Aug
26
2019
--

VMware is bringing VMs and containers together, taking advantage of Heptio acquisition

At VMworld today in San Francisco, VMware introduced a new set of services for managing virtual machines and containers in a single view. Called Tanzu, the product takes advantage of the knowledge the company gained when it acquired Heptio last year.

As companies face an increasingly fragmented landscape of maintaining traditional virtual machines, alongside a more modern containerized Kubernetes environment, managing the two together has created its own set of management challenges for IT. This is further complicated by trying to manage resources across multiple clouds, as well as the in-house data centers. Finally, companies need to manage legacy applications, while looking to build newer containerized applications.

VMware’s Craig McLuckie and fellow Heptio co-founder Joe Beda were part of the original Kubernetes development team. They came to VMware via last year’s acquisition. McLuckie believes that Tanzu can help with all of this by applying the power of Kubernetes across this complex management landscape.

“The intent is to construct a portfolio that has a set of assets that cover every one of these areas, a robust set of capabilities that bring the Kubernetes substrate everywhere — a control plane that enables organizations to start to think about [and view] these highly fragmented deployments with Kubernetes [as the] common lens, and then the technologies you need to be able to bring existing applications forward and to build new application and to support third-party vendors bringing their applications into [this],” McLuckie explained.

It’s an ambitious vision that involves bringing together not only VMware’s traditional VM management tooling and Kubernetes, but also open-source pieces and other recent acquisitions, including Bitnami and Cloud Health along with Wavefront, which it acquired in 2017. Although the vision was defined long before the acquisition of Pivotal last week, it will also play a role in this. Originally that was as a partner, but now it will be as part of VMware.

The idea is to eventually cover the entire gamut of building, running and managing applications in the enterprise. Among the key pieces introduced today as technology previews are the Tanzu Mission Control, a tool for managing Kubernetes clusters wherever they live, and Project Pacific, which embeds Kubernetes natively into vSphere, the company’s virtualization platform, bringing together virtual machines and containers.

Screenshot 2019 08 26 08.07.38 1

VMware Tanzu (Slide: VMware)

McLuckie sees bringing virtual machine and Kubernetes together in this fashion provides a couple of key advantages. “One is being able to bring a robust, modern API-driven way of thinking about accessing resources. And it turns out that there is this really good technology for that. It’s called Kubernetes. So being able to bring a Kubernetes control plane to vSphere is creating a new set of experiences for traditional VMware customers that is moving much closer to a kind of cloud-like agile infrastructure type of experience. At the same time, vSphere is bringing a whole bunch of capabilities to Kubernetes that’s creating more efficient isolation capabilities,” he said.

When you think about the cloud-native vision, it has always been about enabling companies to manage resources wherever they live through a single lens, and this is what this set of capabilities that VMware has brought together under Tanzu is intended to do. “Kubernetes is a way of bringing a control metaphor to modern IT processes. You provide an expression of what you want to have happen, and then Kubernetes takes that and interprets it and drives the world into that desired state,” McLuckie explained.

If VMware can take all of the pieces in the Tanzu vision and make this happen, it will be as powerful as McLuckie believes it to be. It’s certainly an interesting attempt to bring all of a company’s application and infrastructure creation and management under one roof using Kubernetes as the glue — and with Heptio co-founders McLuckie and Beda involved, it certainly has the expertise in place to drive the vision.

Jul
25
2018
--

Google Cloud introduces shielded virtual machines for additional security

While we might like to think all of our applications are equal in our eyes, in reality some are more important than others and require an additional level of security. To meet those requirements, Google introduced shielded virtual machines at Google Next today.

As Google describes it, “Shielded VMs leverage advanced platform security capabilities to help ensure your VMs have not been tampered with. With Shielded VMs, you can monitor and react to any changes in the VM baseline as well as its current runtime state.”

These specialized VMs run on GCP and come with a set of partner security controls to defend against things like rootkits and bootkits, according to Google. There are a whole bunch of things that happen even before an application launches inside a VM, and each step in that process is vulnerable to attack.

That’s because as the machine starts up, before you even get to your security application, it launches the firmware, the boot sequence, the kernel, then the operating system — and then and only then, does your security application launch.

That time between startup and the security application launching could leave you vulnerable to certain exploits that take advantage of those openings. The shielded VMs strip out as much of that process as possible to reduce the risk.

“What we’re doing here is we are stripping out any of the binary that doesn’t absolutely have to be there. We’re ensuring that every binary that is there is signed, that it’s signed by the right party, and that they load in the proper sequence,” a Google spokesperson explained. All of these steps should reduce overall risk.

Shielded VMs are available in Beta now

Aug
28
2017
--

VMware Cloud is now live on AWS — and IT pros just did a little happy dance

 When VMware announced it was partnering with AWS last fall, it turned more than a few enterprise heads. After all, we’re talking about one company that dominates virtual machines on-prem, and the other in the public cloud. Together, the two companies make a powerful combination — and VMware made the whole shebang official today at VMworld when it announced that VMware Cloud was live… Read More

Aug
28
2017
--

VMware expands hybrid cloud strategy with series of announcements at VMworld

 VMware, the company that gave rise to the virtual machine concept in the enterprise data center, announced a series of products and services today at VMworld in Las Vegas that show a company clearly shifting to managing hybrid environments. The hybrid strategy really began to gain momentum last year when the company forged agreements with the top public cloud vendors including Microsoft,… Read More

Oct
19
2016
--

Three Things to Consider When Thinking About Containers

containers

Containers like Docker and Rocket are getting more popular every day. In my conversations with customers, they consistently ask what containers are and how they can use them in their environment. If you’re as curious as most people, read on. . .

How did this happen?

From what I understand, containers grew out of Google’s (and others’) need for massive horizontal scale. Now, this is hardly a unique problem. At the time there were several different solutions out there that could help deploy and orchestrate the applications and infrastructure necessary to scale — namely virtual machines (VMs) and their orchestration services (like Vmware’s vCenter). At the uber-massive scale that companies like Google were pushing, however, server virtualization had some serious drawbacks. Enter containers. . .

What is a container?

Essentially, the main difference between a container and a virtual machine is the amount of overhead involved in each unit.

A virtual machine is literally the components of an entire server, minus the physical hardware. Simplified, it’s the operating system and all additional components required to run the application. That’s a great way to separate applications for mobility, but it also requires a large amount of redundancy (and overhead).

A container is your application and all of its dependencies that run on top of the operating system, but not the operating system (OS) itself. The OS kernel is shared among all the containers on the system. This approach reduces the CPU, memory and disk overhead that virtual machines introduce by running a separate OS instance on every VM. At single system scale, this is not much of a consideration. But when you are talking about scale in the millions, it can lead to an incredible amount of savings without much of a reduction in functionality.

When you get down to the key differences, it essentially amounts to “at what level the hypervisor runs,” or if that’s too technical, the level at which the two technologies provide abstraction from their underlying components (take a look at the image below). For VMs, it abstracts the hardware from the OS. For containers, it abstracts the OS from the applications that interface with it. This is where the benefit comes from: containers allow applications to have isolation without requiring every application to have an additional copy of the operating system. Operating systems take up a great deal of a computer’s resources, so the ability to share that overhead — while getting isolation — can be extremely efficient. Google reported that they spin up roughly two billion containers per week. At that type of scale, you can see the necessity for efficiency!

screenshot-2
Image courtesy of docker.com

How do I decide between VMs and containers?

This is the million dollar question. Currently, the two are often used together. If you’re running containers on an AWS EC2 instance, then you are running containers inside a VM. However, the are important differences to note:

Security

Security = VMs

Whenever you are consolidating resource, regardless of whether it’s with VMs or containers, security should be top of mind. This is because the process that controls access to resources presents a single, high-value target for attack. If you can compromise that process, you can potentially gain control of all resources that are using it. Scary, right?

Efficiency

Cost reduction = Containers

As I said before, you can use both. However, containers have great potential to reduce the number of physical servers you rely on or your spend in any cloud environment. Especially now that there are orchestration solutions like Kubernetes and Swarm to help you manage your environment.

The only other thing that you should consider before deciding what to put in a container is the next point. . .

Performance

Performance = Depends

If you have services (applications) that have very spiky workloads or require a great deal of resources, you have to make very careful decisions about what services you pair together. This is true of both VMs and containers. The reason being that there are a finite amount of resources on the physical machine that is supporting the services. The closer that machine gets to 100%, the slower it responds to the service, and the slower your application runs.

The wrap up . . .

The container space is still maturing. There are sure to be many exciting announcements to come. One thing is certain: this isn’t a fad! While you don’t have to go and start “containerizing” everything in your environment, I would suggest that you start conversations regarding where they’re a good fit in your environment. After all, someone much smarter than I said “you’re either planning for success or failure. The only difference is deliberation.”

 

Oct
04
2016
--

YC grad Paperspace gets $4m seed round to disrupt virtual desktops

Paperspace online running multiple programs. Paperspace founders Daniel Kobran and Dillon Erb set out to solve a hard problem, one the typical startup might shy away from. They wanted to disrupt the mature virtual desktop market dominated by giants like VMware, Citrix and Amazon. Today they got a healthy $4 million seed round to pursue the dream — and announced general availability of the product. Investors for this round… Read More

Aug
30
2016
--

VMware update strives to place virtual desktops in modern context

PCs on a grid in front of a city skyline. VMware announced a series of updates to its virtual desktop (VDI) line today at VMworld in Las Vegas. The announcement attempts to set the virtual desktop in a more modern context, by offering customers a range of options in the cloud, on-prem or hybrid. What’s more, it’s trying to reduce the cost by partnering with a variety of hardware vendors from HP to Dell and even the… Read More

Powered by WordPress | Theme: Aeros 2.0 by TheBuckmaker.com