VMware January 2021 SE Newsletter

[Paul Lembo from our US Enterprise SE team leads an effort to publish a customer newsletter each month with all the latest and greatest info - republishing his post with a number of other SEs editing and adds..]

Welcome to the first newsletter of 2021! I hope this message finds you and your loved ones well. We begin this letter with something new, a note from the editor, and then get to the highlights and links you can use. 

Note from the Editor: 

You’ve likely heard our long time CEO Pat Gelsinger is going back to Intel after eight strong years. We wish him only the best. In parallel, he is joining our Board of Trustees, so he’ll remain a dependable voice inside VMware. We are thankful for that continuation. 

Pat was our third CEO, and as someone who has been here for all three, I can say we’ve proven we are a franchise wisely playing the long game. We’ve been able to find a right person for each new phase, and I believe we will do it again. As Pat himself said, Covid-19 didn’t change everything, but it did accelerate us on the path to the future. Our new leadership will be ready for all that 2021 holds and will serve you well, count on that. We will have more news soon. If you have questions, please don’t be shy, ask your VMware team directly. 

Security:

We have to start here, because Solarwinds. In early stories breaking on the exploitation of Solarwinds there were people looking for clicks and throwing names around. Our official statement is here.

We’ve been saying the security industry is broken for a while now. Maybe it seemed like a marketing line to get attention before, it’s become obvious we weren’t kidding, or wrong. Do you know the 101 on Intrinsic Security? They’ll be some nice updates coming soon. 

In light of the SolarWinds breach, we want to help our customers who may have questions on how a Zero Trust Architecture can act as an effective approach to limit the impact of such attacks. VMware has been monitoring the situation as we learn more about the supply chain compromise. 

Some parts of the challenge will continue to seem simple, like the default password in Excel. Did you know about Microsoft Excel’s VelvetSweatshop?  Where others will need to take advantage of machine learning to match the challenge of distributed, internet based attacks. 

On the Carbon Black front, we are excited to announce the first release of Container Security capabilities in the Carbon Black Cloud and expansion of Linux distribution coverage for Enterprise EDR users on the VMware Carbon Black Cloud platform.

Last, if you haven’t bookmarked our security advisories page, please consider it! 

Quick Bits 

Feature Update of the Month – vSphere’s integrated, Advanced Cross-vCenter Migration or XVM for short in the new 7.0 Update 1c. 

What is hot? Well check out the four most popular Hands on Labs of 2020. All the hands on labs are Always always free and covering a lot of solutions. 

Speaking of hot, hell didn’t freeze over! We’re talking about Oracle RAC support on VMware Clouds, really. People are doing it. Things have changed here. 

During the pandemic, our phone home support service Skyline enabled thousands of VMware customers and partners with proactive, prescriptive, and predictive recommendations to improve stability, security and performance. Read about how it helped in CXO Today.  

Yes, our sugar sweet SD-WAN , AVI load-balancer, has an Openshift/Kubernetes Operator! 

Once again, VMware vSAN powered HCI systems lead the market. We thank you for your support! 

Cloud Highlights 

Moving something into a VMware Cloud? We can help! This paper provides an overview of the different migration strategies and migration tools. These tools span from our native offerings to 3rd party solutions that enable workload relocation to cloud native rehosting based on your business and application needs. Each tool is accompanied by a specific migration strategy, migration type, and commentary.

This very visual look at Multi-Tenancy on VMware Cloud Foundation with vRealize Automation and Cloud Director could help you better understand what your options are and when to look to each solution. Nice work from Mr. Rebmann. 

S3 backed Content Library? On it. As hybrid-cloud adoption grows, people are looking to optimize their apps to get the most out of their VMware and AWS infrastructure. Customers have asked to host the vSphere Content Library (the storage container for VM images and templates) directly on Amazon S3. New from our ACE team, how to do this with Crossplane. 

Modern Apps

We’ve launched https://tanzu.tv! Catch live shows like Tanzu Tuesday’s where you see live demos of new application technologies, Code Wednesday’s with our Developer Advocates, and TGI Kubernetes every Friday. There are also special events and one-off chances to live chat with industry guests so bookmark that one.

Declare App State with Tanzu Service Mesh – Skate to where the puck is going! Create and isolate a logical structure in a Kubernetes cluster, or across different clusters, to achieve an application layer 7 networking and security fabric that you can add values on top of. Just by connecting the dots, we get service discovery, observability, security, and encrypted connectivity for all objects in that global namespace structure. (More about TSM global namespaces in blogs here and here.)

The pandemic has accelerated digital business initiatives. It’s the application that delivers new capabilities to customers and employees; but transformation occurs at several layers to support those applications. We see teams navigating three transformations, each of which supports modernization at different levels.  

Automation and Operations

We’re pleased to brighten your year with another vExpert Cloud Management blog digest!

Watching the apps enough? vRealize Operations brings capabilities to monitor and manage, but there’s so much more than just infrastructure management. Like apps! Check out approaches to discovering and monitoring your business applications. There’s service discovery, agent-based app monitoring, and integrations with existing APM systems, and more. 

Ready to migrate from vRealize Automation 7 to 8? Please read this first. 

I am excited to introduce a feature that I know many vRealize Automation customers will find useful when managing properties for their Cloud Assembly template designs, and that feature is Property Groups.

Check the new, free Gorilla Guide to Network Visibility with vRealize Network Insight to help you plan, optimize, troubleshoot, and scale your infrastructure for end-to-end network visibility and predictive analytics.

Are you a PowerCLI ninja, or just playing? We’ve got a new PowerCLI home page to make life easy and fast. From here, you can navigate to the community, GitHub sample repo, ideas and feature requests, PowerCLI blog, Release notes, changelog, and user’s guide. This page will be the single-entry point for you to get all the PowerCLI related content from now on. 

Speaking of PowerCLI, make sure you check out the Script Runtime Service. It allows you to call PowerCLI scripts from a REST API. Here is the SRS Blog Post with basic information and a good overview of SRS: https://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI/2020/12/introduction-to-script-runtime-service-srs-for-vsphere.html

Storage

This blog is a continuation of a series on top tips for migrating workloads to VMware vSAN. Several different tools and methods can be used to migrate a workload. It’s helpful to understand the different options and benefits of each approach. This entry focuses on the different ways to use vMotion to speed up a migration to vSAN.

Since the release of vSphere 7 Update 1c, vSphere with Tanzu now supports configurable node storage for Tanzu Kubernetes clusters to mount additional storage volume to the worker nodes. Nice! This feature allows vSphere with Tanzu to fully support containerized applications that require a large amount of image size during deployment; one example is SQL Server 2019 big data clusters (BDC).

Leadership Read of the Month

Why do competitors seem to cooperate more than ever before? What are the tactical and strategic options to weigh? This HBR article will help you understand your vendors better in this time of co-opetition.

As always, we want to make the newsletter better tuned to you. We welcome your feedback.

Thank you for your time and be well, Paul 

For fun - the original network ACK was “Roger that”.