosts participating in a vSAN cluster. A heartbeat is sent from the master node to all the other nodes participating in a vSAN cluster. Since vSAN 6.6, this communication is done via unicast traffic.

When a host is part of the vSAN cluster, it can get one of the three roles – master, agent, and backup. As an admin, you have no control over who you can pick as a master vs a backup and this is completely handled by vSAN. This is the second type of communication that happens between the hypervisors participating in a vSAN cluster. The master node is responsible for getting the clustering, monitoring, membership and directory services updates to all nodes (CMMDS).  This traffic is unicast since vSAN 6. The volume of traffic between the master, agent, and backup is light and in steady state, so high bandwidth is not of a concern.

The majority of traffic on a vSAN network comes from the virtual machine disk I/O. VMs on the vSAN datastore is made up of a set of objects which are made up of one or more components. When a VM has multiple copies, it will have its replicas traverse the vSAN network on to other nodes. This is unicast traffic and forms the majority of the vSAN network traffic.

Best practice for the vSAN network is to have a minimum of 10Gb and no routing. If the traffic needs to be routed, then only use static routes in the environment but it is not recommended. Also do not put vSAN traffic on an overlay NSX network, because of circular dependency, this configuration is NOT supported.

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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..

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Learning VMware NSX Second Edition Released

vmware, nsx

Just in time for VMworld 2017 which officially kicks off in an hour from now, the second edition of “Learning VMware NSX Second Edition” released.

I took all the constructive feedback from the first book and incorporated in the second edition. The second edition comes with all the applicable updates for NSX 6.3.3 and brings deep clarity to help you get started quickly with VMware NSX.

Software-defined Networking not only makes it easy to connect your networks and expand at fission pace, but also makes it a breeze to connect to multiple public clouds with near zero infrastructure investment (The statement depends on your topology).

Order your’s today and feel free to get back to me for all feedback. It will be most welcome.

Order today at –

Publisher

Amazon

Lastly, many thanks to my readers and last but not the least, my lovely Wife and my lovely Pup who remind me why we need to smile every day and celebrate our lives.

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