VMworld 2015: Introducing Application Self service with Networking and Security

Editor's Notes

• #4: <Click> If you think back to where server virtualization was 10 years ago, it was just starting to get general adoption. The primary motivation for many companies was cap-ex savings generated by hardware consolidation and resource pooling. A side benefit was that virtual machines could be delivered much quicker than physical machines helping accelerate service delivery times from many weeks down to a few days. <Click> Cloud automation and management will drive the next round of IT efficiency improvements. Automation will help accelerate IT service delivery from days and sometimes weeks to hours and even minutes. Policy based governance and controls will assure that business users receive the appropriate level of resources for the tasks they need to perform the job. Performance and health monitoring will make sure that applications continue to operate at peak efficiencies and make the appropriate adjustments to make sure that happens. Financial management capabilities will allow IT to compare costs of internal and external delivery models. Intelligent placement algorithms will help deliver the appropriate service level based on both cost as well as operational policies that control where specific applications and data need to be located. Lets look in a bit more detail where savings are possible.
• #8: Today, the world revolves around applications. Creating, delivering and managing those applications is a formidable challenge for both Development and IT. By virtualizing all aspects of the data center (namely, compute, networking, security and storage), VMware customers are moving to a completely virtualized infrastructure. One that can be dynamically configured to meet specific application needs. <Click> Because a virtualized infrastructure is fully abstracted from hardware, workloads running in your data center, can be deployed seamlessly on the environment of your choosing: private cloud, public cloud or a hybrid cloud. <Click> However, virtualizing all aspects of your infrastructure by itself will not provide the desired efficiency improvements if your infrastructure and applications are still being delivered by siloed manual processes that take days and weeks to deliver the services the business needed yesterday.
• #9: VMware helps to deliver the foundation for IT-as-a-Service with the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), enabling the CIO to transition IT to becoming a true Broker of IT Services. The SDDC is the ideal architecture for: building, delivering, and managing business applications, and building and operating private, public, and hybrid clouds, where all infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, and the control of this data center is entirely automated by software and enables the delivery of IT-as-a-Service. The SDDC enables customers to utilize the investments in people, process, and technology that they’ve already made to deliver both legacy and new applications while meeting vital IT responsibilities. It allows businesses to use what they have today to build for change in the future. VMware’s SDDC solutions provide a unified platform across the hybrid cloud, built on VMware’s best-in-class compute, storage, and networking virtualization technologies. It includes the industry-leading cloud-management platform, as well as programmatic management capabilities via OpenStack and infrastructure-level APIs. The Cloud Management Platform (CMP) becomes the key control layer in a SDDC to manage heterogeneous and hybrid environments. With policy-based automation, operations, and business management capabilities, it helps IT to deliver on the new business need for speed, agility, and choice while also delivering the ongoing IT need for control and efficiency. Traditional tools and processes that infrastructure and operations teams are using aren’t optimized to deliver on the promise of the software-defined data center and hybrid cloud. Businesses need a cloud management platform that simplifies and accelerates infrastructure and application delivery and ongoing management onsite in their data center and in the cloud. VMware’s Cloud Management Platform (CMP) is purpose-built for the hybrid cloud. It provides a comprehensive management stack that enables IT to deliver infrastructure and applications quickly on vSphere and other hypervisors, physical infrastructure, and private and public clouds, all with the control IT needs.   VMware’s CMP is distinctive, by offering NOT ONLY Automation, BUT ALSO integrating Operations and Business capabilities into a single platform to provide performance and financial insight to improve IT/Business decision-making and alignment. This helps IT to accomplish its mission as a Broker of IT Services, by enabling IT to source, provision, and manage the lifecycle of IT services across the new data center landscape: multi-platform, hybrid cloud, and multiple providers. Automation – self-service provision infrastructure and applications across multiple hypervisors, private and public cloud with both speed and control Operations – manage infrastructure and applications in physical, virtual, and cloud environments with integrated capacity, performance, log, and configuration management Business – align IT spending with business priorities by getting full transparency of infrastructure and application service cost and quality Unified Management – use a common set of tools across on-premises and public clouds with a unified management experience and fast time to value In short, the cloud management platform supports cloud administration, server administration, fabric, and operations teams working with lines of business to ensure agility, application SLAs, and infrastructure efficiency with control. The platform combines automated delivery, intelligent operations, and business insight to deliver a unified cloud management experience across hybrid clouds and heterogeneous environments. [Reference] Background on VMware Strategy These three form the basis of the three strategies for VMware: the Software-Defined Data Center, the hybrid cloud, and end-user computing. A year and a half ago, we laid out this vision of these three components as our strategy, and since then we have been diligently executing upon all three of them. It's gone from vision to instantiation, and now powerful realization across all three of them. These three together are the path to the software-defined enterprise, and we're very proud of the progress that we've made here. There’s much yet to do, but we are on a journey to execute the software-defined enterprise, building on these three components. Overview: The Software-Defined Data Center – An Open, Industry Architecture The architecture that provides the competitive advantage sought by today’s businesses is the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). The SDDC is an open architecture that extends the principles of virtualization – abstraction, pooling, and automation – beyond compute to the rest of the data center, bringing deployment and resource management to any infrastructure and cloud environments of your choice. This in turn enables the management and orchestration for all IT services needed in the mobile-cloud era. As the leader in compute virtualization through its industry standard vSphere product, VMware is the company best positioned to extend virtualization solutions to the rest of the data center. VMware’s SDDC solutions deliver cloud service provider economics in the data center, as well as fast and agile application provisioning that responds to ever-changing business demands. VMware’s SDDC solutions offer the right availability and security for each application with policy-based governance, and the ability to run new and existing applications across multiple platforms or clouds. VMware’s Software-Defined Data Center Solutions consists of four components: a completely virtualized infrastructure across compute, network, and storage; delivered on- or off-premises in a hybrid cloud; a comprehensive virtualization and cloud management platform; choice in cloud frameworks, whether a fully integrated VMware stack or OpenStack-based
• #10: Kent add F5 logo between NSX and vCAC in diagram and add a value statement from capabilities on slide 26 If you can’t configure all your network services dynamically in the context of deploying and application, then you will need to add additional manual steps to your partially automated application deployment. vCloud Automation Center can dynamically provision NSX logical services customized to the specific needs of each applications. The combined capabilities of these products empower IT to fully automate the delivery of secure, scalable and high performing multi-tier applications.
• #12: You are all familiar with the existing network in your data center. The number one thing to understand about this is that NSX works on top of it, you don’t have to virtualize the entire network you can virtualize any part of it or all of it. NSX simply uses the existing network as an IP backplane.
• #13: Connected to your data center network is your compute infrastructure.
• #14: Where your hypervisors and virtual switches exist.
• #15: NSX takes advantage of this infrastructure to create, what can be thought of as a Network Hypervisor.
• #16: And like a server hypervisor allows the creation of software Virtual Machines, the NSX Network Hypervisor enables the creation of software Virtual Networks. It’s really as simple as that. These virtual networks can be created, saved, deleted, restored, just like virtual machines but for the network.
• #20: Many of our customers are looking to vCloud Automation Center as the product of choice to on-board the cloud and achieve better business agility. These customers often also look to VMware to provide guidance of how to on-board the cloud. Now, every customer is different, which makes it a bit difficult to provide this guidance. For example, some customers may be highly automated, but they do not have good mechanisms for governance in place. The next customer might be the exact opposite e.g. everything gets provisioned manually, and the manual process comprehensively captures all approvals so that governance is high. However, in the end, we see a pattern how customers on-board the cloud. There are typically a few types of projects customers deploy to make this transition: Automating the virtualized infrastructure Adding the consumption side (self-service catalog) to the automated infrastructure to stand up an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service) Provide more value to the application teams by providing capabilities to deploy simple applications, middleware and databases with standardized configurations Provide application specific capabilities such as Application release automation and DevOps for application organizations And finally to establish IT as a broker of services It is possible to start at any of these steps and then expand the scope of the project later, or it is also possible to start at the top with a broader CIO / CTO driven initiative. For most customers, the immediate first step is to automate the virtualized environment. This is essentially adding the next technology layer on top of the existing virtualized environments. Those projects are often driven by the IT infrastructure organization and they can be accomplished very rapidly.
• #21: vCloud Automation Center has three primary policies used to implement user-centric business aware cloud management. The first are Business Groups vCAC allows administrators to define a multi-level grouping structure and associate users from Active Directory with one or more groups and have specific role based access within those groups Second, we have Resource Reservations Reservations allow administrators to allocate previously discovered (virtual, physical, or cloud ) resources to each group. As part of assigning resources to a group, you can associate costs to those physical resources. Resource reservations can be grouped by service levels as part of the reservation process. When users request machines, the will be charged based on a prorated consumption of these resources And the third are Service Blueprints Blueprints define the policies that will control the provisioning and ongoing management of a vCAC compute service from the initial request, provisioning, ongoing management and decomissioning. This life-cycle management can be unique for every blueprint defined in the system.
• #23: Let us break down the challenge of slow service delivery time by exploring first the challenges for infrastructure service delivery. Creating infrastructure services is typically a time consuming manual task. Based on customers surveys we conducted, we know that the actual work effort is typically around 4 - 6 hours. However, those 4 - 6 hours are spread over days or weeks since this effort involves multiple teams, which often operate in siloes. As a result there are wait times in slow workflows. Moreover, manual tasks lead to inconsistencies and errors in configurations. There is the need for time consuming rework to ensure that systems consistently, i.e. systems need to behave in the same manner. So now, after a few days or weeks, we provided an infrastructure service, but what about the applications? This is ultimately what the business cares most about.
• #24: Applications need much more than appropriately sized virtual machines, an IP address and DNS entries.  They also need accurately configured network connectivity, security, availability, scale, and performance. <Click> As part of deploying a multi-tiered application you will need to provision connectivity through deployment of logical switches and routers. <Click> In addition it is important to securely deploy the application through intelligent placement of workloads in security groups, protected by firewall rules. <Click> The use of virtual load balancers ensures that application users will always have access to a highly responsive application without the need for additional expensive hardware. <Click> Performance can be optimized by associating applications with shared or dedicated switches, routers and load balancers based on the specific needs of each application vRealize Automation configures and manages NSX snetwork and security services within the context of delivering an application. all within