Software-Defined Datacenter

vRealize Operations 6.0 – collection of new material

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As you may have seen already, vRealize Operations (former vCenter Operations) has been updated to version 6.0 right before Christmas . With this new version, lots of great features have been added and there were lots of changes to the User Interface – mainly the convergence of vSphere and Custom UI. Besides architectural changes, there were also major updates around Views and Custom Reports. I collected some links around version 6.0 that I’d like to share here as well.

Documentation & Whitepaper

Videos

Software-Defined Telco – NFV in Production with VMware

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Last night, my blog post about „Software-Defined Telco – NFV in Production with VMware“ went live on the VMware Office of the CTO blog. After my VMworld 2014 presentation about the operational considerations in Telco Cloud / Network Functions Virtualization environments and other recent blog posts on this site, this article provides a comprehensive overview on the architectural and technical aspects of NFV with VMware:

It is a very exciting time for the Telco industry right now! In this blog post, I will share some updates and observations on VMware’s current involvement in NFV. Telco providers around the globe are working with VMware on both proof-of-concepts as well as production deployments… Continue Reading…

Operational Considerations for Network Functions Virtualization – Part 1

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Just a few weeks back I had the pleasure to present at VMworld 2014 in San Francisco. My session „OPT2029 – Considerations for Operational Efficiency in Telco Cloud Deployments“ covered various aspects around Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure and it’s impact on existing operational models.

Why is NFV important after all? Well, let’s take a look at ETSI’s summary of the key benefits for Network Operators and their customers:

  • Reduced operator CAPEX and OPEX through reduced equipment costs and reduced power consumption
  • Reduced time-to-market to deploy new network services
  • Improved return on investment from new services
  • Greater flexibility to scale up, scale down or evolve services
  • Openness to the virtual appliance market and pure software entrants
  • Opportunities to trial and deploy new innovative services at lower risk

Now, I’d like to start with a quick overview picture around Network Functions Virtualization that I created from ETSI’s NFV overview documents:

ETSI NFV

As you can see, NFV is split up into various parts:

  • NFVI or Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure
  • VNF or Virtual Network Function(s)
  • NFV M&O or Management and Orchestration
  • Service, VNF and Infrastructure Description
  • OSS / BSS

In this post, I’d like to focus on considerations around introducing NFVI:

ETSI NFVI

One very important thing is that you will only see most of the NFVI benefits come to live if you concentrate on as few NFV Infrastructures as possible. Each NFVI not only means fragmentation of resources but also operational complexity as each „silo“ will have specifics that need to be operated in a separate way. Even though the underlying resources will most likely be consumed via API, the actual infrastructure requires operational procedures. So for the following parts, I will focus on a shared NFVI environment, not fragmented NFVIs:

Fragmented NFVI

As with most IT-related infrastructures, terminology and methodology from ITIL comes very handy to describe and differentiate the necessary processes for Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition and of course Service Operation. My experience with Service Operation in a virtual environment is very similar to VMware’s Cloud Operations methodology and publications around Operations Transformation. Some of the ITIL functions need to be much closer aligned than in traditional operations, e.g. Demand, Capacity, Performance, Incident, Problem and Configuration Management.

Also, in a completely shared environment, there will be a logical separation between „Tenants“ and „Provider“ or in our case VNF and NFVI. But this implies a new central function for taking care of NFVI holistically: a NFVI Center Of Excellence. This NFVI COE will be covered in the next part of this series.

New VMware Hands-On Labs available!

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I just came across the VMware Hands-On Labs website and was excited to see many great new labs available there. Check them out!

For starters:

A new group, focussed on IT outcomes:

SDDC Labs:

End-User Computing

VMware EVO:RAIL Demo

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My colleague Duncan Epping (Twitter/Blog) just uploaded a video recorded by EVO:RAIL lead engineer Dave Shanley to demo the setup and usage of VMware EVO:RAIL.

You can read more about EVO:RAIL (the 4 node/16 hosts, 15-minute-setup solution with many partners) and EVO:RACK (in tech preview) at:

Edits:
Sept 2: added more links to the additional materials section

VMworld 2014 – Summary, Notes and Links

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no-limits

VMworld 2014 is in full swing. After an amazing Day 1 and many announcements made in the General Session, Day 2’s keynote had even more technical details and demos about the announcements.

Day 1 Keynote:

Day 2 Keynote:

I just want to put my personal summary, notes and links out here. I’ll continue to work on this as well.

So, what was announced and why is VMworld so exciting so far?

First of all: The VMware EVO product family. It’s VMware’s entrance in the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure market. You can read more about EVO:RAIL (the 4 node/16 hosts, 15-minute-setup solution with many partners) and EVO:RACK (in tech preview) at:

Announcement of vRealize Suite as a comprehensive Cloud Management Platform (CMP) for Hybrid Cloud Environments. It also includes the renaming of multiple products:

  • vCloud Automation Center to be renamed to vRealize Automation
  • vCenter Operations Management Suite to be renamed vRealize Operations
  • IT Business Management to be renamed vRealize Business

If you want to learn more, check out:

Interviews with VMware Executives during VMworld:

Containers: there has been a lot of interest and discussion around Docker and Containers in general. As part of the general sessions, VMware involvement in this space has been explained in more detail:

Announcement of VMware Workspace Suite

VMware joins Open Compute Project as Gold Member.

VMware Integrated OpenStack. There were some exciting news around VMware’s Integrated OpenStack product. The overall goal is to provide OpenStack APIs to developers, have a reliable and production-grade OpenStack, simplify OpenStack deployment and operation as well as a single support contact. You can find out more at:

 

Edit Aug 27: added Horizon Workspace Suite announcements
Edit Aug 28: added Keynote videos

Network Functions Virtualization

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Virtualization and Cloud Computing (IaaS) have been around for quite some time now. Many industries have introduced a „Virtualization-first“ or even a „Cloud-first“ policy for new applications in their datacenters. IT departments and their customers have seen significant benefits over the past five or even ten years.

At the same time, there are areas where hardware-centric deployments are still dominant. But even these industries are seeing major changes. One great example are Telco providers world-wide.

As a result, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has established an Industry Specification Group which is focussing on a very interesting topic called Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

Here is what ETSI is saying about NFV:

Telecoms networks contain an increasing variety of proprietary hardware appliances. To launch a new network service often requires yet another appliance and finding the space and power to accommodate these boxes is becoming increasingly difficult, in addition to the complexity of integrating and deploying these appliances in a network. Moreover, hardware-based appliances rapidly reach end of life: hardware lifecycles are becoming shorter as innovation accelerates, reducing the return on investment of deploying new services and constraining innovation in an increasingly network-centric world.

Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) aims to address these problems by evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types onto industry standard high volume servers, switches and storage. It involves implementing network functions in software that can run on a range of industry standard server hardware, and that can be moved to, or instantiated in, various locations in the network as required, without the need to install new equipment.

So it’s all about time to market, agility and cost savings through standardization and reduction of operational complexity. It’s about bringing the benefits of virtualization and Infrastructure-/Platform-as-a-Service to Telco environments. ETSI has also published several NFV Use Cases that can be found in GS NFV 001.

For now, I’d like to share a few links and resources. I’ll post more about this topic in the near future.

– VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger at Mobile World Congress 2014 (Video).

– Blogpost by Ben Fathi (VMware CTO, follow him on Twitter) about NFV – Transforming the Operational Model of the Network.

– VMware’s Principal Engineer Bruce Davie (follow him on Twitter) on NFV and Network Virtualization in 2014.

– VMware’s Solution Exchange that has a special area focussed on Network Functions Virtualization.

– There is a great whitepaper by Lightreading available.

– Blog: „VMware guiding telecom industry on journey towards network function virtualization and software-defined networking“.

VMware NSX – ESX for Networking

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Do you still remember the first virtual machine you created? The first hypervisor-based server that you worked with? I do. And do you want to know why? Because it was such a great experience compared to all the steps that were related to setting up a physical server in the datacenter. Identifying a rack, network cabling, ordering storage capacity, labeling all cables… But before that you had to choose the appropriate (final) server hardware. What does the customer actually need? 2 or 4 sockets? How much memory? How many NICs? Because any hardware upgrade would become pretty complex. You still remember those days? I don’t want to go back…

So, where are we today? We still need to deploy servers in racks. But (at least to my observation), this process has lost it’s complexity. Besides a certain standardization of ESXi hosts and their storage and network connectivity, resource pooling and capacity management on a cluster or virtual datacenter level brought more agility to the infrastructure.

Deploying a new VM on an existing vSphere infrastructure is pretty easy. From a compute and memory perspective, there is (nearly) always an empty slot somewhere in the cluster.

For storage, the introduction of Thin Provisioning and Storage DRS have provided lots of flexibility as well. You are now able to place new VMDKs on shared datastores more efficiently. And – if necessary – there is still the option to change the size of the individual VM or to (Storage) vMotion a VM for example from it’s temporary to a production location. Elasticity, flexibility, agility – we are done, aren’t we?

We are not. One of the biggest limitations I am seeing these days is around networking. Truth is, compute and memory resources are very often fragmented by networking constraints. „This VLAN is not available in this part of the datacenter“, „the customer can only work with this VLAN/IP range“, „we don’t have Firewall capacity and need to order a new hardware appliance in this network segment“. If you hear any of these comments, it means additional complexity. And time.

Last year, VMware acquired a company called Nicira to address this „missing piece“ of the Software-Defined Datacenter vision. And just a few weeks back, VMware announced „NSX“ – or „ESX for Networking“ as I will call it.

In VMware NSX, the very best of Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) and VMware’s vCloud Networking and Security will come together to virtualize the network.

Quoting the blog article:

VMware NSX exposes a complete suite of simplified logical networking elements and services including logical switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPN, QoS, monitoring, and security; arranged in any topology with isolation and multi-tenancy through programmable APIs – deployed on top of any physical IP network fabric, resident with any compute hypervisor, connecting to any external network, and consumed by any cloud management platform (e.g. vCloud, OpenStack, CloudStack).

Personally, I am pretty excited about the things to come. And the day, on which I can say: I virtualized my first network…