Clearpath’s Blog on IT Infrastructure, Hybrid Clouds and IT Security

Back in March, VMware introduced their application modernization strategy and with it, the biggest release of vSphere in over a decade. This followed the VMware ‘Project Pacific’ announcement Joe Beda made during VMworld 2019 where he made the remark "Kubernetes is a platform for creating platforms."

VMware makes very good use of the intellectual property gained by the Heptio acquisition and fully adopts Kubernetes into vSphere by leveraging Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). This allows centralized management of both virtual machines and containers from the interface we all know and love, vCenter Server. Sound familiar? Yes, vSphere Integrated Containers aimed at a similar result minus Kubernetes a few years back. This time around, however, VMware fully embraces Kubernetes with TKG and provides the vSphere Pod Service as well as namespaces and several other services which together improve performance, security, access, and management of Kubernetes in a vSphere environment. There is plenty to be excited about here.  

User experience is the driving force behind an organization's digital transformation strategy. There is a direct relationship between customer satisfaction and the ability to acquire and retain new customers. Applications play center stage as most products and services are delivered through websites, mobile applications, or both. Microservices-based applications give businesses the ability to more granularly iterate and scale their applications based on customer feedback. This is directly tied to happier customers and increased revenue. As more businesses look to drive innovation using containers and microservices, they face some major headwinds, not least of which is standardizing on Kubernetes to accelerate their application modernization efforts.

VMworld 2019 made a glorious return to its more traditional location at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This was a welcomed location change across the VMware community (except, perhaps, for the hotel room costs) after a three-year stint in steaming Las Vegas. The marketing tag line was “Make your mark…” and the general session theme was “Build, Run, Manage.” Kubernetes played center stage which isn’t a surprise considering this is the first VMworld since the Heptio acquisition was announced at VMworld Europe in 2018. In this blog post I’ll cover the major announcements and sprinkle in some honorable mentions that caught my eye. This is not an all-inclusive list of all the happenings at VMworld as that would be more of a blog series than a post. Feel free to reach out on our contact us page if you have questions about announcements you don’t see mentioned in here.

As the end of general support for both vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 approaches in this fall—many CIOs and IT directors are wondering if upgrading to the latest version of vSphere is a wise move beyond just the comfort of running a supported version of the product.  After all—VMs are pretty standard fare for data centers today.  What can a new version of vSphere really offer?

First of all—many people are hailing vSphere 6.5 as the most beneficial upgrade in years, and customers are moving it into production environments at an unprecedented rate.  The impending end of general support only accounts for some of that production adoption—the remainder resides in the strengths and benefits of vSphere 6.5.  In fact—vSphere 6.5 if the foundation of VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy moving forward—and is required for cross-cloud architectures.  This fact alone may account for its rapid adoption, but let’s explore a bit further.

The move to hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI) is on! 

However, many CIOs hit the brakes when it comes to knowing how to implement HCI initiatives and not wreck the IT budget.  Certainly—one doesn’t want to replace all the existing equipment in the data center with converged infrastructure appliances all at once.  Is there a way to use existing infrastructure and still take advantage of hyper-convergence and software-defined infrastructure while planning for equipment replacements down the road?

The simple answer is YES.  And by building on existing infrastructure and leveraging commodity x86 equipment—CIOs can experience significant CapEx savings compared to hardware replacements.  Certainly CIOs’ ears prick up when they hear figures of nearly 50% savings,¹ but what does this mean for an IT department?  Are there any other advantages to creating a virtual SAN now versus just waiting to implement HCI appliances as hardware refresh cycles come due?

It is critical that differences between software-defined storage (SDS) and storage virtualization be understood.  While there is some overlap between the two—an ideal solution combines both SDS and storage virtualization for maximum benefit to the organization.

Deploying pools can be done using the VMware View Administrator. The Add Pool wizard in the Administrator takes us through a series of steps which include user assignment, pool Identification, provisioning settings, advanced storage options etc. (refer to the figure below). In this article we will learn a different approach to deploying pools - using a powerCLI cmdlet.