Attended VMworld2017 this past week in Vegas and aside from all the parties there was a lot of news, mostly for public cloud users.
In talking with analysts and others at the show it seems like VMware has recently discovered that they can’t fight the cloud, so they better join them. Early this year VMware divested itself of its vCloud Air Business to OVH, which removed their owned competition to the cloud. Now, VMware’s on a different tack, figuring out how to best work with today’s public cloud providers and implementing this.
Last year VMware announced an agreement with IBM and to supply vCloud Air services on IBM’s SoftLayer public cloud. This year, VMware ramps up other public cloud offerings with VMware Cloud on AWS and PKS (Pivotal Container Services) on vSphere.
First up, VMware on the (AWS) cloud
You may recall that earlier this year VMware showed a tech preview of vSphere running in AWS. At VMworld2017 they took off the wraps on this service and made it real. At first it’s only available in AWS US WEST region but they plan to roll it out to the rest of US soon and rest of the world after that.
VMware Cloud on AWS is vSphere, vCenter, NSX, and vSAN running ontop of AWS Elastic cloud services. Essentially, any VM that you run onprem, can be run on AWS, using VMware Cloud on AWS.
The AWS EC2 machines you run VMware on are BIG – 2 CPU, 36 cores (72 hyper threads) with 512GiB of memory and a local (SSD) cache of 3.6TB/10.7TB raw capacity. VMware Cloud on AWS requires four EC2 instances to run. No information about the networking capabilities but I assume HIGH SPEED.
The cost for the service is high but you are paying for 7x24x365 AWS EC2 services. For a 3 year “reservation”, it will cost $109.4K/host. That comes out to be about $3K/month/host for 36 months. VMware claims that on a 3 year TCO basis this would be cheaper than running an equivalent configuration onprem.
You can also contract for VMware Cloud on AWS on an hourly basis. You do have to have a VMware login and VMware credits (?) to do so. It’s certainly not as simple as just having a credit card and an AWS login. But the costs for this are $8.361/hour/host. This seems awfully high but there’s no direct comparison to other EC2 machine configurations. Although there is an EC2 X1.16 with 64 vCPUs (hyper thread equivalents), 976GiB DRAM and 1-1920 (GiB) SSD that lists for $6.669/hour – close, but not a complete match.
You are running a VMware service on AWS so the billing is done through VMware. And any data you move in or out of the cloud will be billed (through VMware) at whatever AWS would charge for the data egress/import.
It seems that if you “connect” your VMware Cloud on AWS to your onprem vSphere cluster (through stretched layer 2 NSX networking and ? other means) you can vMotion VMs from onprem to AWS and back again. There is a behind the scenes Storage vMotion that also happens to get the data to AWS so that the VMs can operate properly.
VMware vCenter offers a dashboard of sorts to tell admins whether a particular VM is a good candidate to move to AWS or not. This is based on the VM’s connections to other VMs and maybe the amount of data that would need to moved.
Next, (PKS) containers and more (GCP) cloud
VMware together with Pivotal and Google Cloud announced a tech preview of the Pivotal Container Service (PKS) on vSphere. The new service implements Pivotal Kubo, or Kubernetes container orchestration with Bosh HA infrastructure management ontop of vSphere. PKS also comes with Harbor a secure, enterprise class container registry from VMware
This would allow a development team to develop a container micro-services application, completely within a VMware environment and to run it under vSphere. This seems tailor made to cloud developers.
Kubernetes has worker and master nodes and each which would run as a VM on vSphere. Inside worker nodes, Kubernetes runs Pods which have one or more tightly connected container(s) which enclose an application and share context.
I was talking with the vSphere team and they had been spending a lot of time making vSphere native services available to PKS. This means that you can use NSX networking and vSAN, VVOLs or VMDK storage for your container (persistent) storage.
Not exactly sure where DevOps fits into PKS on vSphere but my assumption is that you could run Puppet, Chef or if your up to the challenge, vRA to automate application roll out.
There was specific talk of having PKS run on AWS, probably within VMware Cloud on AWS in the future.
Of course, PKS containers that run on vSphere are completely compatible with GKE (Google Container Engine) which runs on Google Cloud Platform
No information on VMware PKS pricing as of yet.
Where lies Photon and VIC (VMware Integrated Containers)
You may recall that VMware announced Photon last year which was a open source container framework and Photon OS which was an OS for Photon containers. This still exists as an open source project and is still being developed but there was nary a word about Photon this year.
VIC still exists. VIC can support running a container as a VM but is not a real container orchestration engine. Yes you could potentially run Docker Swarm as VM or a number of containers as separate VMs under VI, but this is not the same as having a fully integrated container orchestration and management service layer in vSphere. That’s where PKS fits in.
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Although timelines weren’t discussed there were a number of discussions that led me to believe that VMware on AWS would be rolled out to other public cloud provider (read Azure and GCP). And how long it would take to be rolled out to other AWS regions around the world was not discussed. VMware Cloud would really make sense to run on GCP, but Azure might be a bit of a stretch.
Similarly, PKS seems already heading for VMware Cloud on AWS and is already available in native form as GKE on GCP. But Azure already has a native Kubernetes Container Service. And there was no discussion as to whether PKS would be made available on IBM Softlayer or OVH vCloud Air.
Stay tuned more to come as VMware finds its true path to the cloud.