VMware vSphere as an infrastructure foundation

If virtualization has become mainstream and we are living in a post-virtualization era (that is, the cloud computing wave), does this imply that virtualization is now less important and that hypervisors are just a commodity service? Several experts think so and VMworld 2014 and 2015 may have confirmed this (there were no new vSphere products or features announced, except vSAN and other vSphere related products).

Also, other hypervisors (for example, Hyper-V or Nutanix AHV) have grown really fast both in features and in market share, although VMware vSphere still remains the main solution on-premises (we will not consider public clouds or service providers where KVM, Xen, Hyper-V are the most used platforms).

But the platform is still relevant, at least for VMware, and with vSphere 6.5, they brought attention back to the infrastructure part; vSphere is still needed by several VMware products as a core infrastructure component. Let's see a brief description of some of these products and how they require a vSphere platform.

Storage platform

Since 2014, VMware has also become a storage vendor with an interesting solution called vSAN—a software-based solution to build Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) systems. With more than 8,000 customers acquired in only a few years and lot of releases, vSAN is the HCI solution that is growing fastest.

But the interesting part is that vSAN is a native vSphere storage solution, that seamlessly extends local storage on each host, making a shared and resilient storage system, and creating a hyper-converged platform that simply works with most of the vSphere skills and all the existing tools, software solutions, and hardware platforms.

For more details about vSAN and HCI, see Chapter 7, Advanced Storage Management.

Network and security platform

VMware has begun to include network and security capabilities in a virtualized computing environment based on vSphere with the vCloud Networking and Security product.

With the Nicira acquisition, this product has been replaced by NSX, a network virtualization solution (or network overlay solution) that enables the creation of entire networks in software and embeds them in the hypervisor layer, abstracted from the underlying physical hardware. All network components can be provisioned in minutes, without the need to modify the application or the physical environment.

NSX-V is tightly integrated with vSphere components requiring both ESXi (used both as a data plane and also for hosting some NFV and VMs used as a control plane) and vCenter (NSX manager is paired with it and the management interface is just an extension of vSphere Web Client). Although, there is also an NSX edition for Linux systems (NSX-T), for NSX-V, the vSphere platform is the foundation.

For more details about NSX, see Chapter 6, Advanced Network Management.

Cloud platform

Cloud computing is the new wave after virtualization and VMware vSphere lacks a true multi-tenant support and partial automation and agility.

For this reason, VMware has several products for cloud management, addressed at private or public cloud scenarios. The most important VMware cloud-capable solutions are vCloud Director (vCD) and vRealize Automation (vRA). VMware vCD was the first product (if we exclude Lab Manager, which was not truly multi-tenant) to bring full cloud capabilities to vSphere.

Actually, this product is still present, but it is reserved only for service providers willing to build and sell public cloud services as part of the VMware vCloud Air Network (vCAN) program based on top of the vSphere platform; these offerings are inherently hybrid-aware and ideal for enterprise-class organizations that want to extend their VMware-based private cloud into the public one.

In 2012, VMware acquired DynamicOps, a provider of cloud automation solutions that enable provisioning and management of IT services across heterogeneous environments. VMware vRA is a product of this acquisition and enables IT automation through the creation and management of personalized infrastructure, application, and custom IT services (XaaS). This IT automation lets you deploy IT services rapidly across a multi-vendor, multi-cloud infrastructure. In this case, the underlying infrastructure could be vSphere-based (probably the most common choice) but vRA can be extended to orchestrate and automate other non-VMware hypervisors and clouds, making possible a true multi-vendor and multi-cloud approach.

Of course, there are other types of cloud management platform (such as OpenStack), but in this case, VMware vSphere could be just a possible choice, not necessarily the main one.

End-user computing platform

Horizon 7 provides a streamlined approach to delivering, protecting, and managing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and applications while containing costs and ensuring that end users can work anytime, anywhere, across any device.

The Horizon for view part (related to VDI) is tightly integrated with VMware vSphere, requiring both vCenter Server (that is managed by the View Manager and is needed to perform provisioning and VM management) and ESXi (that is used to host the VDIs). There are some exceptions, such as if you are using manual pools of dedicated (and pre-provisioned) VMs.

Also, note that there are now some new offers, such as Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure (https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2017/10/vmware-horizon-cloud-on-microsoft-azure-now-available.html).

Container platform

Containers do not require virtualization at all, because they can run on bare metal. And you can use different solutions for managing and deploying them.

But in the VMware vision, VMware vSphere is used to provide a CaaS solution with two different approaches:

• Using VIC (previously described), useful if you have containers that you need to put into production and use your existing production VM monitoring systems to monitor individual containers
• Using vRA to deploy VMs (with Photon OS or Core OS) that can host multiple containers

Both approaches have a similar infrastructure and only the management part is different depending on whether you have vRA for cloud management, orchestration, and automation.

And of course, vSphere may be not needed at all, because containers can run on bare metal or other platforms, and be managed by other tools. Also, in this case, VMware can still be present, because Linux-based containers still need an operating system to run on, and VMware Photon OS could be a possible option.

For more information, see Choosing a Container as a Service (CaaS) Solution at https://blogs.vmware.com/services-education-insights/2017/07/choosing-container-service-caas-solution.html.

Other VMware products complementary to vSphere

VMware has a plethora of other products for different segments and some of them could be interesting to adopt in a vSphere environment, for example:

• vRealize Operations: This is a monitoring tool used to improve application performance, prevent business disruptions, and make IT more efficient. There is also a specific SKU of vSphere Essentials Plus that includes the operations component. We will describe some of its features in Chapter 9, Monitoring, Optimizing, and Troubleshooting.
• vRealize Log Insight: This is useful to collect logs from different sources (not necessarily only ESXi hosts) and analyze that data. VMware users with a supported vCenter Server license (version 5.x or 6.x) are entitled to a 25-OSI pack of vRealize Log Insight for vCenter Server (see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2144909). We will describe some of its features in Chapter 9, Monitoring, Optimizing, and Troubleshooting.
• Site Recovery Manager: This product is an orchestrator to simplify the site disaster recovery plan in a single-click procedure, with the capability to test it in safe mode and to handle not only the fail-over procedures (planned or unplanned) but also fail-backs. This product is designed to manage only disaster recovery (DR) for vSphere environments. We will describe some of its features in Chapter 12, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.
• VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO): This is a VMware supported OpenStack distribution that makes it easier for IT to run a production-grade OpenStack-based deployment on top of their existing VMware vSphere infrastructure.