VSAN and NSX are important - TechTalk 38
Transcript
hi welcome to episode 38 of virtualized geeks tech talk this is keith townsend from virtualizedgeektop.com and we're going to talk about vmware's vsphere and vsan solutions but we're not going to talk about the speeds and feeds of the solutions but more importantly about the overall importance of vsan and nsx to vmware's software-defined data center and kind of strategically what vsan and nsx means to vmware and how they kind of or at least how i believe they're positioning the vsphere hypervisor in relationship to the data center
and the future of uh it infrastructure in general so you know just let's give a little history lesson and talk about kind of os's and platforms throughout the past couple of uh maybe 20 years or so at least the 15 16 years i've been doing i.t and when i first entered the industry there is a player in the market called novell netware or a product novel network by a company named novell who's now a primary linux company and then there's a kind of newcomer to the
file and print world which is what novell dominated at that time and that was windows nt server uh and then later on windows server 2000 2003 2008 etc you know uh novell kind of ruled the market when it came to foul and print and directory services they had a solution called uh novell directory services nds ldap based solution that uh was very robust kind of the standard for directory services and then of course foul and print services were rock solid they owned a good majority of
the market microsoft's nt windows nt notoriously bad for underperformance uh and reliability eventually though microsoft kind of won that battle of the foul and print server not because they eventually became a better fouling print solution or because active directory wasn't any more compelling than nds it was specifically because microsoft's windows platform was a platform that could be developed on so it was a general purpose os similar to unix similar to today's linux that could serve more than one function it was kind of convergence the last
tech talk we talked about kind of the impact of convergence so microsoft used their position with developers to position applications is much more important than following print generally or at least as important as file and print and got a foothold in an enterprise and the rest is history so now we kind of have the same thing going on when it comes to the hypervisor vmware solely best hypervisor out there hands down you won't get an argument from me on what position vmware has when it comes
to x86 compute and microsoft's hyper-v decent solution similar to uh their position in foul and print in the early 2000s decent solution not as good as uh vmware vsphere but you know what it's serviceable so if you see a pattern happening it's kind of microsoft's strategic strategy a solution that's good enough for 80 of the market plus a bunch of other value add makes uh their competitors kind of go away vmware is a pretty smart company uh the strength of their hypervisor is in uh obviously
a bunch of different areas it's performance it's security in its management and it demands the ease of management uh is the word i'm looking for and we're going to focus a little bit on security and kind of uh why vmware has been extremely careful careful about opening opening up the hypervisor as a platform similar to how uh windows is a platform so martin crusado and pat gelsinger doing his announcement of vsan and uh youtube uh video martine did on uh security in the hypervisor and the
software defined data center you they use two terms i don't know if everyone really count or one term that i don't know if everyone really caught and that's the concept of the goldilocks zone so the goldilocks zone is kind of the sweet spot of uh i.t security and performance where you have services running in an area of compute that are secure enough that they're hard for intruders to hack but provide a great level of performance close enough to the core of the compute that it provides
a great uh level of performance this is the value proposition of vsan and nxx uh both are integrated into the hypervisor which means that you get exceptional performance so if you look at kind of where vmware was and where they were they're going to uh and how they provided similar solutions so uh vmware had a vsa virtual san appliance which was in an appliance that ran on top of the hypervisor so it wasn't integrated into the kernel of the hypervisor which meant that it had a
bunch of limitations it obviously wouldn't be as scalable the performance wouldn't be as good uh so now you have vsan which is scalable to nodes uh can do two million iops and i think four petabytes of uh total storage you have nxx that you can apply security rules uh at the layer two level of the uh networking stack the performance it obviously scales i think uh uh i saw a twitter post from martina a month or so ago that said that they have a customer with
seven thousand virtual switches in a single nsx environment so extremely scalable is extremely robust because of the ability to run it within the hypervisor so this is obviously a shift from vmware saying the hypervisor we're going to limit the number of services that we did around on the hypervisor which makes it secure to saying that you know what we need to protect our market and we need to add value we need to show our customers how we're going to continue to add value and the only
way to do that is to make the hypervisor a platform so vmware has moved from the hypervisor just being x86 a virtual x86 platform to the hypervisor being a platform so it's a in my opinion it's a way for vmware to protect this turf and move away from uh being considered just a hypervisor and more importantly it opens up a kind of door for them to have a relationship with developers i've beat up on vmware quite a bit about their lack of relationship with developers when
i go to developers within the infrastructure they could care less if the infrastructure runs on vmware vsphere uh nsx i mean in it whatever the nxx they don't care about the infrastructure they have applications that needs to make calls to the infrastructure so their applications can scale this is what the software defined data center is all about this is what cloud computing is all about so vmware has no kind of no no hand or no influence when it comes to the developer community and this needs
to change and this can change if the hypervisor becomes a platform i got into a pretty robust conversation with an analyst the other day kind of i was defending the point that vmware can uh be kind of a platform it can be uh the cloud computing platform going into the next decade if they embrace the developer and he kind of argued you know what vmware has never embraced the developer so how could they start you know why should the developer even care about vmware's offering and
you know we and i kind of talked about the ubiquitousness of windows server and what they've done to x86 i can take uh my code that's ran on windows server and run that in any x86 platform so as these hp moonshot uh type servers where they're run on arm arm servers in general cl abstracted data centers whether they're cloud based or whatever uh as they start to mature and start to look more appealing from a uh capex and expense perspective uh vmware needs kind of an
end for that and i thought about it you know what if the hypervisor was a platform what if it didn't matter what the underlying infrastructure was uh kind of the thought of vmware virtual platforms in general what if it didn't matter what the infrastructure was didn't matter what the networking was didn't matter what the storage was didn't matter what the uh x86 physical hardware or not even x86 the physical hardware was what if vmware could guarantee developers that you take your cold you write it for
our platform we can guarantee that it'll run on any hardware platform or any uh cloud platform out there because we've virtually we've abstracted it so vmware is a company that likes to abstract things whether it's storage whether it's networking whether it's x86 compute or the data center itself doesn't matter it's abstracted you can code your you can take your today you can take your windows workloads and run them on any infrastructure uh regardless of the underlying hardware uh but tomorrow what if you could write your
application uh via apis or uh directly onto the hypervisor and then you can run that same application on any platform doesn't matter the underlying infrastructure whether it's amazon's cloud openstax cloud kvm what doesn't matter vmware will provide a common interface kind of uh right once the promise of java write wants run anywhere but one that really works or even on the value prop for the the infrastructure guy which i don't think this value prop is a long-term deal but that you can take your abstracted software-defined
network and run it take your same operating model and run that across any cloud platform or any hosted provider and normal kind of normalize the infrastructure so vsan and nxx very very important products to vmware not just because it opens up new markets for them but because they're showing that the the power of the platform of the hypervisor or the hypervisor as a platform whereas previously the hypervisor wasn't a platform at all it was just another way to present x86 hardware well that's it for this
episode of virtualized geeks tech talk look forward to talking to you on the twitter so you can follow me at virtualized geek or you can visit the website virtualizedgeek.com to get more of my industry insights thanks and have a great day
