Live Update on the VMware Cloud Study
Transcript
hey keith townsend from the cto advisor this a live periscope ask me anything on our cloud study specifically we are we've created this scenario on which a enterprise company has to deal with the current pandemic situation with remote workers if you're like a typical organization you're not prepared to deploy thousands of vdi to support remote workers so i wrote this or i did a cto dose on this a few months ago near the front end of the pandemic it said hey what would happen if you
needed to deploy a thousand two thousand three thousand vdi instances but you don't have the actual capacity in your data center what would you do this is like a real life dr situation that happens that's happened globally all at one time so you're not going to procure new hardware you're not going to get that stuff into your data center fast enough to get the capacity that you need you're not going to get the links provision etc you could look out to doing something like a aws
desktop vdi solution hosted in the public cloud but the challenge is that you're changing the way you do business and for end users this is a shock to the system how do you go from using traditional desktops etc or your current remote access solution to using a completely new solution obviously one of the advantages of a vmware based cloud solution is that you can expand your current solution out to the public cloud so if you have citrix or you're using horizon you can just deploy citrix
or her horizon and vmware on the public cloud so that that's the kind of backstory for the study that we're doing so the original idea is that we were going to take uh vmware horizon distribution and we were going to extend that from our on-premises data center the cto visor hybrid infrastructure sponsored by intel by the way uh to the public cloud the basics across public cloud providers pretty simple we go to our we're in the co the cto advisor data center is inacolo and we
are hosting uh uh vmware vsphere 6.7 vsan deployment we have proximity to a lot of cloud providers so we can go with someone like a mega port which is uh what we did provision a 10 gigabit link and now we can virtually connect to each one of the cloud providers anywhere from 50 megabits all the way up to 10 gigabit depending on the the need so that's what we did we provisioned a 10 gigabit circuit uh then we worked with initially oracle who's sponsoring the study
to connect to oci deploy their solution do some common vmware vsphere tasks uh do linked mode between the data centers and see what's the what with the each solution so where we're at in the study so far we've tested tested the oracle solution which should in the next couple of weeks or so be announced as ga uh we tested the uh vmc on aws and over the next few days we'll start testing uh google we're still still talking with microsoft their solution is in preview and
for the most part without exception of oracle we've basically gone and gotten the retail versions of the solution uh there hadn't been any considerations as part as far as capacity other than oracle because obviously they're sponsoring the study so we are using their facilities to do the testing so we went and bought i plucked down the credit card paid to 2 000 to get vmc on aws we're plucking down the credit card to get the google capacity and then we'll go back and uh hopefully do
azure unfortunately azure is a 15 000 minimum buy-in and that's a lot of money so we'll see if oracle if we can work a deal with microsoft to at least get them included into the study so what have we found uh we found that yeah josh ouch uh we found that the two solutions take aim at two completely the audience may overlap but it's audiences that want two completely different experiences uh the vmc let's start with vmc on aws because that is by far the most
popular solution on the market as vmware's go to market partner i knew this coming in but i did not i did not put two and two together vmware provides the service it is a vmware service logically when you think about it okay great but what does that practically mean it practically means that when i went to my aws console and search for vmware cloud in the aws console control plane it's just not there there is no option for vmware cloud on awf they don't even reference
that you should go and talk to vmware you have to go to cloud.vmware.com create a vmware cloud account and then provision the service through vmware this isn't unlike many services that aws has partnered with in the past there's plenty of services that you go to their portal and then they provision the services within your aws account however i don't think there's a scale of service that's similar to the vmware in aws relationship one of the things that became obvious to me is that it is a
dis i don't want to call it a disjointed experience but it is a a separate experience i'm creating a separate vmware cloud account account to consume resources in aws vmware is going to charge me by the hour for those resources however my main goal is to integrate with the aws platform so on the back end and this is the meat of the testing tom green will do throughout the day is what does that mean if i'm a vsphere admin and i want to consume vmc on
aws and i also want to integrate vmc on aws with my amazon vpc the vmware solution getting into a little bit of technicality the vmware solution sits in its own vpc in the vmware control vpc which creates some interesting scenarios from an administrative perspective and i see why vmware had to do some of the design decisions that they made connecting from their private vpc into my vpc requires some network plumbing to be done meaning i need some type of vpc to vpc connectivity out which includes
accounts that are not managed by the same organization so i can i have a bevy of options to do that you can do uh direct connect you can do a bunch of uh a vpn etc etc uh but it's a enterprise from a aws perspective they're treating it as two different accounts networking accounts from a vpc perspective so you have to deal with that reality flipping back to the oracle solution pretty quickly before we finish the conversation of emc on aws oracle does it slightly different
the sddc is provisioned it's a oracle solution so the sddc is provisioned in the vcn there's still some networking magic that you have to do to get a uh vm in your vsphere environment talking to a oracle cloud service but it's all within your vp vcn the equivalent of the aws vpc so back to the vmware solution vmware and aws designed this solution to be very familiar to a cloud type experience it is a black box the it doesn't matter how much engineering goes into the
underlay you won't see it uh you can go you can't go to the about and see what version of vsphere you're running in the vcenter it is a cloud solution uh that is hidden away from you tom calls it engineering magic i think that's a pretty good uh characteristic of it but from a day-to-day operations perspective it impacts your operations you're you're not managing vsphere in this traditional sense and i've called for this type of capability for a provider to uh do this type of capability
that i just want to consume vms and i want to consume them in a familiar way vm vmware vmware cloud on aws is a familiar interface for the vsphere admin it's not the same it's familiar enough that a vsphere admin once it's configured and set up they can go and they can do the things with caveats that they're used to doing they have to just figure it out one of the things that our i was asked last year when i was pitching a vmware cloud to
a customer he asked what doesn't work the rumors that he had heard the feedback that he had heard that there was a bunch of things because vmware abstracts the underlay from you that don't work uh vmware needs to need it at the time to still do work so that they can have their partner solutions work we're starting to see more of that for example veeam now works there there's a vmware cloud on aws version for uh a veeam etc but natively not every solution works with
vmware cloud on aws which takes us over to the oci piece of it what have i learned about oci vmware's solution or oracle's vmware solution in oci it takes the flavor of oracle cloud infrastructure if you're not familiar with oracle cloud infrastructure's basic go to market concept is that they're appealing to enterprise i.t organizations what what do you do today and how do you need to take what you do today do it in a public cloud and then consume those cloud services natively they've taken that
approach with vmware they basically have some automation in the front you provision your sddc it deploys in your vcn and you have a bunch of bare metal vsphere servers that's oracle solution you have a bunch of bare metal vsphere servers what does that functionally mean that means that i can go into vcenter i can look at the hardware underlay i can take my if i still have mibs and i'm still using mibs i can still use those mibs uh time just noticed the highlighted that you
know you can see that it has you know vsphere 6.7 update 3 you see the version of vsphere running oracle lets you decide when you're going to move from one version of vsphere to the other versus you know vmware just has you on that main uh cold line distribution line from when they release new features it is a cloud service versus oracle is giving you hosted vsphere and i don't think one is better than the other one it's what it is what are you looking for
as a customer are you looking for a native vmware vsphere operational solution in which you're using your current operations and you're using someone else's data center provided by that and uh or are you do you want a managed solution tom just read my line manage versus hosted do you want a managed solution in which vmware cloud is just managing vsphere for you and you just consume vcenter and a bunch of vms completely different solutions solving the same problem i love that the industry is providing alternatives
as a executive as a architect you can based you have enough solutions out on the market to base your decisions solely based on your needs oracle has the argument since they're extremely network friendly when it comes to egress charges you can go to them for your vsphere in the cloud if you want to keep that native vmware operations and just do the networking back to aws the from a from a uh egress charge percent perspective oracle is much friendly more friendly than the other cloud providers
what does google fit in all that well you know what that's that you you guys have to stay tuned for that you have to read the report once it's released to find out how does google solution compare to the vmware solutions i'm suspecting that they're going to fall somewhere in the middle that you're going to get some google magic and some google cloud magic they've been doing this a little while with the cloud simple acquisition uh where you get that native it's inside the my vcp
uh vpc in google i'm using some google networking concepts etc but do i get unfeathered access to the underlay i don't know tom you you you'll have to tell the the everyone on what the results of that is you guys want to follow the project follow the hashtag ctoa hi cto visor hi hybrid infrastructure what we're doing everything that we're doing in the data center visit the website the ctoadvisor.com we're launching a new left website in the next couple of months specifically so we can better
organize and tell this story uh time and follow time on twitter at time at time tech thoughts or tech i think it's at times tech talk he changed his twitter twitter handle uh but or just search for time green time spells his name t-h-o-m-e green with the e yep it's at tom talks tech on the twitters follow me obviously you know how to do it talk to you next cto does ask me anything
