vRealize Automation 7.2 released

vRealize Automation is the automation platform by VMware. The first time I heard about it I was a bit puzzled. Don’t we all already do automation? Isn’t that the basics of what IT is? It depends on your definition of automation but the way vRealize brings it to us is not the way we did things. But it’s the way we want to do things.

A Short Introduction

So, for all of you out there who think that vRealize Automation (or vRA, as we like to call it) is not for him or her, think again. vRA can make your life so much easier. Imagine this: you want to test an update. What would you normally do? You would go to your test environment, if you have one, install it there and if it turns out that it does not cause any issues, you deploy it in production. That sounds like a viable way to test, but is your test environment a mirror of your production? Does it run the same patch levels? Does it run the same databases? Is it truly a source you can rely on? Probably not. If you are really good, you only have minor differences. And if we’re all honest, for most of us it’s not like production at all.
With vRA you could clone your production environment, have it redeployed with some crucial changes so it will not interfere with your real production, and make it available to you. Then you can install and test your update and really be sure it works or not before you deploy it in your actual production environment. And if you have NSX, the network virtualisation solution by VMware, as well, you can even have it create an isolated network bubble just for you. And the best thing is, vRA can even clean up after you and archive your test or just delete the whole test environment.
This is just one example of what vRA can do. There is so much more. vRA can talk to vSphere, obviously, and with this update it can talk to the latest version of it. But vRA can also talk to others. It features multiple ways of interacting with third party soft- and hardware. Do you want to offer developers the opportunity to create their own environment and does that include configuring firewall rules for a Cisco ASA or load balancing rules for an F5 or a Netscaler? You’re covered! Would you like to give your application managers a way to backup their app? vRA can work with a range of backup software flavours so you can create a single click workflow for your app managers to make it all happen without your intervention.
As said, vRA does that through blueprints. You create a blueprint by dragging and dropping the elements you wish to configure in the sequence you want to configure them. These elements can be predefined elements, third party elements, scripts and templates created by you and calls to external systems. You can also transfer information to other platforms like Chef, Ansible or Puppet, have them do their stuff and report back to vRA when ready. You can also create forms you want your users to fill out with predefined variables or variables you create yourself to use them in your workflow. And such a workflow can also incorporate an approval from a manager to prevent someone from requesting more resources than they need. Or when a  workflow exceeds the currently available resources. It also works in conjunction with other vRealize apps like Operations and Business so you can build it as far as you like and it’s really only limited by your imagination.
Why is this so revolutionary, you may say? Why would I need something that takes my job, turns it into an icon on a web portal that a user can click to have it do something that is really my job? Well, because this is what your job became as the dependencies on IT and the demand for more services went up and there was no way to make it happen other than have someone do it manually. But now vRA can do it for you so you can focus on things that really matter.

What’s new?

Now, that short introduction paragraph does not do justice to everything the platform can do. And with version 7.2 it can do even more. A short list of what’s new? Here you go. The vRealize Automation 7.2 release includes resolved issues and the following changes (taken from the release notes):

Accelerating Time to Value

• Enhanced installation API.
• Enhanced upgrade API.
• Migration Improvements.
• FIPS 140-2 Compliancy.
• OpenLDAP support.

Application Centric Infrastructure

• Elastic Application & XaaS (Scale out/scale in for Application & XaaS objects).
• Enhanced Load Balancer Functionality (Selectable Algorithm for On-Demand Load Balancers on the blueprint).
• IPAM Framework expansion to allow vendor plug-ins to support on-demand routed networks.

LifeCycle Extensibility

• New EBS events for blueprint components:
  • Pre- and Post- Event for each blueprint component.
  • Before|After request, Before|After Allocation, and so on.
• Reassign Managed Machines.
• Azure endpoint.

New Integrations

• ServiceNow integration to ITSM tools integration with ServiceNow.
• Container support.
• Admiral integration.

Miscellaneous

• Entitlement enhancements:
• • Add all users.
  • Delete inactive enhancements.
• Import vcd workloads to import vCloud Director workloads.
• Leap support – API & UI to OpenLDAP support.
• Service Monitor URL added for HTTPS.

ClonOS: New FreeBSD-Based Free/Open Hosting Platform

Currently, FreeBSD is well proven as a base for routers (pfSense, OPNSense, BSDRP) and NAS (FreeNAS, zfsGuru, NAS4Free). However, FreeBSD-based solutions are almost completely absent in the virtualization area, and ClonOS is one of the attempts to change that.
ClonOS is a new free open-source FreeBSD-based platform for virtual environment creation and management. In the core platform are:

• FreeBSD as the host OS
• bhyve
• xen
• vale
• jail
• CBSD (as a management tool)
• puppet (for configuration management)
• additional features such as go-micro services (obtaining VMs, resizing disks, and so on)

In the Works – VMware Cloud on AWS

The long-standing trend toward on-premises virtualization has helped many enterprises to increase operational efficiency and to wring out as much value from their data center as possible. Along the way, they have built up a substantial repertoire of architectural skills and operational experience, but now find that they are struggling to match public cloud economics and the AWS pace of innovation.

Because of this, many enterprises are now looking at the AWS Cloud and like what they see. They are enticed by the fact that AWS has data centers in 35 Availability Zones across 13 different locations around the world (with construction underway in five more) and see considerable value in the rich set of AWS Services and the flexible pay-as-you-go model, and are looking at ways to move in to the future while building on an investment in virtualization that often dates back a decade or more.

VMware + AWS = Win
In order to help these organizations take advantage of the benefits that AWS has to offer while building on their existing investment in virtualization, we are working with our friends at VMware to build and deliver VMware Cloud on AWS.

This new offering is a native, fully managed VMware environment on the AWS Cloud that can be accessed on an hourly, on-demand basis or in subscription form. It includes the same core VMware technologies that customers run in their data centers today including vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), Virtual SAN (vSAN), and the NSX network virtualization platform and is designed to provide a clean, seamless experience.

VMware Cloud on AWS runs directly on the physical hardware, while still taking advantage of a host of network and hardware features designed to support our security-first design model. This allows VMware to run their virtualization stack on AWS infrastructure without having to use nested virtualization.
If you find yourself in the situation that I described above—running on-premises virtualization but looking forward to the cloud—I think you’ll find a lot to like here. Your investment in packaging, tooling, and training will continue to pay dividends, as will your existing VMware licenses, agreements, and discounts. Everything that you and your team know about ESXi, vSAN, and NSX remain relevant and valuable. You will be able to manage your entire VMware environment (on-premises and AWS) using your existing copy of vCenter, along with tools and scripts that make use of the vCenter APIs.

The entire roster of AWS compute, storage, database, analytics, mobile, and IoT services can be directly accessed from your applications. Because your VMware applications will be running in the same data centers as the AWS services, you’ll be able to benefit from fast, low-latency connectivity when you use these services to enhance or extend your applications. You’ll also be able to take advantage of AWS migration tools such as AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Import/Export Snowball, and AWS Storage Gateway.

Plenty of Options
VMware Cloud on AWS will give you a lot of different options when it comes to migration, data center consolidation, modernization, and globalization:

On the migration side, you can use vSphere vMotion to live-migrate individual VMs, workloads, or entire data centers to AWS with a couple of clicks. Along the way, as you migrate individual components, you can use AWS Direct Connect to set up a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS.
When it comes to data center consolidation, you can migrate code and data to AWS without having to alter your existing operational practices, tools, or policies.

When you are ready to modernize, you can take advantage of unique and  powerful features such as Amazon Aurora (a highly scalable relational database designed to be compatible with MySQL), Amazon Redshift (a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse), and many other services.
When you need to globalize your business, you can spin up your existing applications in multiple AWS regions with a couple of clicks.

Red Hat boss Jim Whitehurst on how today's managers must be more inclusive.

Traditional management methods are rooted in the days of steam trains and textile mills and need to be updated to cope with a workforce that has to make decisions on the spot, says Jim Whitehurst. His name might not be familiar to you, but since becoming CEO of the open source tech company Red Hat eight years ago he’s transformed it into a powerhouse with more than $2bn (£1.5bn) in annual revenues and a $13bn market cap. So he probably knows a thing or two.
‘Traditional management developed in the late 1800s, basically to co-ordinate uneducated people to perform rote tasks in a very static environment’ he tells MT. ‘The problem is in the intervening 150 years the world has fundamentally changed. Rote tasks have or are being automated, so generally the people we hire now are hired to apply a degree of initiative, judgement or creativity to their jobs. This whole concept of a static environment where you say "let me plan what I want to do and then tell people how to do it just doesn’t work anymore – the world is moving too fast.’

Most executives still try to use these old school solutions they learned at business school, he suggests, and as a result they’re failing to get the best out of their workforce. Here are his suggestions for making sure your organisation keeps up with the changing times.

Give workers meaning and context

The role of today’s manager, says Whitehurst, is to ‘create a context in which people can do their best work.’ An important part of that is giving the work they do some meaning. ‘You need to start off with the mission of the company, why we’re doing it, why it transcends just a paycheck – meaning is absolutely critical.’
Mission statements are a bit old hat now but it’s nonetheless true that workers want to have a non-financial reason to do their job. At Red Hat that’s an obsession with the philosophy of ‘open source’ software development. A more down-to-earth example could be as simple as helping customers try great food or manufacturing the highest-quality widgets in the country.
Workers also need to see their role in delivering on that purpose. ‘People need to understand the strategy of the company and how they fit that strategy deeply,’ says Whitehurst. ‘They need to understand the context of how to make the right decisions.’

Don’t be ‘terminally nice’

Whitehurst was previously COO at Delta Airlines. ‘When Delta was in bankruptcy some of the advisers had a term: ‘terminally nice’. Companies often end up in that situation because people aren’t willing to have tough conversations. That happens a lot in business.’
While co-operation is good, sometimes sparks need to fly for things to progress. ‘You get better decisions if people have straightforward, open, honest conversations – even if they’re painful,’ he says. The role of managers is to get rid of the ‘elephant in the room’ to make sure that people are willing to have them.

Hire people that will fit in

‘As soon as you recognise that people aren’t emotional cogs, that they are emotional beings, you have to recognise that you’re not just hiring for skill sets, you have to hire for cultural fit as well,’ says Whitehurst. Lots of managers do that, but it’s often implicit, rather than explicit.
At Red Hat, ‘we recognise that we need people who are comfortable with ambiguity, that are very self-starting that actually thrive in a world where there’s not a lot of rules.’ One way they do that is by pro-actively hiring through employee referrals – ‘nobody knows a red-hatter like another red-hatter.’
It's a controversial tactic - focusing too much on cultural fit means closing your business to different ideas that could help it thrive. Managers need to tread the balance between hiring people that will work well within their organisation and bringing in identikit yes men.

Make decisions inclusively

In many businesses, ‘change management’ is about making a decision at a high level and then communicating the reasons for it to employees. Whitehurst says that’s the wrong way around. ‘It’s so much more effective to engage people in making the decision and then you have no "change management" – it happens during the decision-making process.
That’s partly about improving the decisions that are taken – ‘I’ve been shocked at how much better the decisions are because the people close to the problems are involved,’ says Whitehurst. But it’s also about making people feel they have a say. ‘In the less hierarchical socially connected world we live in today, the millennial type of people that you want to hire expect that they’re going to be heard.’
That doesn’t mean you have to do what they say, of course. ‘People don’t necessarily expect their opinion to win,’ says Whitehurst. They just want to have a say.

by Jack Torrance

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is an open infrastructure and management platform for servers and workstations with robust security capabilities. It is built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technologies and enables customers to virtualize both traditional and cloud-native applications. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is the open alternative. It offers a high-performing, fault-tolerant, and more secure platform for mission-critical, virtualized Linux and Windows environments. Red Hat reduces the cost and complexity of proprietary virtual machines (VM) through improved economics, interoperability, and agility of virtualization. Backed by Red Hat’s certified ecosystem of software and hardware partners, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers unparalleled performance, scale, and flexibility to support a broad range of critical workloads.

10 Leadership Lessons from Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com CEO

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg are famous names that we always heard of on the news and internet. But have you heard about Jeff Bezos; CEO of Amazon.com – the largest and most successful internet retail company in the world? Jeff Bezos currently tops Fortune’s latest list of the world’s greatest leaders. Let’s have a look on the leadership lessons that he practices that turned Amazon.com from a garage operated company to a multi-million dollar business:

1. Be Stubborn and Flexible

 “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.” This is what Bezos says when it comes to business. According to him, if you are not persistent enough to pursue your dreams, you will easily give up on the trial and error that you do for yourself/company. At the same time, you need to be flexible on the details to see the bigger picture when it comes to problem solving. In a nutshell, any entrepreneur need to have these two characteristics in order to excel.

2. Never Stop Experimenting

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.” Experimentation and willingness to invent has always been a part of the culture in Amazon. It’s how new innovations are born and how they stay competitive in the market.

3. Be Willing to Invent

Bezos lived by rule of rapid experimentation and invention. Invention is really important to him and his team at Amazon. He looks for people that like to invent and are always looking for ways to make products better.

4. Think long-term

Thinking long term requires a tremendous amount of patience. This is especially true when you’re the CEO who needs to focus on day-to-day operations. Since its establishment in 1994, Bezos encountered numerous obstacles and challenges in setting up the company as people barely know what the internet is.

5. Obsess About Customers

“Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.” At Amazon, the team practices to always start with the customer and “working-backward” approach to upgrade your service. When you work backwards, you start with the customer and their needs and problems.

6. Take on new and unique experiences

Innovative leaders always embrace new experiences as a means to engage in interactive learning.  It’s important to approach new activities with an open mind. When you’re working with a variety of people, processes and products or solving new, complex problems, you’ll see a big boost in creative thinking and you’ll gain new perspectives on the world around you.

7. Work in a Call Centre

We live in a digital age where everything will go viral especially when it comes to complaints and customer service. Bezos asks thousands of Amazon managers, including ­himself, to ­attend two days of call-center training each year. The end result: humility and empathy for the customer.

8. Every day is a new day for Internet

We still have so much to learn on the World Wide Web. In an interview, Bezos says that they treat every day as a new day for the internet as there is so much to learn and discover.

9. Insist on the Highest Standards

Leaders have relentlessly high standards – many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and driving their teams to deliver high quality products, services and processes. They ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.

10. Hire and Develop the Best

 Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others.

Goodbye vSphere Client for Windows (C#) – Hello HTML5

The C# client (AKA Desktop Client/thick client/vSphere Client for Windows) will not be available for the next version of vSphere.  Current versions of vSphere (6.0, 5.5) will not be affected, as those will follow the standard support period.  You’ve heard this from us in the past, but we’ve been waiting for a sufficient replacement before finally moving forward.  Second, we want to talk about the recent vSphere HTML5 Web Client Fling, user adoption, and VMware’s focus on bringing a great user experience.  Like the Embedded Host Client Fling (which made it into vSphere in 6.0U2), we plan on bringing this product into a supported release soon.
We’ll be referring to the new client as the vSphere Client, as it better describes the product, and isn’t a ten syllable mouthful (vSphere HTML5 Web Client).

Looking to the Future

VMware has been working towards the transition to HTML5 with the Platform Services Controller UI, vCenter Server Appliance Management UI, and the Host Client.  All three of these were very well received and have become the official interfaces for their respective components.  The last (and biggest) one to tackle was the management interface for vCenter Server.
vSphere Web Client has always been intended to be the replacement for the Desktop client, and many of our users have tried to embrace this during the vSphere 5.5 and vSphere 6.0 periods, spending their time working within the Web Client even with the Desktop client available.
While there were certainly issues with the 5.5 and 6.0 Web Client, many users that committed to the experience came to enjoy many of the new features and usability improvements.  We also continued to listen to our customers, making further efforts to improve the Web Client experience have been made across 5.5U3, 6.0U1 and 6.0U2, including VUM (vSphere Update Manager) in 6.0U1 Web Client.  We have made the Desktop client available during this period, which was much longer than originally planned.  But now that time is ending.
Additionally, due to the shift in backend services going from vSphere 6.0 to the next version, updating the Desktop client would have required a huge investment.  This may have been okay in a vacuum, but the required resources would have severely impacted the progress of the new vSphere Client, only to end up with four clients for users to juggle.  We decided to focus on bringing the new vSphere Client (HTML5 based) up to speed as fast as possible, simultaneously offering a great user experience and getting off of Flash.

The new vSphere Client (HTML5)

This decision is about VMware trying to provide the best user experience: a fast, reliable, scalable modern interface that allows you to get your work done is our primary goal.  The new vSphere Client is the best way to achieve that goal.  Many have already tried out the Fling (https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vsphere-html5-web-client), with approximately 40% of survey respondents deploying it into Production and using it daily to manage their critical environments.  With this Fling, we’ll keep the user experience mostly the same as the Web Client, which we’ve improved, based on your feedback.  We also plan on making additional improvements to make it easier for C# users to transition.
One benefit of the Fling delivery model is very fast turnaround.  We’ve been able to release a new version of the Fling every week, with new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements.  More importantly, we’ve been able to quickly incorporate user feedback into the product.  Sometimes this means simple bug fixes, sometimes this means changing our priorities to better address user needs.  While this pace and model of delivery may not be used for the fully supported releases, due to testing time required, we likely will continue to use the Fling releases to stay on track with users.  A fundamental part of this high touch engagement model is users staying as up-to-date as possible, and most of our Fling users are doing just that, so thank you!

Plugins

We also recognize how important plugins are, and the transition from Web Client to vSphere Client will take second and third-party plugins into account.  We’ve already started engaging with plugin developers of all sorts to get them moving to the HTML bridge, which will allow the creation of a single plugin that is forward and backward compatible with both the vSphere Client and the Web Client, creating a smooth transition path.  If you require more information on plugin migration, please contact us.  One great source of information is this site which contains a lot of future looking information about vCenter.  This site will be updated as more information becomes available, so keep an eye on it: http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-server/future-overview/overview.html
We do expect the plugin transition to take some time, and this means that we expect to ship the Flex based Web Client and the HTML5 based vSphere Client side by side for some uncertain period.  Everyone is very eager to have the new vSphere Client as the only client, but we want to respect the porting development time our partners require.