VMware recently released VMware vSphere 6.0 into the marketplace. The latest vSpere version is packed full of more than 650 technological breakthroughs! It’s more powerful, more flexible, more secure and more easily managed than ever before. In this series, Global Knowledge instructor, Bill Ferguson will highlight several features that make VMware vSphere 6.0 a game changer.
Two terms that you will see most if you read IT forums today are “cloud” and “Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC)”; but what do they really mean? vSphere provides the capability to create an isolated compute (CPU and memory) environment for each of your applications. In fact, this has been true for years. Now, with integrated products such as VMware’s NSX and VSAN you can create an isolated, controllable and secure network and storage environment for each of your applications as well.
NSX allows you to use the network capacity of your routers and switches to pass the packets while all of the configuration of VLANs, access-lists, NAT, VPNs and so on can be controlled in the software layers of NSX. Now, with vSphere 6.0, you can seamlessly use the network capacity of other networks to which you are connected as well. This includes not only inter-datacenter, but even hybrid networks where some of the network capacity that you are using is on the public domain. At the same time, VSAN allows you to quickly create logical storage containers that leverage the size and speed of the underlying physical storage. In addition, each VM (and therefore each application) can have its defined properties in regard to storage performance and redundancy. With these two additional services in place through vSphere, you can now have the CPU, memory, networking and storage (all four of the “core 4”) fully definable, controllable and securable for each application within its own Software Defined Datacenter. With this complete microsegmentation in place, the only thing left to do is to define how various devices will gain access to this environment for consumption of the resources.
Of course, VMware certainly has products for consumption and management as well, such as vRealize Automation and vCloud Air, but they are not locking you down to only their products for cloud consumption. As you may know, an initiative that has made great progress in regard to the secure, efficient, and effective use of hardware resources in a cloud platform is OpenStack. First started by Rackspace Hosting and NASA in 2010, the OpenStack initiative has continued to take on new partners — including VMware. In fact, VMware assured that their original NSX product could be “consumed” by OpenStack’s software by offering a Neutron plug-in. Now, with vSphere 6.0, Openstack is fully integrated into vSphere and its Web Client. This means you can create compute platforms in OpenStack and then manage them in OpenStack and/or through VMware’s Web Client as needed for your applications.
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Quick Look at VMware vSphere 6.0 Series
- Quick Look at VMware vSphere 6.0: Web Client
- Quick Look at VMware vSphere 6.0: Configuration Maximums
- Quick Look at VMware vSphere 6.0: Fault Tolerance
- Quick Look at VMware vSphere 6.0: VMware Integrated OpenStack