New Year’s Resolutions Fulfilled: VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4 on VxRail 7.0.320

Many of us make New Year’s resolutions for ourselves with each turn of the calendar. We hope everyone is still on track!

The Cloud Foundation on VxRail team wanted to establish our own resolutions too. And with that, Dell Technologies and VMware have come together to fulfill our resolution of continuing to innovate by making operating and securing cloud platforms easier for our customers while helping them unlock the power of their data.

And as a result, we are happy to announce the availability of our first release of the new year: VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4 on Dell VxRail 7.0.320! This release includes Cloud Foundation and VxRail software component version updates that include patches to some recent widely known security vulnerabilities. It also adds support for Dell ObjectScale on the vSAN Data Persistence Platform (vDPp), support for additional 15^th generation VxRail platforms, new security hardening features, lifecycle management improvements, new Nvidia GPU workload support, and more. Phew! So be resolute and read on for the details.

VCF on VxRail Storage Enhancements

VCF on VxRail Lifecycle Management Enhancements

VCF on VxRail Hardware Platform Enhancements

VCF on VxRail Developer and AI-Ready Enterprise Platform Enhancements

VCF on VxRail Operations Enhancements

VCF on VxRail Security Enhancements

VCF on VxRail Storage Enhancements

Support for vSAN Data Persistence Platform and Dell ObjectScale Modern Stateful Object Storage Services

Initially introduced in vSphere 7.0 U1, the vSAN Data Persistence Platform (vDPp) is now supported as part of in VCF 4.4 on VxRail 7.0.320. Check out this great VMware blog post to learn more about vDPp.

Beginning in this release, support for running the new Dell ObjectScale data service on top of vDPp is also available. This new next-gen cloud native software defined object storage service is geared toward those IT teams who are looking to extend their cloud platform to run Kubernetes native stateful modern application data services. To learn more about ObjectScale please refer to this blog post. Note: VCF on VxRail currently supports using vDPp in a vSAN “Shared Nothing Architecture Mode” only. 

The following figure illustrates the high-level architecture of vDPp.

 Figure 1 – vDPp and ObjectScale 

As a result of this new capability, VCF on VxRail customers can further extend the storage flexibility the platform can support with S3 compatible object storage delivered as part of the turnkey cloud infrastructure management/operations experience.

Giving customers more storage flexibility resolution: Check!

VCF on VxRail Lifecycle Management Enhancements

Improved SDDC Manager LCM Prechecks

This release brings even more intelligence that is embedded into the SDDC Manager LCM precheck workflow. When performing an upgrade, the SDDC Manager needs to communicate to various components to complete various actions as well as requiring that certain system resources be configured correctly and are available.

To avoid any potential issues during LCM activities, VCF administrators can run SDDC Manager prechecks to weed any issues out before any LCM operation is executed. In this latest release SDDC Manager now adds six additional checks. These include:

• Password validity (including expired passwords)
• File system permissions
• File system capacity
• CPU reservation for NSX-T Managers
• Hosts in maintenance mode
• DRS configuration mode

All these checks apply to ESXi, vCenter, NSX-T, NSX-T Edge VMs, VxRail Manager, and vRealize Suite components in the VCF on VxRail environment. Figure 2 below illustrates some examples of what these prechecks look like from the SDDC Manager UI.

 Figure 2 – New SDDC Manager Prechecks

Giving customers enhanced LCM improvements resolution: Check!

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager Flexible Upgrades

VCF 4.4 has been enhanced to allow vRealize suite products to be updated independently without having to upgrade the VCF SDDC stack.

 Figure 3 – vRSLCM Flexible Upgrades 

This means that from VCF 4.4 on, administrators will use vRSLCM to manage vRealize Suite update bundles and orchestrate and apply those upgrades to vRealize Suite products (vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight, Workspace ONE Access, and more) independently from the core VCF version upgrade to help better align with an organization’s business requirements. It also helps decouple VCF infrastructure team updates from DevOps team updates enabling teams to consume new vRealize features quickly. And finally, it enables an independent update cadence between VCF and vRealize versions which boosts and improves interoperability flexibility. And who doesn’t like flexibility? Am I right?

One last note with this enhancement: SDDC Manager will no longer be used to manage vRealize Suite component update bundles and orchestrate vRealize Suite component LCM updates. With this change, future versions of VCF will not include vRealize Suite components as part of its software components. vRSLCM will still be a part of VCF software components validated for compatibility for each VCF release since that will continue to be deployed and updated using SDDC Manager. As such, SDDC Manager continues to manage vRSLCM install and update bundles just as it has done up to this point.

Giving customers enhanced LCM flexibility resolution: Check!

VCF on VxRail Hardware Platform Enhancements

Support For New 15^th Generation Intel-Based VxRail Dynamic Node Platforms

VxRail 7.0.320 includes support for the latest 15^th Generation VxRail dynamic nodes for the E, P, and V series models. These can be used when deploying VMFS on FC Principal storage VxRail VI Workload Domain clusters. Figure 4 below highlights details for each model.

 Figure 4 – New 15^th Generation VxRail dynamic node models

Also, as it relates to using VxRail dynamic nodes when deploying VMFS on FC Principal storage, support for using NVMe over FC configurations has also been introduced since it is a part of the VxRail 7.0.320 release that VCF on VxRail customers can just inherit from VxRail. It’s like finding a fifth chicken nugget in the bag after ordering the four-piece meal! Wait, it is New Year’s—I should have used a healthier food example. Oops!

Support For New 15th Generation Intel-Based VxRail With vSAN Platforms (S670 and E660N)

In addition to new 15^th generation dynamic nodes, this release introduces support for two new 15^th generation VxRail node types, the S670 and E660N. The S670 is our 2U storage density optimized hybrid platform based on the PowerEdge R750 while the E660N is our 1U “everything” all NVMe platform based on the PowerEdge R650.

Giving customers more hardware platform choices resolution: Check!

VCF on VxRail Developer and AI-Ready Enterprise Platform Enhancements

NVIDIA GPU Options for AI and ML Workload Use Cases

As AI and ML applications are becoming more critical within organizations, IT teams are looking at the best approaches to run them within their own data centers to ensure ease of manageability and scale, improved security, and maintaining governance.

As a follow on to the innovative and collaborative partnerships between Dell Technologies, VMware, and NVIDIA that were first introduced at VMworld 2021, we are happy to announce, with this VCF on VxRail release, the ability to run GPUs within VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4 on VxRail 7.0.320 to deliver an end-to-end AI-Ready enterprise platform that is simple to deploy and operate.                   

Figure 5 – VCF with Tanzu on VxRail + NVIDIA AI-Ready Enterprise Platform

VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu, when used together with NVIDIA certified systems like VxRail and NVIDIA AI Enterprise Suite software, deliver an end-to-end AI / ML enterprise platform. And with VxRail being the first and only HCI Integrated System certified with NVIDIA AI Enterprise Suite and its supported GPUs, IT teams can deliver and provision GPU resources quickly in a variety of ways, while also allowing data scientists to easily consume and scale GPU resources quickly when they need it.

While getting into all the details on getting this set up is beyond the scope of this blog post, you can find more information on using NVIDIA GPUs with VxRail and NVIDIA AI Enterprise Software Suite using the link at the end of this post. VMware has additional information about this new support in a blog post that you can check out using the link at the bottom of this page.

Giving customers a simple path to unlock the power of their data resolution: Check!

VCF on VxRail Operations Enhancements

Configure DNS/NTP From SDDC Manager UI

This new feature simplifies and streamlines DNS and NTP Day 2 management operations for cloud administrators. In previous releases, all DNS and NTP configuration was included in the VCF Bring Up Parameter file that was used by Cloud Builder at the time of VCF on VxRail installation. But there was no straightforward way to make updates or changes to these settings once VCF on VxRail has been deployed. Now, if additional modifications are needed to these configurations, they can be performed within the SDDC Manager UI as a simple Day 2 operation. This feature integrates SDDC Manager with native VxRail APIs to automate VxRail cluster DNS/NTP settings. The figure below shows what this looks like.

 Figure 6 – DNS/NTP Day 2 Configuration From SDDC Manager UI

Giving customers a simpler and more flexible day 2 operations experience resolution: Check!

VCF on VxRail Security Enhancements

Activity Logging For VCF REST API Call-Driven Actions

Administrators can now ensure audit tracking for activity that takes place using the VCF REST API. In this release, SDDC Manager logs capture SDDC Manager API activity from SDDC Manager UI and other sources with user context. This can be used to ensure audit tracking of VCF activity and making analyzing logs easier to understand. Figure 5 below illustrates this activity. The log entries include the following data points:

• Timestamp
• Username
• Client IP
• User agent
• API called
• API method

 Figure 7 – SDDC Manager REST API Activity Logging

Each of the SDDC Manager core services has a dedicated activity log. These logs are in the respective /var/log/vmware/vcf/*service*/ service directories on the SDDC Manager VM.

Giving customers enhanced security logging resolution – Check!

Enhanced Access Security Hardening

This release disables the SSH service on ESXi hosts by default, following the vSphere security configuration guide recommendation.

This applies to new and upgraded VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4 on VxRail 7.0.320 deployments.

Giving customers enhanced default platform security hardening resolution: Check!

Log4j and Apache HTTP Server Fixes

No security conversation is complete without addressing the headache that has been the talk of the technology world recently and that is the Log4j and Apache HTTP Server vulnerability discoveries. VCF on VxRail customers can be rest assured that as a part of this release fixes for these vulnerabilities are included.

Kicking Log4j and Apache HTTP bugs to the curb resolution: Check!

To wrap up…

Well, that about covers it for this new batch of updates. For the full list of new features, please refer to the release notes listed below. There are additional resource links at the bottom of this post. We hope to continue making good on our VCF on VxRail platform resolutions throughout the year! Hopefully, we all can say the same for ourselves in other areas of our lives. Now, where is that treadmill...?

Author: Jason Marques

Twitter: @vWhipperSnapper

Additional resources

VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell VxRail Release Notes

VxRail page on DellTechnologies.com

VxRail page on InfoHub

VxRail Videos

Virtualizing GPUs for AI Workloads with NVIDIA AI Enterprise Suite and VxRail Whitepaper

VMware Blog Post on new VCF 4.4 support of NVIDIA AI Enterprise Suite and GPUs

VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations (TKO) on Dell VxRail is a jointly validated Dell and VMware reference architecture solution designed to streamline Kubernetes use for the enterprise. The latest version has been extended to showcase multicloud application deployment and operations use cases. Read on for more details.

VMware Tanzu and Dell VxRail joint solutions

VMware TKO on Dell VxRail is yet another example of the strong partnership and joint development efforts that Dell and VMware continue to deliver on behalf of our joint customers so they can find success in their infrastructure modernization and digital transformation efforts. It is an addition to an existing portfolio of jointly developed and/or engineered products and reference architecture solutions that are built upon VxRail as the foundation to help customers accelerate and simplify their Kubernetes adoption.

Figure 1 highlights the joint VMware Tanzu and Dell VxRail offerings available today. Each is specifically designed to meet customers where they are in their journey to Kubernetes adoption.

Figure 1.  Joint VMware Tanzu and Dell VxRail solutions

VMware TKO on VxRail

VMware Tanzu For Kubernetes Operations on Dell VxRail reference architecture updates

This latest release of the jointly developed reference architecture builds off the first release. To learn more about what TKO on VxRail is and our objective for jointly developing it, take a look at this blog post introducing its first iteration.

Okay… Now that you are all caught up, let’s dive into what is new in this latest version of the reference architecture.

Additional TKO multicloud components

Let’s dive a bit deeper and highlight what we see as the essential building blocks for your cloud infrastructure transformation that are included in the TKO edition of Tanzu.

First, you’re going to need a consistent Kubernetes runtime like Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) so you can manage and upgrade clusters consistently as you move to a multicloud Kubernetes environment.

Next, you’re going to need some way to manage your platform and having a management plane like Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) that provides centralized visibility and control over your platform will be critical to helping you roll this out to distributed teams.

Also, having platform-wide observability like Aria Operations for Applications (formerly known as Tanzu/Aria Observability) ensures that you can effectively monitor and troubleshoot issues faster. Having data protection capabilities allows you to protect your data both at rest and in transit, which is critical if your teams will be deploying applications that run across clusters and clouds. And with NSX Advanced Load Balancer, TKO can also help you implement global load balancing and advanced traffic routing that allows for automated service discovery and north-south traffic management.

TKO on VxRail, VMware and Dell’s joint solution for core IT and cloud platform teams, can help you get started with your IT modernization project and enable you to build a standardized platform that will support you as you grow and expand to more clouds.

In the initial release of the reference architecture with VxRail, Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) and Aria Operations for Applications were used, and a solid on-premises foundation was established for building our multicloud architecture onward. The following figure shows the TKO items included in the first iteration.

Figure 2.  Base TKO components used in initial version of reference architecture

In this second phase, we extended the on-premises architecture to a true multicloud environment fit for a new generation of applications.

Added to the latest version of the reference architecture are VMware Cloud on AWS, an Amazon EKS service, Tanzu Service Mesh, and Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) functionality provided by NSX Advanced Load Balancer to build a global namespace for modern applications.

New TMC functionalities were also added that were not part of the first reference architecture, such as EKS LCM and continuous delivery capabilities. Besides the fact that AWS is still the most widely used public cloud provider, the reason AWS was used for this reference architecture is because the VMware SaaS products have the most features available for AWS cloud services. Other hyperscaler public cloud provider services are still in the VMware development pipeline. For example, today you can perform life cycle management of Amazon EKS clusters through Tanzu Mission Control. This life cycle management capability isn’t available yet with other cloud providers. The following figure highlights the high-level set of components used in this latest reference architecture update.

Figure 3.  Additional components used in latest version of TKO on VxRail RA

New multicloud testing environment

To test this multicloud architecture, the Dell and VMware engineering teams needed a true multicloud environment. Figure 4 illustrates a snapshot of the multisite/multicloud lab infrastructure that our VMware and Dell engineering teams built to provide a “real-world” environment to test and showcase our solutions. We use this environment to work on projects with internal teams and external partners.

Figure 4.  Dell/VMware Multicloud Innovation Lab Environments

The environment is made up of five data centers and private clouds across the US, all connected by VMware SD-WAN, delivering a private multicloud environment. An Equinix data center provides the fiber backbone to connect with most public cloud providers as well as VMware Cloud Services. 

Extended TKO on VxRail multicloud architecture

Figure 5 shows the multicloud implementation of Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations on VxRail. Here you have K8s clusters on-premises and running on multiple cloud providers. 

Figure 5.  TKO on VxRail Reference Architecture Multicloud Architecture

Tanzu Mission Control (TMC), which is part of Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, provides you with a management plane through which platform operators or DevOps team members can manage the entire K8s environment across clouds. Developers can have self-service access, authenticated by either cloud identity providers like Okta or Microsoft Active Directory or through corporate Active Directory federation. With TMC, you can assign consistent policies across your cross-cloud K8s clusters. DevOps teams can use the TMC Terraform provider to manage the clusters as infrastructure-as-code. 

Through TMC support for K8s open-source project technologies such as Velero, teams can back up clusters either to Azure blob, Amazon S3, or on-prem S3 storage solutions such as Dell ECS, Dell ObjectScale, or another object storage of their choice. 

When you enable data protection for a cluster, Tanzu Mission Control installs Velero with Restic (an open-source backup tool), configured to use the opt-out approach. With this approach, Velero backs up all pod volumes using Restic.

TMC integration with Aria Operations for Applications (formerly Tanzu/Aria Observability) delivers fine-grained insights and analytics about the microservices applications running across the multicloud environments.

TMC also has integration with Tanzu Service Mesh (TSM), so you can add your clusters to TSM. When the TKO on VxRail multicloud reference architecture is implemented, users would connect to their multicloud microservices applications through a single URL provided by NSX Advanced Load Balancer (formerly AVI Load Balancer) in conjunction with TSM. TSM provides advanced, end-to-end connectivity, security, and insights for modern applications—across application end users, microservices, APIs, and data—enabling compliance with service level objectives (SLOs) and data protection and privacy regulations.

TKO on VxRail business outcomes

Dell and VMware know what business outcomes matter to enterprises, and together we help customers map those outcomes to transformations.

Figure 6 highlights the business outcomes that customers are asking for and that we are delivering through the Tanzu portfolio on VxRail today. They also set the stage to inform our joint development teams about future capabilities we look forward to delivering.

Figure 6.  TKO on VxRail and business outcomes alignment

Learn more at Dell Technologies World 2023

Want to dive deeper into VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations on Dell VxRail? Visit our interactive Dell Technologies and VMware booths at Dell Technologies World to talk with any of our experts. You can also attend our session Simplify & Streamline via VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations on VxRail.

Also, feel free to check out the VMware Blog on this topic, written by Ather Jamil from VMware. It includes some cool demos showing TKO on VxRail in action!

Author: Jason Marques (Dell Technologies)
Twitter: @vWhipperSnapper

Contributor: Ather Jamil (VMware)

Resources

• VxRail page on DellTechnologies.com
• VxRail InfoHub
•  VxRail videos
• Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations VMware page
• TKO on VxRail Reference Architecture