There are several recommended areas to focus on to prepare you for the experience of stepping out of an airplane in flight.  This includes training and informing you on potential dangers you may face. 
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The same is true for working with a VMware Master Services Competency partner. You know that you will be working with a highly skilled partner that can walk you through all the steps involved to meet your business needs and objectives.
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In 2018, VMware announced the new master services competencies for partners interested in deepening their practices and/or building additional practice areas. VMware master services competencies require achieving advanced technical certifications and proof of high-level service capability and expertise as validated by the partner’s customers.

These competencies allow partners to differentiate in four specific solution areas:

• Cloud management and automation – designates expertise in delivery of VMware Cloud Management and Automation solutions and services. Achieving this competency validates deep understanding and execution of cloud management design principles and methodologies.
• Data-center virtualization – designates expertise in delivery of VMware vSphere environments and digital infrastructure services. Achieving this competency validates deep understanding and execution of Data Center Virtualization design principles and methodologies.
• Desktop and mobility – designates expertise designing, installing, and maintaining VMware Workspace ONE and Horizon solutions. Achieving this competency validates deep understanding and execution of desktop and mobility design principles and methodologies to deliver a scalable and reliable digital workspace.
• Network virtualization – designates expertise in delivery of VMware NSX environments and services. Achieving this competency validates deployment and optimization of NSX environment capabilities. 
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​The VMware master services competencies recognize outstanding service partners for expertise in specific VMware solution areas. Through attaining these competencies, partners like Sirius can demonstrate a proven success and expertise in a specialized area of business.

Russ Kaufmann, National Partner Manager for VMware, says, "As customers embrace digital transformation and shift towards adopting cloud technologies, it is important that partners are able to demonstrate expertise around delivering these type of solutions. This  includes next-generation VMware solutions like digital work-spaces, software defined data centers, and cloud services like VMC on AWS. The Master Services Competencies (MSCs)  provides a framework to enable partners like Sirius around these solutions but also recognizes their expertise having demonstrated successful delivery. As customers look to “reduce risk” and “accelerate time to value” when adopting VMware solutions identifying partners with MSC designation would be a great starting point."

Since 1980, Sirius has been helping organizations solve complex business challenges so they can meet their business objectives. To achieve their position as a top solution provider, they've built a nationwide consulting, sales and services organization that provides best-of-breed technologies from across the full spectrum of information technology, including hardware, software, storage, networking, security, cloud and voice. 
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​Sirius has obtained multiple VMware master services competences in Data Center Virtualization, Network Virtualization, and Desktop & Mobility. This achievement demonstrates to customers that Sirius is dedicated, invested, and have validated expertise in advanced VMware technologies.

​According to Deborah Bannworth, Senior Vice President of Strategic Alliances & Inside Sales, “Sirius is making significant investments to support our client's VMware solutions.  The master services competencies only help to accelerate our capabilities and skills for our clients.  It also recognizes Sirius for the investments we are making to support our field and clients.”

​By leveraging these service capabilities, customers of VMware can rest assured that master services competency partners have the repeatable and successful deployments of VMware business related use cases that can meet their business objectives, across multiple solution areas. 

For more information on the program click here.

Day 1 began with the general session, where VMware Executives presented to the partner community and reinforced the importance of the partner as the unsung heroes helping to drive the  VMware business and most importantly driving value for their customers.

VMware's Brandon Sweeney, Senior Vice President , WW Commercial and Channel Sales took the stage to a packed room and began the day talking about the journey VMware has taken over the past 20 years. Founded in 1998 VMware has continued to innovate and be a disruptor  in the industry. Introducing vMotion in 2001 to NSX and Airwatch, the leading mobility platform to-date, to vSAN being introduced in 2003 and now the VMware and AWS partnership which is leading the transformation for customers to a hybrid cloud infrastructure. 

Brandon spoke about the tremendous growth of the product lines such as NSX up 50%, EUC up 30%, and vSAN up 130%. These products are the fastest growing portions of VMware's business making up for more than 65% of their business.

He spoke about how VMware has again transformed their business and this transformation involves deeper partner ecosystem. VMware is changing the way they do business within the partner community, with things like the Center for Advanced Learning.

Robin Gunn, Vice President of Global Education Sales and Delivery took the stage to discuss how VMware is investing in its partners through technical enablement which is where the Empower event came from, giving partners their own technical event.

​The Center for Advanced Learning will allow partners to have access to the same training that VMware gives to its own employees. This also includes things like Live Fire events which are hands-on training for products like VMC, NSX, and SDDC. I have taken several of these and can state that these are of high quality. There are several of them at the Empower event. 

Robin spoke about a new Learning Zone which is a social platform being launched where participants can earn points that can be used toward things like exam vouchers and passes to VMworld. 

Matt Stepanski, Vice President of WW Professional Services, joined the stage after Robin to talk about how VMware is transforming their business  to really focus with partners on "Solutions and Outcomes" to business challenges. Customers are transforming and VMware is transforming to better align with the business needs of its customers through better partnership within the building blocks to Partner-Led Service Delivery.

Matt spoke about one example in particular, the PS credit program, where VMware will transfer PS credits to its partner to deliver solutions such as EUC, NSX, and VMC. PS credits are part of the ELA sold to a customer with the expectation that those get transferred to a Partner to do the work. ​

VMware continued the general session, bringing Chris Wolf, Vice President & CTO on stage to talk with partners about the products driving transformation within the business. 

Chris started by talking about Cloud-to-Edge principles for things like Native API access, Docker, Openstack, Service APIs, and embracing opensource, and  Kubernetes.

​VMware wants to deliver consistency  across all these platforms in a safe and secure way to deliver the best value to the developer community while maintaining operational consistency and control for IT. 

Workspace One is an example of this, delivering over 1.5 million applications, whether it be Windows, Virtual Apps, SaaS, Legacy, or Mobile applications across a unified platform while allowing for IT to maintain Identity, Security, and Compliance. 

​Connecting people to content, applications and each other through a combination of AirWatch, the market leader in mobility, and Horizon.

He then spoke about one of the latest acquisitions of VeloCloud and how this is solving a problem for customers around SD-WAN. This  is a cloud-delivered SD-WAN which enables enterprises to securely support application growth, network agility, and simplified branch and end-point implementations while delivering high-performance, reliable access to cloud services, private data centers and SaaS-based enterprise applications. 

Chris also spoke about containers and how they are helping to transform how customers build and service applications through Opensource Kubernetes, and Pivotal Container Services. He describes NSX as the fabric bringing full automation to these environments automating the network for Cloud-Native applications.  

Chris ran through a demo of containers on VMware as you can see from the above video.

Chris ended with talking about Partner-Led Solutions and what VMware's vision is for this. He spoke about edge computing, where the digital and physical worlds collide, and how IoT is driving this along with the importance of data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality. He spoke about the drivers being time, data, network, privacy, and of course control in this new age of technology where products like VeloCloud and SD-WAN play an integral role bringing a consolidated solution for IoT which includes the management of IoT infrastructure itself, automation, and operational technologies.

Overall this was an excellent general session for the first Empower event, which is meant to empower VMware's partners to deliver the best solutions in the market to their customers. 

The movement toward a hybrid cloud, software defined data center, has been on-going for years now. We have seen the virtualization of compute, storage, and now networking. In this blog, I will be discussing this journey: where we started, where we are going, and why you want to be on this journey.

Traditional data center models are still very prevalent and accepted by organizations as the defacto model for their data center(s). If you have ever managed a traditional data center model, then you know the surmounting challenges we face within this model. 

What comprises the traditional data center model? A traditional data center model can be described as  heterogeneous compute, physical storage, and networking managed by disperse teams all with a very unique set of skills. Applications are typically hosted in their own physical storage, networking, and compute. All these entities-physical storage, networking, and compute- increase with the growth in size and number of applications. With growth, complexity increases, agility decreases, security complexities increase, and assurance of a predictable and repeatable production environment,  decrease. 

Characterizations of a Traditional Data Center:

• Heterogeneous hardware environment
• Complex workloads
• Uses different management and monitoring tools
• The cost of running traditional data center is much higher since different application have different requirements
• Increased costs and complexities  for disaster recovery
• 80 percent of time spent on maintenance and keeping lights on
• Requirements for specialized skill sets increased
• Increase in power, heating, and cooling costs​ ​
• Complex support matrix which can include multi-vendors
• ​Life-cycle management concerns and upgrade complexities 

Challenges around supporting these complex infrastructures can include things like slow time to resolution when an issue arises due to the complexities of a multi-vendor solution. Think about the last time you had to troubleshoot a production issue. In a typical scenario, you are opening multiple tickets with multiple vendors.  A ticket with the network vendor, a ticket with the hyper-visor vendor, a ticket with the compute vendor, a ticket with the storage vendor, and so on and so on. Typically, all pointing fingers at each other when we all know that fault always lies with the database admins.

The challenges aren't just around the complexities of design, day to day support, or administration, but also include challenges around lifecycle management. When it comes to lifecycle management, we are looking at the complexities around publishing updates and patches. If you are doing your due diligence, then you are gathering and documenting all the firmware, bios, and software from all the hardware involved for the update/patch and comparing that information against Hardware Compatibility Lists and Interoperability Lists to ensure that they are in a supported matrix. If not, then you have to update before going any further. This can be extremely time consuming and we are typically tasked with testing in a lab that doesn't match our production environment(s) ensuring we don't bring any production systems down during the maintenance window.

The first attempt at reducing the complexities we face with the traditional model was when we witnessed the introduction of converged infrastructure. Converged introduced us to a pizza delivery model for infrastructure. Meaning, we gather our requirements, place an order, and have it delivered ready to be consumed on premise. This new model to infrastructure brought with it a reduction in complexities that are inherent with the traditional model.

What is converged infrastructure? Converged infrastructure is an approach to data center management that packages compute, storage, and virtualization on a pre-integrated, pre-tested, pre-validated, turnkey appliance. Converged systems include a central management software.

These pre-built appliances reduce concerns with support issues due to the fact that the vendor supports the entire stack. You gain that "one throat to choke" when issues arise. You are no longer required to open multiple tickets with multiple vendors. One call to the supporting vendor and they handle troubleshooting for the hyper-visor, compute, and storage. This can increase resolution time when issues present themselves.

You gain a reduction in data center footprint which, in turn, reduces power and cooling costs. I worked with a customer and reduced their multi-rack traditional data center to a single rack solution. The cost savings were tremendous, as they were able to reduce the costs of not only the power and cooling, but also the space they paid for at the collocation. 

With converged, you also gain a reduction in lifecycle management. When an update comes out from the vendor, they have already pre-validated and pre-tested the update/patch and know how it will affect your production environment. This means that you can gain back all the time it takes for you to check the firmware, bios, and software against the HCL, etc. This can be a tremendous benefit allowing you to deploy new updates/patches with assurance.

VMware Validated Designs was also introduced to provide comprehensive and extensively-tested blueprints to build and operate a Software-Defined Data Center. 

With the VMware Validated Designs, VMware also allows for more flexibility with a build your own solution. Think of Validated Design as a prescriptive method to SDDC. You follow the detailed guides and are ensured of a specific outcome. Unlike the vendor pre-validating and pre-testing the solution, then building it for you in an appliance approach, VMware handles everything but the build.

This approach has four benefits:

1. Accelerated Time to Market. Following a VMware Validated Design, streamlines and simplifies the usually complex design process of the SDDC, shortening the deployment and provisioning cycles.
2. Increased Efficiencies. A VMware Validated Design provides detailed, step-by-step operational guidance to greatly reduce time and effort spent on tasks. Such as setting up monitoring and alerts, developing backup and restore procedures, and ensuring compliance with industry standards.
3. De-risk Deployments and Operations. Rigorously tested and continuously validated, the VMware Validated Designs reduce uncertainty and potential risks associated with implementing and operating the SDDC by ensuring interoperability and compatibility of all software components included in the design.
4. Drive IT Agility. The VMware Validated Designs are designed for scalability and to support a broad set of use-cases and diverse types of applications, helping IT to respond faster to the needs of the business.

The converged model does still present some challenges. You may not be able to move to the latest hyper-visor software when it comes out but most don't like to be the guinea pig anyway.

Another challenge is with storage. Although storage is packaged and supported in this model, you still have to manage it as with traditional storage arrays. For example, if you need to build a new VM, typically we need to:

• ​Request storage for the new VM. This can flow through a change control which can complicate things further.
• Once approved, the storage administrator has to carve out the space on the array, while ensuring that this is provisioned to the correct tier of storage as to meet the required IOPs and space objectives.
• This may or may not include masking or zoning so that this is presented correctly to the hosts that the new VM will reside on.
• Once this has been completed, the administrator responsible for the hyper-visor environment now has to ensure:
  • The hosts see the newly provisioned LUN(s).
  • Format and associate any storage policies.
• Then the VM can be created and placed on the newly provisioned storage.
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As you can see, there is a lot of touch points and complexities in this model. 

To further simplify the traditional model of infrastructure, VMware brought us the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) vision with the  hyper-converged model. 

What is hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI)? Hyper-converged infrastructure allows the convergence of physical storage onto industry-standard x86 servers, enabling a building block approach with scale-out capabilities. All key data center functions run as software on the hyper-visor in a tightly integrated software layer, delivering services that were previously provided via hardware through software.

Reducing the complexities of traditional storage administration while taking the intelligence of the array and bringing it into the software layer. Take the previous example above. Now, when we provision a VM, the storage is provisioned along with it. There is no need to log into the storage array and provision the LUN, or zoning and masking,  to present the newly created storage to the hyper-visor environment.

Management of the storage is performed through the vCenter server web interface that you use to manage the rest of the hyper-visor environment. 

The hyper-converged environment further reduces the footprint at our data center(s) and the complexities we have in both traditional and converged environments. This new model of deploying an infrastructure gains us five benefits:

1. Cost efficiency: Optimizing infrastructure costs is a major appeal of HCI, which can drive better performance while at the same time reducing TCO.
2. Agility: HCI makes it easier to launch new cloud services, supporting enterprises that want to easily package and migrate new workloads. HCI helps cut deployment down to a matter of minutes.
3. Scalability: HCI can help enterprises move aggressively toward more flexible infrastructure and data centers.
4. Software-defined storage: Storage is software-defined which means the storage nodes act as one highly-reliable and redundant pool of storage. Should one node go down, the rest will remain unaffected.
5. Application modernization: Businesses can integrate containers, VMs, and storage, providing greater flexibility and creating the ability to virtualize applications that traditional VMs can’t handle.

With hyper-converged, we have moved compute and storage into software defined. This simplifies the environment while gaining all the benefits from a converged infrastructure. 

To recap, we have talked about where we began with the traditional data center model and all the challenges listed above with administering a traditional environment.  Along with all the added benefits of converged and now hyper-converged infrastructures. Remember, that at this point, we have software defined the compute and the storage, but what about the network? 

In 2012, VMware acquired Nicira and one year later introduced network virtualization with NSX. To further the SDDC vision of an all software defined data center, VMware virtualized the network. We now have compute, storage, and networking in the software stack.

This year at VMworld 2017, VMware introduced the next logical iteration to the journey of SDDC with VMware Cloud Foundations. 

VMware Cloud Foundations, encompasses the best of  VMware Validated Design and all the benefits of hyper-converged. It brings the three software defined solutions, compute, storage, and networking into a single packaged managed by the SDDC Manager. I wrote a previous blog about VMware Cloud Foundations you can find here to gain more insight.

Why do we want to be on this journey? VMware Cloud Foundation provides the simplest way to build an integrated hybrid cloud. They do this by providing a complete set of software defined services for compute, storage, network, security and cloud management. Allowing the user to run enterprise apps- traditional or containerized- in private or public environments along with being easy to operate with built-in automated lifecycle management. 

This new model has four use cases:

• Cloud Infrastructure: Cloud Foundation is a fully virtualized infrastructure. Cloud administrators have the ability to expand and contract the underlying infrastructure to meet their changing business needs. Lines of business have the flexibility to deploy a wide variety of operating systems and applications.
• IT Automation: Cloud Foundation provides performance management, capacity optimization, and real-time log analytics. IT automation accelerates the delivery and ongoing management of personalized, business-relevant infrastructure, application and custom services. All while improving overall IT efficiency. 
• Hybrid Cloud: Organizations can build a true hybrid cloud with common infrastructure and consistent operational model, connecting on-prem and off-prem data centers to make them compatible, stretched, and distributed.
• Virtual Desktop: Cloud Foundation simplifies the design and implementation of a VDI environment based on VMware Horizon. Thus, making VDI deployments faster and more secure.

To begin your journey toward this new infrastructure model and future proofing your data center for cloud, you begin with upgrading your current vSphere 5.x environment to 6.5. By upgrading to vSphere 6.5, you put your current infrastructure in an optimal place to take advantage of the latest vSAN and NSX deployments along with the following benefits you gain from the new features in 6.5.

Benefits of vSphere 6.5:

• ESXi Secure Boot: Secure Boot now leverages the capabilities of the UEFI firmware to ensure that ESXi not only boots with a signed bootloader validated by the host firmware but that it also ensures that unsigned code won’t run on the hyper-visor. ​UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, is a replacement for the traditional BIOS firmware that has its roots in the original IBM PC. 
• Virtual Machine Secure Boot: SecureBoot for VM's is simple to enable. Your VM must be configured to use EFI firmware and then you enable Secure Boot with a checkbox.
• Enhanced Logging: vSphere 6.5 introduces enhanced logging. Logs have traditionally been focused on troubleshooting and not security. Complete logs are now sent via the syslog stream for actions like "VM Reconfigure". Logs now contain more complete information, so notices of something changing you will now see what changed it changed from and what it changed to. You can then take actions against the information collected like rollback the change if it caused an issue.
• VM Encryption/vMotion Encryption: VM encryption works by applying a new Storage policy to a VM. It is Policy driven. You’ll be able to encrypt the VMDK and the VM home files. There are no modification within the guest OS. You can run different OS's like Linux, Windows, etc. and can be run from different storage like NFS, block storage, and VSAN. The encryption is happening outside of the Guest OS and the guest does not have access to the keys. The encryption works also for vMotion but both the source and the destination hosts must support it.
• vCenter High Availability: In vSphere 6.5 vCenter has a new native high availability solution that is available exclusively for the vCenter Server Appliance. This solution consists of Active, Passive, and Witness nodes which are cloned from the existing vCenter Server. The vCenter HA cluster can be enabled, disabled, or destroyed at any time. There is also a maintenance mode so planned maintenance does not cause an unwanted failover.
• Native File-Based Backup / Restore: New in vCenter Server 6.5 is native backup and restore for the vCenter Server Appliance. This new out-of-the-box functionality enables customers to backup vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller appliances directly from the VAMI or API. The backup consists of a set of files that will be streamed to a storage device of the customer’s choosing using SCP, HTTP(s), or FTP(s) protocols. This backup fully supports vCenter Server Appliances with embedded and external Platform Services Controllers.
• VUM is now included in the VCSA no longer requiring a separate Windows Server: VCSA 6.5 now includes Update Manager out of the box. It has all the features of Windows VUM but is much easier to manage and benefits from all of the new enhancements in the VCSA for performance and resiliency. Customers can also use the migration tool to move from a Windows-based vSphere management environment to the VCSA in order to benefit from these enhancements. 
• Predictive DRS: Predictive DRS is a new feature in vSphere 6.5 that leverages the predictive analytics of vRealize Operations Manager with the powerful resource scheduler algorithm of vSphere DRS. Together, these two products enable workload balancing for certain VMs before resource utilization spikes occur, potentially eliminating a great amount of resource contention that might have occurred in the past.

As you can see from the picture above the journey doesn't end with VMware Cloud Foundation but continues to progress toward the true hybrid-cloud solution that was announced this year out at VMworld 2017. The new announcement was a new partnership between VMware and Amazon.

This new offering is an on-demand service that will allow you extend your on-prem data center to the Amazon cloud, which is running VMware Cloud Foundation on physical hardware in Amazons cloud data center. This means no converting of workloads in order to take advantage of a cloud architecture because this is running the same SDDC applications you are running today. 

VMware Cloud on AWS is ideal for customers looking to:

• Migrate applications to the public cloud.
• Develop entirely new applications.
• Extend the capacity of their data centers for existing applications.
• Consolidate on-premises data centers.
• Quickly provision development and test environments.

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VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered, sold, and supported by VMware as an on-demand, scalable cloud service.

This new model is the most flexible and agile model for future data centers. This will allow you to transform your business from hardware dictating where applications reside to applications driving the business in a hybrid cloud model and gaining the ability to easily migrate applications to where it makes most since in alignment with the business requirements and objectives.

References:

• VMware on AWS
• Dell/EMC, VxRail hyper-converged
• VMware Cloud Foundation
• VMware NSX
• VMware vSAN
• Upgrade to vSphere 6.5​

It's that time again and I highly suggest joining in. Not only will you be a part of a great community learning new products but you'll get the chance to offer your input into the direction.

This beta program is different from the past programs in that it is not tied to a specific version or release. This is a new beta program that includes a new beta community. The beta program will continue through multiple releases of vSphere. Participants can expect to see new functionalities and capabilities added on as the program continues on. Participant are expect to:

• Online acceptance of the Master Software Beta Test Agreement will be required prior to visiting the Private Beta Community
• Install beta software within 3 days of receiving access to the beta product
• Provide feedback within the first 4 weeks of the beta program
• Submit Support Requests for bugs, issues and feature requests
• Complete surveys and beta test assignments
• Participate in the private beta discussion forum and conference calls

This program enables participants to help define the direction of the most widely adopted industry-leading virtualization platform. The vSphere team will grant access to the program to selected candidates in stages. This vSphere Beta Program leverages a private Beta community to download software and share information. VMware will provide discussion forums, webinars, and service requests to enable you to share your feedback. 

You can expect to download, install, and test vSphere Beta software in your environment or get invited to try new features in a VMware hosted environment. All testing is free-form and you are encouraged to use the software in ways that interest you. This will provide VMware with valuable insight into how you use vSphere in real-world conditions and with real-world test cases, enabling them to better align with your business needs.

Some of the many reasons to participate in this beta opportunity:

• Receive early access to the vSphere Beta products
• Interact with the vSphere Beta team consisting of Product Managers, Engineers, Technical Support, and Technical Writers
• Provide direct input on product functionality, configurability, usability, and performance
• Provide feedback influencing future products, training, documentation, and services
• Collaborate with other participants, learn about their use cases, and share advice and learnings

​You can register for the Beta Program Here!

Security these days can be more of that traditional, needle in a haystack approach, than a true centric security approach to include analytics and alerting. VMware is again shifting to a new paradigm, and that was evident from all the products and messaging that came out of VMworld 2017.

Security is on the forefront of all of our minds and VMware, as the leader in data center technologies, wants to lead the conversation and be the foundation that you are laying down to protect your data, along with adding significant value to you with their partnerships in the security space, like the new partnership announced with IBM around their security products like QRadar.

With increasing attacks on our data centers, take Equifax for example, we must first look at one of our most significant portions of our security foundation, ESXi and work to secure that. We typically start with securing the physical and the edge, throw in some anti-virus and call it secure, but are we secure?

When it comes to data center security, we must start with our foundation, ensure that we have designed it to follow recommended best practices, then evaluate the gaps, and add in products to get us the rest of the way there. This also includes following best practices for end-user access of the environments and not being "lazy" admins just to skip a few steps. We have to lean on trusted partners like Sirius that have developed a security practice that can help us navigate the waters of security because the landscape of security products is immense, as you can see from the picture below.

So where do we begin? I believe that we must start with VMware. VMware is no longer just a hyper-visor running your vms, but the most integral part of your data center security strategy and if you don't get that foundation right, then the rest will crumble too. We must secure the infrastructure, build and architect the data.

After we get the infrastructure secure we move into securing the entire ecosystem like controls, automation, validations and the security solutions. 

Last we must get back to the basics and as VMware's CEO, Pat Gelsinger stated, "Learn from sport teams who follow the basic regimen over and over again. Every major breach in the last five years that made headlines happened because a simple cyber hygiene wasn’t followed somewhere.” VMware is working with the government to set cyber hygiene standards for the tech industry to simplify the security solutions, as  Gelsinger stated that, “The role of the governments globally in making stronger cyber policies is equally important to ward off data breaches."

VMware has shifted to becoming a security centric company. With added features in their base product  VMware ESXi 6.5 which represents a move toward "secure by default" and allows for a truly secure foundation to build the rest of the house. Let's take a look at these features.

ESXi Secure Boot
Secure Boot now leverages the capabilities of the UEFI firmware to ensure that ESXi not only boots with a signed bootloader validated by the host firmware but that it also ensures that unsigned code won’t run on the hypervisor. ​UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, is a replacement for the traditional BIOS firmware that has its roots in the original IBM PC. 

ESXi is comprised of a number of components. There is the boot loader, the VM Kernel, Secure Boot Verifier and VIBs, or “vSphere Installation Bundles”. Each of these components is cryptographically signed.

You can read more about UEFI on wikipedia.  

Virtual Machine Secure Boot
SecureBoot for VM's is simple to enable. Your VM must be configured to use EFI firmware and then you enable Secure Boot with a checkbox. (Note that if you turn on secure boot for a virtual machine, you can load only signed drivers into that virtual machine.)
Secure Boot for Virtual Machines works with Windows or Linux.

Enhanced Logging
vSphere 6.5 introduces enhanced logging. Logs have traditionally been focused on troubleshooting and not security.

Complete logs are now sent via the syslog stream for actions like "VM Reconfigure". Logs now contain more complete information, so notices of something changing you will now see what changed it changed from and what it changed to. You can then take actions against the information collected like rollback the change if it caused an issue.

You will now see logs for actions like adding more memory to a vm. The associated logs will show you what it was before and after the change. From a security perspective you can see much more information like who made the change and with integrations with VMware Log Insight you will be able to parse the data quicker bringing you to faster remediation.

VM Encryption/vMotion Encryption
VM encryption works by applying a new Storage policy to a VM. It is Policy driven. You’ll be able to encrypt the VMDK and the VM home files.

There are no modification within the guest OS. You can run different OS's like Linux, Windows, etc. and can be run from different storage like NFS, block storage, and VSAN. The encryption is happening outside of the Guest OS and the guest does not have access to the keys.
The encryption works also for vMotion but both the source and the destination hosts must support it.

After you apply an encryption policy to a VM, the VM receives a randomly generated key for each VM, and that key is encrypted with a key from the key manager.
When you power-on the VM which has the Encryption Storage policy applied to, vCenter retrieves the key from the Key Manager, sends that to the VM encryption Module and unlocks that key in the ESXi hyper-visor.

Encrypted vMotion works by having the randomly generated key added to the migration information, this is sent to each of the hosts participating in the vMotion process, the data going across the network is encrypted with the randomly generated key only for the migration process, and is one-time generated random key, which is generated by vCenter.
​
vSphere Security Guide for vSphere 6.5
​The new security guidelines have changed to a subset of things to focus on. This is changing from the traditional "Hardening Guides," from VMware to a "Security" guide. I will not go into the entire guide in this post but you can read the post from VMware here.

Along with these new settings, government work, and a new security guide being introduced, I think its time to shift into the products that support VMware security model.

The first of these is NSX. With organizations spending more on security than ever before, see Gartner, NSX becomes the next integral step to securing your production data center. I have written several blogs now on NSX so I will just write a quick recap as to what NSX is.

VMware NSX provides a platform that allows automated provisioning and context-sharing across virtual and physical security platforms. Combined with traffic steering and policy enforcement at the virtual interface, partner services, traditionally deployed in a physical network environment, are easily provisioned and enforced in a virtual network environment, VMware NSX delivers customers a consistent model of visibility and security across applications residing on both physical or virtual workloads.

To further enhance NSX VMware introduced at VMworld 2017, AppDefense. AppDefense adds data center threat detection and response to the micro-segmentation capabilities delivered by NSX.

NSX prevents threats from moving freely throughout the network, while AppDefense detects anything that does make it to an endpoint and can automatically trigger responses through integrations with NSX and vSphere. The idea is to prevent, detect, and respond.

AppDefense uses machine learning technology, were it learns application behavior and if the application deviates from that behavior, it is quarantined. This is very different from the traditional approach with anti-virus solutions. Anti-virus solutions use definitions to secure the vm. If a new attack has been brought to the attention of your provider then they will create a new definition, once they have had time to analyze it, and then you are responsible for pushing the new definition out to all you vms. This can cause a gap in your protection.

See this video below to learn more about AppDefense.

VMware has a dedicated internal team  responsible for developing and driving software security initiatives across all of VMware’s Research and Development organizations to reduce software security risks; The VMware Security Engineering, Communications & Response group (vSECR).

The vSECR group takes a full lifecycle approach to product security from product inception to product end of life. VMware, through vSECR, is committed to the ongoing security of their products and the safety of their customers data.

VMware is also active in the greater security community, and is a member of SAFECode (the Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code) and BSIMM (Building Security In Maturity Model). For more details about VMWare product security, please refer to the VMware Product Security White Paper.

You may also be interested in the following resources:

• NSX Security Guide
• vSphere 6.5 Configuration Guide
• vSphere 6.5 Security Guide
• VMware Security Development Lifecycle
• VMware Security Advisories

​
Lastly, remember to reach out to your VMware Partner, like Sirius, who can help you with security health checks, education, and help you gain confidence in your production data center environment(s) is configured correctly.

Sirius can help you prevent, detect, and respond to security threats and secure your data.

Back on February 2nd, VMware announced two new products, VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3 and VMware NSX-T 1.1, and the adoption rate has reached new heights for VMware, as Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger mentioned in the Q4 2016 earnings that NSX is on track to bring in $1 Billion in revenue this year. That is impressive especially if you take into account the initial slow adoption rate of NSX.

The customer focused demand for tighter security in the data center with NSX and Micro-Segmentation, Automating IT provisioning while increasing efficiency, and Application Continuity is helping to drive the success of NSX into corporate IT.

So what is NSX anyway? As I mentioned in a previous blog, NSX is an innovative approach to solving long-standing network provisioning bottlenecks within the data center, and it allows for the integration of switching, routing and upper-layer services into an integrated application and network orchestration platform. With an overlay solution that may not require hardware upgrades, NSX offers customers a potentially quicker way of taking advantage of SDN capabilities by decoupling the network from hardware into a software abstraction layer allowing the end-user to programmatically create, provision and manage networks.

Let's take a look at what's new in version 6.3. You can see the announcement from VMware here.

Security:
VMware is bringing some new capabilities to security in NSX with Application Rule Manager, available in NSX Advanced and Enterprise editions. Application Rule Manager is responsible for the creation of security groups and firewalls for applications based on network traffic flows which  is a sequence of packets from a source computer to a destination, which may be another host, a multicast group, or a broadcast domain. This along with Endpoint monitoring, available in NSX Enterprise, enables you to set profiles for applications inside the guest OS. This gives you end-to-end visibility into applications while simplifying the profile creations.

It is good to note that for security certification and requirements: 

• VMware NSX for vSphere meets regulatory compliance requirements such as PCI DSS.
• NSX meets the security hardening guidance required for installment on Department
  of Defense (DoD) networks. 

Here are a few other updates in NSX 6.3:

• NSX Pre-Assessment Tool based on vRealize Network Insight
• Micro-Segmentation Planning and application visibility
• New Security Certifications around ICSA, FIPS, Common Criteria and STIG
• Linux Guest VM Introspection
• Increase performance in service chaining
• Larger scalability of VDI up to 50K desktops
• NSX IDFW for VDI
• Active Directory Integration for VDI at scale

Automation:
Software Defined Networking with NSX rounds off the Software Defined Data Center vision of VMware, bringing the ability to automate the provisioning of what once was, very manual physical networks, and the security of them. VMware continues to enhance the  integration of NSX Load Balancers with vRealize Automation and offer support for third-party IP Address Management (IPAM) systems. VMware has also enhanced the integration with NSX for vSphere and vCloud Director. These new enhancements will enable new multi-tenant capabilities for our vCloud Air Network partners.

Some other new features found in Automation for 6.3:

• Routing Enhancements
• Centralized Dashboard for service and ops
• Reduced Upgrade windows with rebootless upgrades
• Integration with vRA 7.2 enhancing LB,NAT
• vCloud Director 8.20 support with advanced routing, DFW, VPN
• VIO Updates to include multi-vc deployments
• vSphere Integrated Container Support
• New Automation Frameworks for PowerNSX, PyNSXv, vRO

Application Continuity:
As the adoption of NSX increases VMware is seeing more and more uses cases around Active-Active data center architectures utilizing the network overlay capabilities of NSX allowing for true workload mobility while maintaining ip addresses and consistent security policies across data centers. New enhancements in security tagging while simplifying security policy management across multiple data centers will help to ensure a consistent and reliable virtual network in a multi-vCenter deployment. 

In NSX 6.3 there is also a new ROBO SKU introduced which allows you to take advantage of all these features in a ROBO solution allowing you to simplify the security and management across remote branch offices.

Here are a few other features introduced in NSX 6.3: 

• Multi-DC deployments with Cross VC NSX enhancements for security tags
• Operations enhancements with improved availability
• L2VPN performance enhancements for cross DC/Cloud Connectivity
• Integration with vSphere Integrated Containers

NSX-T
The focus for NSX-T is around emerging application frameworks and architectures like private IaaS on OpenStack and multi-hypervisor support for development teams using dev clouds. NSX-T supports multiple KVM distributions, within the hypervisor kernel, while delivering security with the use of distribute firewalls, logical switches and distributed routers; This includes Red Hat Enterprise and Ubuntu. This means freedom of choice to technologists allowing them to choose what's best suited for their applications. 

Integration with VMware Photon allows IT to deliver security and services to their developers that are building containerized and cloud native applications. NSX can automate the creation of networks and routers when a new namespace/project/organization is created and then secure it all with micro-segmentation policies for containers and pods.

Pricing
As noted above you now have standard, advanced, and enterprise editions. According to CRN, NSX Enterprise is $6,995 per CPU socket; Advanced costs $4,495 per socket and Standard will cost $1,995 per socket. 

​See VMware NSX for more information.

If you are interested in learning more and getting some hands-on lab time with NSX, take a look at VMware's hands-on labs, here.

Today VMware announced vSphere 6.5 at VMworld Europe 2016, the latest version of its industry-leading virtualization platform. 

New Features:

• vCenter Server Appliance
• vSphere Update Manager
• Native HA
• REST-based APIs
• HTML5-based vSphere Client
• VM-level Disk Encryption
• Encrypted vMotion
• Secure Boot
• Enhanced Audit-logging
• vSphere Integrated Containers
• AWS Integration

The vCenter Server Appliance becomes the core component of the new vSphere environment. The new appliance brings easy deployment and reduces the complexities of managing a vSphere environment by combining the vSphere Update Manager and introduces file-backup and recovery natively with VCSA High Availability. As a side note vSphere HA has been renamed to vSphere Availability inside the client and instead of having one long settings page for vSphere HA, it has now been divided up into multiple sub-pages and organized by the function that the setting is for. You will now see ‘Failures and Responses’, ‘Proactive HA Failures and Responses’, ‘Admission Control’, ‘Heartbeat Datastores’, ‘Advanced Options’.

To further protect the environment in vSphere 6.5, VMware introduced secure boot which protects both hypervisor and guest OS. This will address security issues around images from be tampered with and denying unauthorized access and prevent the loading of unauthorized components into vSphere environments.

For those that require further security needs around auditing vSphere 6.5 brings enhanced audit-quality logging capabilities.  These forensic logs can help determine who did what, when and where. 

VMware is realizing, that with more competitors and with more and more software start ups in the containers arena, the importance of supporting containers, ie. their own. VMware knows that the world of traditional and next-generation apps need infrastructure that will scale, perform and allow for high availability. 

In this new release VMware delivers vSphere Integrated Containers, which allows for the deployment of containers in a vSphere environment for infrastructure needs. This means you can deploy containers in your environment without the need to re-architect your infrastructure. The new containers environment contains three components - the Engine providing core container run-time, Harbor a registry for container images, and Admiral which is the portal for management. vSphere Integrated Containers provides a Docker-compatible interface to app teams and of course is completely compatible with NSX and vSAN.
​
The VMware vSphere Integrated Containers new feature of vSphere 6.5 will be available for vSphere Enterprise Plus Edition customers at no additional charge. Pricing for vSphere starts at $995 per CPU.

​vSphere 6.5 is the foundation for the new partner announcement between VMware and AWS continuing the cloud strategy of any cloud, any application and any device. Of course this is all integrated with the new Cloud Foundation announced by VMware in Vegas at Vmworld 2016.

​To learn more about this announcement read the news release.
For more information on the AWS partnership check out this article.

VMware announced VMware Cloud Foundation back in the general session of VMworld 2016. Cloud Foundation is a unified platform for private and public clouds.

Let's start with defining the term "Clouds". This term has been thrown around a lot and some take this term as "In the Cloud" off premises platforms, but some use the term more all inclusive which includes both "On-Prem" and "Off-Prem" platforms. Wikipedia defines this term as "computing that provides shared computer processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand".  For this blog I am using the definition of cloud as the latter. I think of cloud as all inclusive of both off and on-prem platforms for providing resources. I know some feel as though cloud was meant to replace the "on-prem" private cloud and yes, that will ultimately be the direction in years to come, but for now we live in a world of hybrid-cloud and that is what Cloud Foundation is here to assist us with.

Now that we have cleared that up, let's move on to Cloud Foundation from VMware. Cloud Foundation brings together, VMware's vision for SDDC where compute, storage, and networking services are decoupled from the underlying hardware and abstracted into software as pools of resources allowing for IT to become more flexible and agile while also allowing for better management, into an integrated stack for cloud. This is done by defining a platform common to both private and public clouds.

The foundational components of Cloud Foundation are VMware vSphere, Virtual SAN, and NSX and can be packaged with vRealize Suite to bring automation into the picture. If you are not familiar with the vRealize Suite from VMware let's just take a moment to discuss this. 

The vRealize Suite is a software defined product suite built to enable IT to create and manage hybrid clouds. It includes products like IT Business Enterprise, which VMware just sold off,  and is an IT financial management tool to manage and analyze cost associated with IT services. It also includes vCloud Automation Center, vCenter Operations Management, and LogInsight. 

The management for Cloud Foundation is VMware's SDDC Manager. SDDC Manager serves as a single interface for managing the infrastructure. From this interface, the IT administrator can provision new cloud resources, monitor changes to the logical infrastructure, and manage lifecycle and other operational activities. The idea here is a single pane of glass for management along with monitoring of all your cloud environments whether it be on-prem, IBM-Cloud, AWS, etc., providing ongoing performance management, capacity optimization, real-time analytics, and cloud automation.

Cloud Foundation allows for a flexible solution allowing for on-prem and off-prem deployment options and can be deployed on-prem or off-prem as a service. You can choose on-prem options like integrated solutions from OEM providers such as VCE with hyper-converged systems and VSAN ready nodes from Dell.  

Cloud Foundation will help to reduce the complexities faced with cloud strategies to date. The idea of "who cares where your data resides as long as it it secure and accessible" comes to mind. You can have applications being delivered from multiple clouds whether on or off-prem, Azure, or AWS. IT only needs a single pane of glass to monitor and manage these environments while also allowing for IT and management to track related costs. Ultimately giving IT the agility of migrating between cloud platforms when needed.

A use case for this would be a merger and acquisition of a company with a hybrid cloud environment. Cloud Foundation would help manage the complexities involved with integrating those resources into your own environment while maintaining security and the integrity of your current environment.

VMware announced alongside the Cloud Foundation announcement at VMworld 2016 the new partnership with IBM Cloud. This allows companies to have choice in deploying SDCC whether it be on-prem in their own private data center(s) or with IBM.  This solution is based with Cloud Foundation and allowing VMware customers to seamlessly extend private to public. 

Again, the software stack includes VMware vSphere, Virtual SAN, NSX, and VMware SDDC Manager. VMware SDDC Manager was announced back at VMworld 2015 and combined with Cloud Foundation is just the next step toward IoT with what VMware states as "Any Cloud, Any Application, Any Device". The SDDC Manager allows for a simplified management of a highly distributed architecture and resources. 

Cloud foundation integrates with the entire VMware stack which includes Horizon, vRealize Suite, vRealize Automation, vRealize Business, OpenStack and products like LogInsight. 

With Cloud Foundation natively integrating the software-defined data center stack and SDDC Manager, customers can flexibly upgrade individual components in the stack to higher editions allowing for flexibility in lifecycle management which consumes large amount of time in traditional IT.

With Cloud foundation you can automate the entire software stack. Once the rack is installed and powered on with networking to the rack, the SDDC Manager takes the BOM that was built with your partner like Advizex,  and includes user-provided environmental information like DNS, IP addresses, etc. to build out the rack. The claim is that this can reduce the provisioning time from weeks to hours which for those of you that have done this in a non-automated fashion can attest to how painful the process can be. When complete you have a virtual infrastructure ready to start deploying and provisioning workloads.

In the complexities of traditional IT with silos, it takes extensive resources to provision a highly available private clouds, but with Cloud Foundation an administrator only needs to create and manage pools of resources decreasing the time to delivery of IT resources for consumption by the end-user whether it be a vm or a virtual desktop. This is done through a new abstraction layer called, Workload Domains. 

Workload Domains are a policy-driven approach for capacity deployment. Each workload domain provides the needed capacity with specified policies for performance, availability and security. An admin can create a workload for dev/test with a balanced performance and low availability requirement while also creating one for production with high availability and high performance. 

The SDDC Manager translates these policies into the underlying resources of compute which allows for the admin to concentrate on higher level tasks instead of spending time researching how to best implement.

Lifecycle management introduces a lot of complexities which are typically manual process to patch and upgrade and can lead to issues within an infrastructure due to interoperability and configuration errors. In turn the validation and testing of these patches takes a lot of time away from an IT staff.  Sometimes patches get deployed before they have been vetted correctly for security and other reasons  or defer patches which can slow down the roll-out of new features, etc. SDDC Manager automates these tasks for both physical and virtual infrastructures. VMware tests all the components for the Cloud Foundation before shipping new patches to the customer. 

Within the lifecycle management of Cloud Foundation you can choose to apply the patches to just certain workloads or the entire infrastructure. SDDC can patch the vms, servers and switches while maintaining uptime thereby freeing resources to focus on business critical initiatives. 

Scalability is built into the platform  within a hyper-converged architecture. You can start with a deployment as small as 8 nodes, and scale to multiple racks. Capacity can be added linearly in increments as small as one server node at a time within each rack allowing IT to align CapEx with business needs. Cloud Foundation automatically discovers any new capacity and adds it into the larger pool of available capacity for use.

Some main use cases for Cloud Foundation are; Virtual Infrastructure allowing IT to expand and contract the underlying infrastructure to meet their changing business needs; IT Automating IT allowing IT accelerate the delivery and ongoing management of infrastructure, application and custom services, while improving overall IT efficiency; Virtual Desktop making VDI deployments faster and more secure. Administrators can focus on specifying the policies and needs of the VDI infrastructure instead of dealing with the details of deploying the VDI infrastructure. 

To learn more about VMware's Cloud Foundation you can visit the product page here.

You can also get hands-on with the product from the hands-on lab provided online from VMware. 
HOL-1706-SDC-5 - VMware Cloud Foundation Fundamentals

Disruptive innovation, is a term coined by Clayton Christensen. The term describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors. 

For example, take a look at what a company like Uber has done to the taxi service in San Francisco. They don't hire drivers like Yellow Cab. They don't own a fleet of cars. They built an application. An application that has been very disruptive to the taxi industry and is changing the landscape of ride-hailing services.

Thanks to Uber, San Francisco's largest yellow cab company is filing for bankruptcy. Yellow Cab Co-op President Pamela Martinez was quoted saying that some of the financial setbacks "are due to business challenges beyond our control and others are of our own making." Yellow Cab's drivers are flocking to Uber, an app-based enterprise, lured by the promise of more riders and better schedules. 

Yellow Cab has been turned on its head by a disruptive innovation. Uber has disrupted the ride-hailing service industry with a lasting impact which is now moving across the county. 

Why do I point this out? Because, you are either being disrupted or are the disrupter. Think about that for a second. Ask Yellow Cab how it feels to be disrupted in an industry they felt very secure in before an application took over. 

Look at companies like Blockbuster. I bet you can tell me who disrupted them? Got it in your mind?

Blockbuster in its peak in 2004 consisted of nearly 60,000 employees and over 9,000 store locations.  In 2000 a fledgling company came on the seen slowly changing the landscape of the movie rental industry and eventually bankrupting Blockbuster in 2010. 

If you were thinking of Netflix then you are correct. Now a $28 billion dollar company, about ten times what Blockbuster was worth. Blockbuster has been greatly disrupted and is reinventing itself. 

You can either be disrupted or be the disrupter as with VMware. They have been a disruptive force in the technology industry from their entry with vSphere to their latest creations like SDDC, vSAN and NSX. VMware's vSphere changed the  landscape of compute forever, moving cpu, memory, etc. into software, removing the dependency on hardware and has now become the most popular infrastructure management API in use today.

Disruption doesn't happen overnight; Disruption happens gradually. Remember, the term "Disruptive Innovation," is taking root and relentlessly moving up the market. Uber didn't overtake Yellow Cab overnight just as with Blockbuster. A disruptor was introduced and slowly moved to overtake the industry.

The same is true for vSphere. Industry leaders were hesitant to adopt such a drastically different technology but now this tried, tested and proven technology is the leader in x86 server virtualization infrastructure. ​

 VMware continues to be a disruptive force in the technology industry. Look at the movement to hyper-converged. Hyper-converged is about software, not hardware. Hyper-converged derive from being able to support all infrastructure in software, and without the need for separate dedicated hardware, such as a storage array or fibre channel switch.  And, what is the core software technology in just about every hyper-converged product available today? VMware vSphere and the Software Defined  Data Center.

VMware is disrupting the way that we have traditionally approached the data center. Fully virtualized infrastructure, delivered on a flexible mix of private and hybrid clouds. I'm sure you have all heard the mantra, "One Cloud, Any application, Any Device." This is the next evolution in data center technology and VMware continues to lead disruptive change with products like NSX for Software Defined Networking (SDN).

NSX like vSphere has had a slow adoption. I find myself having the same conversations with customers that I had when vSphere was introduced.  You don't have to convince customers of the value of vSphere anymore. The speed of adoption is picking up and VMware saw an increase of threefold in the number of paying customers for its NSX network virtualization product and in Q4 of 2015 9 out of 10 VMware deals included NSX. 

The NSX solution is an innovative approach to solving long-standing network provisioning bottlenecks within the data center, and it allows for the integration of switching, routing and upper-layer services into an integrated application and network orchestration platform. With an overlay solution that may not require hardware upgrades, NSX offers customers a potentially quicker way of taking advantage of SDN capabilities. 

NSX is that disruptor in the networking industry bringing agility to existing network deployments with limited impact to existing network hardware and offering all of this without vendor lock-in. VMware NSX works across many IP-based network installations and in virtual environments running mainstream hypervisors and has established relationships with a broad set of IT vendor partners to provide integration of security and optimization solutions, as well as key network hardware players, such as Palo Alto, Arista Networks, Brocade, Dell, HP and Juniper Networks.

Remember back in the beginning of this blog where I quoted President Pamela Martinez as saying that some of the financial setbacks "are due to business challenges beyond our control and others are of our own making." Some challenges were of their own making. Remember too that disruptive innovation happens over a period of time. It took 10 years for Netflix to overtake Blockbuster. Could Blockbuster have moved quicker to insue their spot as the leader in the online movie rental industry? The same is true with VMware and vSphere. This disruptive innovation took time to take hold and now it is still a driving force to change the industry with SDDC.  

VMware NSX is picking up steam and is in the heart of every hyper-converged to hybrid-cloud solution that companies are moving toward. The question is will you be disrupted or be part of the disruption? I want to be part of the disruption and drive change in an exciting time to be a part of this industry. Will you be disrupted or will you help disrupt? It's a call to action; To be the disruptive force that your company doesn't even know it needs because NSX will do for networking what vSphere did for compute.

​Disrupt or be disrupted.