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Cloud Director Availability 4.3 Released

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VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.3 is Generally Available now. Together with the newly branded logo, it brings a significant amount of new features and improvements for our VMware Cloud Providers to deliver even better DR and migration services to their tenants and offer an answer to combat Ransomware.

New features available:

  • Advanced Retention Rules – Now providers can set more than one rule for retention of the instances. Up to five different retention rules can store instances with a granularity that is changing over time. 
  • DR and Migration Plans – Orchestrate and schedule the recovery and the migration operations across multiple virtual machines and vApps by using plans with sequences of delayable and pausable steps, containing execution settings and existing virtual machines and vApps replications references.
  • 1-Minute Target Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – Now you can set the shortest RPO as 1 minute, by using the slider for RPO in Configure replication, in SLA profiles, or in replication policies. To meet shorter RPO, verify that you follow the recommendations for lowering the RPO violations occurrence and see https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Director-Availability/index.html. An I/O intensive workload protected with shorter RPO can cause RPO violations.
  • Multisite Cloud to Cloud authentication – When multiple Availability cloud sites use a single VMware Cloud Director instance now you can use multisite authentication for performing regular replication operations when prompted to extend the session from Availability site A to Availability site B.
  • On-Premises Authentication by Using a Token – With vCenter Server 7.0 or later, a new authentication mechanism for the on-premises tenants allows performing disaster recovery operations in the vSphere Client Plug-In that require authentication to the cloud site. When the organization uses an external identity provider, for example, SAML, the on-premises tenants can now use that method for authentication.
  • Add Virtual Machines in Existing vApp Groups – Now, you can group one or several new virtual machines to an already existing vApp replication from on-premises to the cloud.
  • Placement Policies – Now the system providers and their tenants can select a placement organization VDC compute policy for a specific cluster or host for the recovered virtual machine.
  • Optimized Reverse – When performing a reverse task, now skips performing a full synchronization back to the original source workload by transferring only the deltas when there are no blocks changed in the original source and the original source disks are not modified in any way.
  • Backup and Restore – Now you can perform an in-place restore on existing appliances. Also, now you can perform a restore on a single cloud appliance.
  • Select Endpoint Address for Each Network Adapter – Now in a Cloud Replicator Appliance or in a Cloud Tunnel Appliance with multiple network interfaces, you can specify which of the network adapters to use for local site communication.
  • Replacing the Cloud Service Certificate Without Impacting Paired On-Premises – Now the paired on-premises appliances verify the entire SSL certificate chain of the Cloud Service. As a result, when replacing the certificate with a valid CA-signed certificate, the paired on-premises appliances do not need re-pairing with the cloud site.
  • Tunnel Connectivity – The following new sections now are available for verifying the statuses of the connections from the local Tunnel Service to the following destinations: Local components connectivity to all the remaining services on the cloud appliances in the local cloud site; Remote cloud sites connectivity to the remote Tunnel Service instances in all paired remote cloud sites with the local cloud site; On-Prem Incoming connectivity to all paired on-premises appliances with the local cloud site.
  • Improved Replicating Workloads – Now on start virtual machine replication when VMware Cloud Director Availability encounters a virtual machine that is already configured for replication, possibly by another replication solution, the stale replication is automatically unconfigured first and then it is configured for replication.

VMware SASE

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The VMware SASE Platform is the secure access service edge (SASE) platform that converges industry-leading cloud networking and cloud security to deliver flexibility, agility, security, and scale for enterprise of all sizes. The VMware SASE Platform is offered as-a-service, helping offload IT staff from deploying and maintaining WAN/security and saving enterprises operational costs.

Components

  • SD-WAN
  • Zero Trust Network Access
  • Cloud Web Security
  • AIOPs

VMware Products

  • VMware SASE Platform
  • VMware SD-WAN
  • VMware Secure Access
  • VMware Edge Network Intelligence
  • Workspace One

Benefits

SASE secures the newly distributed workforce and network edge so people, apps and devices can communicate from anywhere. The VMware SASE advantage is a unified edge and cloud service model with a single place to manage business policy, configuration, and monitoring.

  • Cloud-First – Simplifies and provides cost-effective connectivity to SaaS-based applications
  • Intrinsic Security – Unifies network and application security policies for branch and remote workers
  • Application Quality Assurance – Ensures availability and performance of mission critical applications
  • Operational Simplicity – Lowers operational expenses

vRealize Log Insight Cloud New Release

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A new Log Insight Cloud has been released with the following new features:

  • Alerts and notifications – now it is possible to customize an alert definition to include extracted fields from logs in the alert title and description. When triggered, the alert sends out a notification to the configured endpoints (email and webhook).
  • Azure Network Watcher Content Pack – A Network Security Group (NSG) contains security rules that allow or deny inbound network traffic to, or outbound network traffic from several types of Azure resources. This content pack is enhanced to support NSG logs and include dashboards that provide insights around the network activity to and from your NSGs.

vRealize Log Insight Cloud is also now integrated with the VMware Subscription Manager, so it can be tried and bought within minutes.

If you didn’t get a chance to virtually attend VMworld 2021, please check these sessions:

  • Troubleshooting with vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight [MCL1286]
  • Log Insight Cloud – a SaaS version of Log Insight [ISM-HOL-2201-96-ISM]
  • vRealize Log Insight Cloud – A Year in Review [2824]

VMworld 2021 Key Announcements

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It has been a very busy year and, sadly, I didn’t had lot of time to write here. But with VMworld 2021 recently finished, lot of new things have appeared and I will talk about the key announcements.

Project Arctic

Project Artic, currently on a Tech Preview, has the main goal to bring hybrid cloud to customers existing vSphere deployment model. It integrates cloud connectivity right into vSphere and establishes hybrid cloud as the default operating model for all customers infrastructures. They will be able to leverage unlimited cloud capacity on demand and access VMware cloud services through vCenter.

Project Cascade

Projects Cascade aims to provide a unified interface for on-demand infrastructure and containers across VMware Cloud platforms from a single API or GUI. It will address the needs of developers and DevOps in a multi-cloud world and will enable a true open multi-cloud with an industry standard programmatic interface that is powered by Kubernetes.

Project Capitola

Project Capitola is an exciting step in the evolution of vSphere to meet the growing memory needs of the next generation of applications. It is a software-defined memory implementation that will aggregate tiers of different memory types such as DRAM, PMEM, NVMe and other future technologies in a cost-effective manner, to deliver a uniform consumption model that is transparent to applications. With the growing need to process and consume massive amounts of data, the memory subsystem of the data center continues to be a bottleneck, impacting performance.

Project Ensemble

Another new project, another Tech Preview. Project Ensemble will simplify and accelerate your journey to multi-cloud by uniting the different personas in an application-centric collaborative user interface. Project Ensemble will unify and strengthen our best-in-class multi-cloud management capabilities and support a cloud operating model for customers at any stage of their cloud transformation.

A cloud operating model combines people, process and technology and provides an operational framework for key decisions on where your applications need to live, how to help them perform and be more secure, and how to optimize the efficiency of these environments and your overall cloud budget. This model allows for more easily adopting new clouds and managing existing clouds with the same staff, tools, and governance policies. vRealize Cloud Management supports the cloud operating model and support private, public, multi-, hybrid and edge clouds in any combination.

Project Ensemble takes an app-centric view of your clouds, but also focuses on how different personas, such as cloud providers and cloud consumers, in your organization interact with those applications. This will be driven by a user experience customized by learning users’ needs made possible with machine learning.

VMware Sovereign Cloud Iniciative

As organizations become increasingly global and interconnected, issues surrounding data privacy have become more complex. 

A company may be based in France, but it may leverage the tools of U.S.-based companies like Google or Amazon to store and transmit sensitive data. If that France-based company stores customer information on a server that happens to be based in the U.S., where does that data really reside, who owns it, and what regulations should it be subject to? 

Many countries and regions are taking a firm stance to create guidelines around those questions in order to protect private data. With regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) setting the bar for data privacy protection, it’s more important than ever for companies to proactively safeguard their sensitive customer and employee data, everywhere it’s stored and shared.

VMware’s Sovereign Cloud initiative is a global collection of cloud provider partners who are addressing the ESG values in many ways, but particularly the “G” for Governance with their approach to sovereignty.  

Sovereign cloud providers are committed to ensuring data privacy and compliance, helping customers get the benefits of cloud whilst also meeting the rapidly growing and changing data privacy laws. These national or regional regulations and laws govern everything from where data resides geographically to cross-border data flow. Moreover, organizations need to protect data in the cloud against evolving cyberattacks. Sovereign cloud providers ensure that data sovereignty, data residency, data access, jurisdiction, control, and much more are met with the assurance that customer’s most sensitive data is managed securely. VMware Sovereign Cloud partners deliver Cloud Verified services and utilize architecture built on VMware Validated Designs (VVD) for Cloud Providers, this means they can design, architect and secure compliant clouds faster and efficiently.