Aria

3 Reasons Why VMware vSphere Needs Aria Operations

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VMware by Broadcom recently announced a dramatic simplification of their product portfolio to unlock more value from customer investments. The cost of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the flagship enterprise hybrid cloud stack, was slashed, and VMware vSphere Foundation was introduced.

‘The new VMware vSphere Foundation delivers a more simplified enterprise-grade workload platform for mid-sized to smaller customers. This solution integrates vSphere with intelligent operations management to provide the best performance, availability, and efficiency with greater visibility and insights’. You can read the full announcement here.

Many customers already get huge value out of Aria Operations alongside vSphere and their multi-cloud environments. For those that don’t, this post will start by outlining 3 use cases that fit almost any organisation and persona, from VI admin through to CIO. The second part of the post will cover the easy setup of Aria Operations to help customers get up and running in no time, either with the new licensing model or using a free evaluation.

1. Do More With Less: Capacity Management

Often capacity and procurement planning is done manually, ad-hoc, and as a best guess estimate. I’ve been there myself, as a VI admin I used to think I knew all the workload demands and upcoming project requirements for the infrastructure I was responsible for. That knowledge is still relevant, but can be enhanced with accurate data.

Aria Operations delivers immediate benefits through optimisation and waste management. Oversized, hidden, or stale resources can be identified and dealt with accordingly. The context you have as a VI admin complements that information; a simple example is a clinical application that may not utilise its full resource allocation, but still requires it to meet third-party application support contracts. These workloads can simply be tagged and/or hidden from rightsizing. As well as oversized workloads, resources can be reclaimed from orphaned disks, snapshots, and idle or powered off VMs. Another common scenario is that infrastructure teams are asked to throw more virtual resources at application issues or poorly written code, which in some cases can compound the issue, especially when over allocating CPU. Detailed performance tracking and evidence backed recommendations can be used to justify workload sizing.

One of the most useful features of intelligent capacity planning is to visualise what-if scenarios. This could be a data centre move, hardware consolidation, architecture change, or cloud migration. What-if scenarios show the infrastructure requirement or impact of proposed and considered changes. Outputs can be exported as reports which serve as evidence for budget requests or change approval.

The final headline feature on this point is the cost visibility and show-back capability in Aria Operations. IT can raise cost awareness for other departments when they request new or increased resources. Many service owners do not realise the total cost to the business of an IT resource, and whilst not all organisations want to cross-charge, there is huge value in tracking and showing these costs to help reduce overall utilisation. Furthermore, the what-if scenarios mentioned above also include cost comparisons for infrastructure changes. You can add your own custom costs for facilities, employees, or enterprise agreements to ensure accurate figures.

2. Reduce Unplanned Downtime: Monitoring & Troubleshooting

VMware vSphere on its own provides great value as a foundational hypervisor, for management, availability, and resource scheduling. When it comes to troubleshooting, due to the complexity and interoperability of enterprise IT, multiple personas and information sources can be involved. Often this means supplementing vCenter information with command line or third-party tools, such as monitoring or log analytics, which can slow down the time to fix and lead to a blame culture between teams.

With Aria Operations, IT operations can resolve issues faster with actionable insights, overall and individual object health, and deep dive pathways into correlated metrics, data and logs. Management packs and integrations enable the build out of a complete application and infrastructure stack view, to identify bottlenecks or potential issues from a single source. What’s more, the management packs for applications and databases, previously licensed as add-ons, are now included in the software foundations mentioned at the start of this post. You can read more about VMware provided management packs in the Aria Operations Integrations Documentation.

The additional visibility afforded to VI admins is easily extended to the wider organisation. Custom dashboards and automated reports are great ways of sharing information and status updates with business units, senior management, and service management teams. There are plenty of built-in dashboards for monitoring and examining the VMware environment out of the box, but the VMware Sample Exchange also has a bunch of community developed dashboards and code samples to get you started.

As well as health and performance, Aria Operations provides policies, reports, and alerts against compliance and regulatory benchmarks, such as the vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and VCF security guides, or the PCI and ISO27001 hardening guides. Just like dashboards and reports, custom compliance benchmarks can also be created. Together these features help track and evidence items for audit and cyber risk assessments such as the Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF).

3. Track Your Decarbonisation Goals: Sustainability

Another priority for many organisations is enhancing their Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) credentials. The Aria Operations Green Score allows customers to directly gather and track information on the environmental sustainability of their on-premises infrastructure. This feature provides recommendations to optimise energy usage and carbon footprint. The score factors in workload and hardware efficiency, resource utilisation, virtualisation rate, and power source. You can read more about this topic and VMware’s own ESG commitments in the blog post Accelerate Sustainability Targets with VMware.

The built-in Aria Operations Sustainability Dashboards provide visibility into sustainability optimisation and emissions reduced by using VMware technologies. The available dashboards at the time of writing include: carbon transparency, carbon efficiency with virtualisation, environmental impact of idle VMs, and green supply. This is complimentary to existing features that already help customers manage their energy consumption such as workload right-sizing, resource reclamation and capacity management.

Installing Aria Operations

To get up to speed on Aria Operations, I recommend following the VMware Aria Operations: Journey To Success walkthrough which explains how to use and get the most out of each feature. The VMware Aria YouTube Channel and VMware Hands-on Labs are also great free training resources.

If you don’t have a license for Aria Operations you can sign-up for the 60-day evaluation. For a more detailed setup guide and topology overview consult the Installing VMware Aria Operations and Reference Architecture Overview sections of the VMware Aria Operations product documentation.

As always, before installing you should review the appropriate release notes and check the Product Interoperability Matrix. All deployments start out with the Aria Operations Manager master node. For the purposes of this setup, and for some small to medium production environments the master node is generally sufficient to manage itself and perform all data collection and analysis operations. You can build in high-availability and multi-site configurations if required using clustering the installation and topology guides linked above.

Appliance Deployment
  • Download the Aria Operations Manager OVA from Customer Connect here.
  • Allocate a static IPv4 address for the master node and a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) with forward and reverse DNS entries. Whilst the DNS entry is not strictly required for deployment, it is good practice to have ready.
  • You will need access to the vCenter Server to deploy the OVA. An account is also required to register the vCenter connector; you can use a dedicated service account, or a built-in account such as administrator@vsphere.local. The account can be changed afterwards if needed.
  • Log into the vSphere client and deploy the OVA (right click the target host or cluster and select Deploy OVF Template). The deployment wizard prompts for the usual options like compute, storage, and IP address allocation. You will be asked for the appliance size based on the sizing guidelines displayed on screen, you can also find the appliance requirements in the VMware Aria Operations Sizing KB or the more advanced interactive Aria Operations Sizer.
  • Do not include an underscore (_) in the hostname.
  • When the deployment is complete power on the virtual machine.
Appliance Setup
  • Browse to the appliance FQDN or IP address to complete the setup. You can double check the IP address has applied correctly from the virtual machine page in vSphere or the remote console.
  • For the purpose of this setup, and a single Aria Operations Manager deployment, select express installation. The Aria Operations Manager appliance will be set as the master node, this configuration can be scaled out later on if required. For larger environments and additional settings like custom certificates, high availability, and multiple nodes select the new installation option.
  • Follow the on-screen prompt to set an administrator password and click finish to apply the configuration. A loading bar will appear, this stage can take around 15 minutes.
  • When the setup is complete login with the username admin and the password set earlier.
  • Accept the End User License Agreement (EULA), and enter the license information. You can leave this blank for now or use an evaluation key if you have one. Select or deselect the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) option, then click finish.
Add vCenter Server
  • Now Aria Operations is ready to use we can go ahead and add the vCenter Server(s). From the launchpad, expand data sources and integrations, click add and select vCenter as the account type.
  • Enter a display name for the vCenter account, and add the vCenter Server FQDN or IP address. Since we deployed a single Aira Operations Manager use the default (built-in) collector group. Test the connection, enable vSAN if required from the vSAN tab, and then click add.
  • Give the vCenter account a few minutes to sync up, the status should change to OK. Back at the launchpad a prompt is displayed to set the currency; configurable under administration > global settings > cost/price > currency.
  • Permissions are inherited from vCenter by default, but you can also add your corporate Identity Provider under administration.
  • Once a data source is being collected and analysed, typically I would leave for at least 7 days before acting on any of the information presented. The more data available to Aria Operations the more accurate the recommendations will be.
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Accelerate Sustainability Targets with VMware

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This post will look at how VMware prioritises Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), and how it supports and accelerates its global customer base with their own sustainability initiatives. The focus will be on environmental sustainability in healthcare, specifically the UK National Health Service (NHS).

In October 2020, the NHS was the first health system globally to commit to delivering net zero, acknowledging that climate change and human health are inextricably linked. Sustainability ambitions for the NHS were previously laid out in the NHS Long Term Plan, and net zero was legislated through the Health and Care Act 2022 and the subsequent forming of Integrated Care Boards (ICBs).

The Delivering a Net Zero National Health Service Report is issued at statutory guidance for NHS trusts and ICBs. The report outlines 2 targets for the NHS carbon footprint. Firstly, for emissions the NHS controls directly, these will be reduced to net zero by 2040, with an 80% reduction achieved by 2028-2032. Secondly, for emissions the NHS can influence, these will be reduced to net zero by 2045, with an 80% reduction by 2036-2039. These targets are crucial to the Climate Change Act 2008, since the NHS makes up around 4% of the country’s carbon emissions. According to NHS England, an overwhelming 87% of NHS staff support the NHS Net Zero ambition, while 92% of the general public believe it is important for the NHS to work in a more sustainable way.

What does VMware do for sustainability?

VMware’s 2030 Agenda is a decade-long Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) commitment to build a more sustainable and equitable future. VMware has been innovating for 25-years and, through the introduction of data centre virtualisation and consolidation, has already had an immeasurable impact on the efficiencies of global infrastructure and emissions.

The VMware Environmental Social and Governance Report 2023 sets out VMware’s sustainability strategy, focused on visibility (data), efficiency (resources), and renewables (energy). VMware have been certified as a carbon neutral company continuously since 2018, and achieved 100% renewably sourced power for global facilities and co-located data centres continuously since 2019. Some of the key goals outlined in the VMware 2030 Agenda are listed below.

  • Achieve net zero carbon emissions for operations and supply chain, and reduce emissions 50% from FY19 baseline, by 2030.
  • Collaborate with enterprise public cloud partners to catalyse the transition to zero carbon clouds through the adoption of 100% renewable energy. At the time of writing 74 cloud providers have partnered with VMware for a sustainable future, including the likes of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle, Equinix, and others.
  • Collaborate with global governments as a sustainable cloud advocate, to drive policy making IT infrastructure more reliable, scalable, flexible, secure, cost-effective and sustainable.
  • Empower customers by enabling transparency into the carbon reduction impact of VMware solutions (more on this below).

VMware’s approach to sustainability goes far beyond decarbonising operations, it is also inherent to their technologies and innovation. VMware’s virtualisation solutions help reduce customers hardware and power consumption, improving efficiencies in data centre operations and management across compute, storage, network and security.

Furthermore, VMware holds itself, partners, and suppliers accountable for sustainability targets. At VMware Explore Europe 2023, mitigating the carbon footprint of an event with a 9000+ strong attendance was a top priority; using responsible materials, a green venue, and innovative climate partnerships. VMware has a strong history in foundation and community support, it comes as no surprise that when mitigating residual emissions, projects are selected that have the potential for systemic impact in communities. These carbon avoidance and removal projects include things like solar water heating, clean water and cooking, mangrove and forest restorations, wind power, and more.

VMware reports its climate strategy, targets, emissions, risks and opportunities in detail through an annual disclosure with the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). The reporting aligns to the recommendations provided by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). In FY23 VMware was recognised on the CDP Climate A list for their environmental transparency and performance on climate change preparedness. You can see VMware’s full TCFD disclosure, in the VMware Environmental Social and Governance Report 2023.

How does VMware help customers achieve their sustainability targets?

There are multiple ways in which VMware solutions help customers with their sustainability initiatives. This is not an exhaustive list, but rather the most common conversations I have with customers. The solutions are aligned to healthcare messaging but are applicable cross-industry at a high level, so you can apply your own use cases. If you’re interested in knowing more about this topic you can catch up on the Sustainability for Techies – Why You Should Care session recording from VMware Explore.

  • A digital, low-carbon transformation:
    • Ensure data centres and companies providing these services minimise their environmental impact and support the drive to reach net zero
    • Front-line digitisation of clinical records, clinical and operational workflow and communications, aided by digital messaging and electronic health and care record systems
    • Digitising the estate and smart hospitals; ensuring large-scale migration of trust data centres into the hyper-scale cloud; and reducing the need for the storage of large volumes of data
VMware customers can use Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations) to directly gather and track information on the environmental sustainability of on-premises infrastructure.

The VMware Aria Operations Green Score feature provides recommendations for customers to optimise energy usage and carbon footprint. The score factors in workload and hardware efficiency, resource utilisation, virtualisation rate, and power source. You can read more about this topic in the VMware Green Score in Aria Operations blog and Configuring Green Score to Track Sustainability documentation.

The built-in Aria Operations Sustainability Dashboards provide visibility into sustainability optimisation and emissions reduced by using VMware technologies. The available dashboards at the time of writing include: carbon transparency, carbon efficiency with virtualisation, environmental impact of idle VMs, and green supply. This is complimentary to existing features that already help customers manage their energy consumption such as workload right-sizing, resource reclamation and capacity management.

The sustainability features in Aria Operations are discussed in detail in the Improve Cloud Optimisation and Sustainability Stance with VMware Aria Operations session at VMware Explore. In this session, the internal VMware IT team (VMware on VMware) talk about how they operationalise the green score and recommendations within VMware’s own IT infrastructure.

With Aria Cloud Suite, available as Software as a Service (SaaS), customers can benefit from Aria Automation as well as Aria Operations. Additional efficiencies from automation and on-demand infrastructure can be gained with Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Automation). Automating the deployment of infrastructure services allows for standardisation and desired state configuration, as well as just-in-time provisioning. Environments such as test and development can be spun up and torn down easily, providing infrastructure efficiencies especially when paired with cloud services.

Public cloud users can optimise resources and spend with VMware Tanzu Cloud Health. Sustainability reporting for multi-cloud is now in private beta.

Cloud Health provides actionable insights and recommendations to optimise cost and governance in public cloud. It is aligned with FinOps practices, but has more recently integrated GreenOps too. GreenOps starts with visibility, taking a baseline of the current multi-cloud operational emissions, in order to identify optimisation and remediation opportunities. Next, and much like FinOps, the right teams need to be onboard to take action along with the right reporting and governance structure.

The GreenOps feature in Cloud Health is currently in private beta. It includes a multi-cloud dashboard and reports with carbon emissions, power consumption and equivalencies, for all compute instances and regions for the 3 major cloud providers. You can learn more about Cloud Health for FinOps and GreenOps practices in the VMware Explore session recording for From FinOps to GreenOps – Public Cloud Sustainability and Compliance.

Extend compute virtualisation benefits to the Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

The benefits of compute virtualisation with vSphere are well documented, but they also extend out to storage virtualisation with vSAN and network virtualisation with NSX. These components bundled together are known as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). VCF provides a consistent operational building block for a Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) in the data centre, private cloud or public cloud, and at the edge. The consolidation of hardware into Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) has an immediate impact on carbon footprint, reducing data centre racks, power consumption, cooling, and removing the need for external storage arrays. Beyond switching and routing, networking capabilities like load balancing, firewalls, and Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS) that previously required dedicated hardware and data centre space can now be run in software.

Hosting providers are becoming more competitive in their electricity consumption. This is measured by the amount of data centre power consumption versus how much of the total Kwh is being used by the actual computing power of the data centre, known as the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness). At a recent customer supplier day I learnt that currently IT accounts for around 2% of emissions globally, but this will rise to 10% by 2030. Every organisation is being tasked with digitalisation, at the same time as reducing their carbon emissions. It is absolutely vital to choose the right hosting partners, so with VCF customers have the flexibility to either self manage their infrastructure whilst selecting a data centre premises with a lower PUE, or consume their infrastructure as a managed service. At the time of writing there are 74 cloud providers approved as VMware Zero Carbon Committed Cloud Providers.

Migrating to public cloud unlocks world class optimised data centres with lower energy usage, increasing migration speed and reducing risk and cost with VMware.

All the benefits of VCF on-premises can also be delivered off-premises, in renewable energy powered cloud data centres. The hosts used by solutions like VMware Cloud on AWS typically allow for reduced hardware, with better consolidation ratios, and scale on-demand capabilities. Data centres run by hyperscalers are optimised and utilised to a higher scale than could ever be achieved by an individual organisation; the 3 major cloud providers have PUE ratios of between 1:1 and 1:3, by contrast the local data centre average in Europe is 1:6.

Many organisations will still retain an on-premises or hybrid footprint, whilst migrating to a combination of SaaS and public cloud services. Public cloud can help replace unnecessary energy consumption, such as always on dedicated storage arrays for archive data, with cold or on-demand infrastructure. In conjunction with cloud computing, further opportunities are presented for consolidating and optimising network infrastructure with SDWAN.

With VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, customers can deploy copies of production environments on-demand for a true Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) model.

Traditionally, organisations have had to double up on IT infrastructure to provide Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities essential for business continuity. This model presents obvious drawbacks in the doubling of cost, hardware, power consumption, operational support, maintenance, and a big impact on sustainability initiatives. VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) enables a DRaaS model that can potentially remove or reduce the need for a complete secondary infrastructure stack. VCDR replicates immutable copies of workloads to a cloud based scale-out file system. In the event of an outage or ransomware attack, VCDR mounts the file system to on-demand infrastructure using VMware Cloud on AWS. This approach significantly reduces the overhead of DR cost and carbon footprint.

  • Reduce travel and transport:
    • Digitally enabled care models and channels for citizens that will significantly reduce travel and journeys to physical healthcare locations, with care closer to home being delivered through remote consultations and monitoring.
    • Approximately 3.5% (9.5 billion miles) of all road travel in England relates to patients, visitors, staff and suppliers to the NHS, contributing around 14% of the system’s total emissions.

The solutions mentioned above provide the underlying resilient and secure foundation for digitally enabled services. Promoting self-service through modern, Internet facing applications, along with Integrated Care Board and Partnership collaborations, can also help improve accessibility and further reduce overall carbon footprint.

Take advantage of a distributed workforce and offer users both flexibility and consistency with VMware’s End User Computing (EUC) solutions.

Remote work has a number of immediate benefits on carbon emissions across all industries. The obvious ones include less commuter travel and optimising the way organisations use their buildings. Where there are customer, or in this example patient, facing activities the commute of the patients and visitors is also removed. In healthcare published desktops and applications with VMware Horizon and Workspace ONE enable use cases such as telemedicine and teleradiology, to reduce waiting times and access a wider talent pool of remote clinicians.

It’s not just about remote and distributed workforces either. Carbon footprint for those with fixed locations can still benefit from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) delivery by utilising low power consuming thin client devices over thick clients. Features like multi-session desktops enable consolidation of compute power for multiple people accessing the same applications. In many cases, a full desktop instance isn’t needed and applications can be published directly to the relevant role.

The transition of applications and services to edge locations can be enhanced with SDWAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). In healthcare these technologies support examples like virtual wards and community or popup services, reducing the carbon impact of delivering acute care.

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VMware Explore 2023 Review

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Last week 9000+ tech enthusiasts descended on Fira Gran Via, Barcelona, for VMware Explore 2023. VMware’s flagship annual event started out in 2004, running under the hugely popular VMworld banner until 2021. In 2022 VMworld transitioned to VMware Explore, demonstrating the companies journey to a mutli-cloud and application focus.

This year, VMware Explore 2023 ran through 6-9 November, with over 750 sessions, and over 60 sponsors and exhibitors. Amongst the breakout sessions and the parties customer appreciation events, I’ve pulled together all the key announcements, along with insights into the healthcare showcases.

Be sure to visit the VMware Explore 2023 Video Library where you’ll find over 700 sessions from Barcelona, available on-demand. You can also use the GitHub page, compiled by William Lam, of VMware Explore 2023 Breakout Session URLs. Expect to hear how VMware is leading the way in cloud-smart, bringing the power of private AI to mainstream enterprises, and continuing to deliver breakthrough innovation.

Day 0

The Monday at VMware Explore is typically for industry and partner sessions. There’s a great buzz as people are arriving, checking in, and building anticipation for the general session the following day.

First up was healthcare industry session INDT1725BCN, Teleradiology Workshop: Ensuring Dependable Workflows for Radiologists, opened by Jens Koegler, VMware Healthcare Industry Director, with an opening keynote from Martin Curley. Martin is Professor of Innovation at Maynooth University and Director of the Digital Health Ecosystem at the Innovation Value Institute. Most recently Martin was CIO and Director of Digital Transformation at Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE). We heard about the Stay Left, Shift Left 10X strategy, which aims to keep people out of emergency and elective care. By keeping people well and managing chronic conditions from home, the movement of patients is shifted left to a community or home setting. Furthermore, increasing preventative and pro-active healthcare improves the quality of life and care, at the lowest cost. As we look at the continuum of care the cost increases as we shift from preventative, to home care, to community or primary care, to acute care settings.

We then delved into the life of a remote radiologist and their complex IT setup and challenges. We heard how VMware SDWAN improves and prioritises radiologists applications, along with VMware’s ecosystem of integrating technologies for secure remote access. Siemens Healthineers took to the stage to tell us about the increasing demand for imaging services and the shortage of radiologists, along with their virtual cockpit software for remote scanning, enabling radiologists to collaborate anytime from anywhere. The Siemens Healthineers representatives took part in a Q&A panel session on teleradiology, with Yusuf Mangera, Technical Architect at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. The discussion centred around the need for remote radiologists to increase productivity, provide efficient diagnosis, increase retention, and ultimately deliver better patient outcomes. Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust are tackling the significant shortage of skills by using technology to widen the pool of available radiologists remotely across the UK.

Day 1 General Session

Tuesday and the biggest day of the week, the general session was underway from 9am local time. Here is my take away from the key announcements and my favourite breakout sessions of day 1. With so much to see and do across the hub, the expo, and even a castellers’ human tower, I missed the donut wall! You can find out what else was going on throughout the day in the official VMware Explore 2023 Barcelona Day 1 Recap.

AI, AI, AI, Artificial Intelligence, if you hadn’t heard. Distributed computing and multi-cloud are at the foundation of AI, and we’re about to hear how we can make it easy to adopt AI securely in the enterprise. VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram opened the general session GEN2154BCN, Taking a Cloud-Smart Approach to Harness the Power of Generative AI, in VMware’s 25th year of milestones and accomplishments. Raghu introduced Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, who committed to continued innovation by investing in R&D and the VMware ecosystem, whilst simplifying how customers consume and configure VMware products.

Working in the healthcare industry, it was great to see Siemens Healthineers as the first major customer showcase. Siemens Healthineers are a market leader in CT/MRI scanners and software for analysing the human body, offering AI-driven solutions to support radiologists with the increasing demand for imaging. They use VMware technologies to develop applications on multi-cloud platforms, using Private AI to take learnings from local data back into central algorithms, as opposed to moving data around. The end to end process provides life changing outcomes for patients and speeds up workflows for radiologists.

Next, we were joined by Purnima Padmanabhan, VMware SVP of Cloud Management, to talk about product innovations. Purnima covered the VMware Cloud capabilities, anchored by VMware Cloud Foundation and delivered as software through partners and hyperscalers, along with security add-ons and overlay services to build applications. Some of the major new innovations include:

  • VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1 – provides innovation on your platform foundation, with support for generative AI and compute intensive workloads. VCF 5.1 includes 2x GPU capacity to accelerate AI, 4x storage performance boost with vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA), and a bill of materials featuring vSphere/vSAN 8.0 U2, NSX 4.1.2.1, and SDDC Manager 5.1.0.0.
  • VMware vSAN Max – delivers petabyte scale disaggregated storage, allowing storage to scale independent of compute, but still be managed from the same control plane. There’s also a broader choice of certified VMware vSAN Ready Nodes now available.
  • New Developer, Data, and Security Services for Sovereign Clouds – last year, I wrote about VMware Sovereign Cloud; a framework of guiding principles and best practices to deliver cloud services that adhere to the data sovereignty requirements of a specific jurisdiction. A sovereign cloud seeks to augment existing platforms and regulations, with a specific focus on putting the customer in complete control of their data. Today VMware Sovereign Cloud is a powerful, interconnected, and global ecosystem of 57 cloud providers in 33 different countries. This is a super relevant topic for the NHS, as we know the overwhelming majority of UK citizens believe it is important their data does not leave UK shores. VMware Sovereign Cloud is about more than just data locality, but also regulatory and jurisdictional control. As well as security enhancements, such as Bring Your Own Keys (BYOK) and Bring Your Own Key Management Systems (BYO-KMS), a range of further data and developer services have been added to VMware Sovereign Cloud for more agility, better resiliency and faster innovation. You can see the full list here.
  • VMware Live Recovery – VMware announced a new solution that will provide protection for ransomware and disaster recovery across VMware Cloud in one unified console, allowing customers to take advantage of unified protection, secure cyber recovery, and simplified consumption. The functionality in VMware Site Recovery Manager and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery with Ransomware Recovery, is now available in a flexible adoption model from a single console.

Moving on and Chris Wolf, VP VMware AI Labs, took to the stage to discuss all things generative AI. At VMware Explore Las Vegas, VMware announced Private AI; an architectural approach that balances the business gains from AI with the privacy and compliance needs of the organisation. The key partnership was VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia and a VMware Private AI Open Ecosystem. A Reference Architecture for VMware Private AI was accompanied at VMware Explore Barcelona by Starter Packs for VMware Private AI.

Private AI Gains Momentum at VMware Explore Barcelona contains all the Private AI keynote announcements, also summarised below. The AI use case with Siemens Healthineers earlier in the general session is outlined fully in the article AI’s Healthcare Revolution Draws Closer with Multi-Cloud.

  • Accelerating Data-Driven Innovation with Next Generation VMware Data Services Manager – the new VMware Data Services Manager will ensure best-in-class management for a wide range of data services, not just databases, as a natively integrated experience for VMware Cloud Foundation customers. MinIO Object Store will be the first third-party object storage natively integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation through Data Services Manager. MinIO is a highly performant and resilient object store and ideal solution for data lake and large-scale AI/ML use cases.
    • VMware and Google Cloud Announce Database Solution for Traditional and Generative AI Applications on VMware Cloud Foundation – VMware and Google announced a partnership to deliver Google Cloud’s AlloyDB Omni database to VMware Cloud Foundation, starting with on-premises private clouds. AlloyDB Omni is a PostgreSQL-compatible database that runs anywhere and offers built-in support for generative AI. It will integrate into VMware Cloud Foundation using VMware Data Services Manager for simplified management and developer-friendly consumption, whilst providing superior performance and scalability with VMware vSAN.
  • VMware Collaborates with Intel to Unlock Private AI Everywhere – VMware and Intel extended over 2 decades of joint innovation with a validated AI stack, based on VMware Cloud Foundation, Intel’s AI software suite, Intel processors with built-in AI accelerators, and Intel Max Series GPU’s. Customers can use their existing general-purpose VMware and Intel infrastructure with open source software to simplify building and deploying AI models.
  • IBM and VMware Help Enterprises Adopt Generative AI with watsonx On-Premises – born out of the IBM and VMware Joint Innovation Lab, IBM and VMware are bringing together VMware Cloud Foundation, Red Hat OpenShift and the IBM watsonx AI and Data Platform. This partnership will allow enterprises access to IBM watsonx in on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, unlocking generative AI use cases at close proximity to mission-critical operations.
  • New Innovations to Accelerate Software-Defined Edge Adoption – there were multiple announcements in this area, including new VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator telemetry capabilities for better visibility of edge workloads. Edge operations have been simplified with the introduction of Intelligent Assist, and edge security enhanced with Microsoft Security Copilot and Symantec integrations.

Finally, here are some of the additional announcements and innovations from modern applications to anywhere workspace:

And breathe! If you’re still reading, and you still want more, all of the technical announcements are pulled together nicely in the What’s New at VMware Explore 2023 page, or for higher level there’s the VMware Explore 2023 Media Kit page.

Day 1 Customer Breakout Sessions

Next, it was on to the breakout sessions starting with MAPB1443BCN, UK Health Security Agency Streamlines Cloud to Accelerate Digital Healthcare. In a really informative session from Jonny Da Silva, Head of DevOps, we listened to UKHSA’s challenges around deploying high-demand services to multi-cloud, with a need for consistent security, operational, and cost policies. UKHSA are responsible for protecting the country against health threats and share best practice and data globally. They work as an Arm’s Length Body for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) alongside NHS England.

UKHSA developed new capabilities to unify governance, automate account provisioning, and build in guardrails and policies, using VMware Tanzu Cloud Health. Cloud Health was a game changer for driving down costs and optimising cloud resources, it enables UKHSA to run a multi-cloud platform where service owners and partners have the flexibility of selecting the right cloud for each application. Cloud Health provided instant visibility and substantial return on investment, through monetary savings repurposed more effectively elsewhere. Jonny spoke very well about the mantra of doing it right first time, which has delivered an award winning platform and applications. In the future, by adopting automation and AI, skills will not be replaced but instead repurposed. If you’re interested in hearing more about UKHSA’s cloud journey you can catch the session replay and separate case study.

Running at the same time as the UKHSA breakout session, was session CEIB1442BCN, Deliver Hybrid Cloud to Modernise Infrastructure and Accelerate Innovation. Fortunately I was able to catch up on the recording to hear Keith Tudge, Datacentre Manager at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust, deliver an excellent session on implementing a secure and resilient private cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). VMware representatives first covered VCF use cases and the latest features in 5.0 and the newly announced 5.1. The main innovations brought in by VCF 5.1 include vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA), networking integration enhancements, support for DPUs with vSphere DSE (Distributed Services Engine), and support for both Terraform and Okta.

Then, and most importantly, we moved onto the customer spotlight. In 2021 Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust were running separate VMware environments in data centres that were not fit for purpose, with no site resilience, and obsolete hardware and software. The trust migrated workloads seamlessly using HCX to a new VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell VXRail platform with dual site mirroring and resilience, software defined networking and lifecycle management. Virtual Machines were moved throughout the day with no down time and no impact to clinical services.

Fast forward to 2023 and the trust completed a rolling 24 hour upgrade to VCF 4.5, starting at 9am Monday morning as a central London organisation, again with no impact on IT systems. Infact, as a seamless background task clinicians were completely unaware the platform had been upgraded. With VCF 4.5, the team were then able to start utilising Aria Suite, particularly Operations and Lifecycle Manager. Keith gave a great example of a complete network failure at a co-located site in March 2023. The data centre network outage saw 680 VMs restarted at a second site within 7 minutes of the outage. There were no out of hours calls and barely any noticeable impact on clinical services, due to the VCF architecture.

Overall the trust has seen a huge drop in the number of P1 and P2 calls and outages, more stable clinical systems, increased confidence in IT, ease of patching to address cyber vulnerabilities, and enhanced health reporting and monitoring. A great story but not the end of the journey! Chelsea and Westminster are planning next to migrate to VCF 5, automate more with Aria Automation, centralise load balancing activities into NSX Advanced Load Balancers, further secure east-west data centre traffic with intrusion detection, and expand the platform for VDI.

Onto the next one, session CEIB1800BCN, Customer Panel: Cloud-Smart Insights from the Public Sector. Hosted by Chris Dunne, VMware Head of Regional Public Sector Technology, this panel Q&A gave us a unique insight into both operating and cloud challenges for public sector. We heard from representatives of government and higher education about evading red tape and bureaucracy, and breaking out of a traditional public sector mindset.

The panel was in agreement that software enables quicker and more efficient digital transformation, but to be successful organisations need the people, skills, and culture wrap around. Other topics included procurement, upskilling, cloud migrations, flexibility, availability, portability, and proximity of both applications and data. I was sat next to an attendee from the NHS who commented it was reassuring to hear others with the same issues he experiences day to day. This isn’t a technical session but the topics covered are absolutely crucial to the successful implementation of technical solutions, well worth a watch.

As well as the NHS speakers in today’s breakout sessions, another highlight was East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT) winning Hero for Good in the 2023 VMware Customer Achievement Awards. With VMware, ELFT built a future-proof platform where IT innovates, scales and maintains access to digital care services. The trust swiftly migrated to the cloud, virtualised its networks and implemented a robust disaster recovery solution. Clinical staff are now less encumbered by technology and able to engage more with patients. More people have access to ELFT’s digital care services through digital pods, and patients have easier access to view and manage their own records.

Day 2 & 3

Wednesday was another jam packed day of breakout sessions, covering not only technical content but also leadership and self-development. Some of my favourites included VCF technical deep dives, AI integration with Google Cloud VMware Engine, Azure VMware Solution migration lessons learned with Lloyds Bank, automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Natwest, VMware Cloud on AWS migration strategies for public sector customers, and an overview of AI/ML workloads running on Intel AMX CPUs. You can browse the VMware Explore 2023 Video Library for these sessions and others, using the filters for your favourite topics.

Off the back of session INDB1728BCN, When Healthcare Meets Modern AI and VMware: The Results Are Life-Changing, I had a great chat with a NHS trust about piloting the use of AI in partnership with NHS England. The NHS AI Lab is rolling out a pilot of an AI Deployment Platform (AIDP) that acts as a store for AI medical imaging technologies used in radiology workflows. Finally, the traditional Wednesday evening VMware party took place onsite with the Manic Street Preachers. Check out all the other day 2 activities in the official VMware Explore Barcelona 2023 Day 2 Recap.

Thursday, the final day of a fantastic week at VMware Explore, and still a great hustle and bustle at the Fira and across the expo hall. Apart from any left over swag, the main healthcare agenda item today is session CEIB2113BCN, Securing Medical Devices and Data with VMware NSX and VMware SD-WAN. For those with an interest in blue light services, there was also the story of an SDWAN-enabled edge compute stack for emergency vehicles in session CEIB1985BCN, Building the Police Car of the Future.

Healthcare is becoming the most common target for ransomware attacks and data breaches are rising exponentially. As the session opened we heard examples from Waldemar Potratz, VMware, including a phishing email generated ransomware attack at a hospital in Germany, and the NHS Wannacry attack, which exploited a Windows 7 vulnerability in 2017.

Although banking and financial personal data may be the obvious target for cyber criminals, we learnt that actually your medical information is worth between 10 and 40 times that of your credit card number on the black market. Furthermore, AI is now being used to manipulate medical images, and medical devices are being targeted as a back door entry to a hospitals network and systems. Often the communication path for medical devices is unsecured, using protocols such as HTTP, and configuration changes can result in voiding the devices warranty or support status.

We heard how technologies like NSX micro-segmentation, IDPS, and NDR, identify application boundaries and implement a zero trust model over the top of the existing underlay network. NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB) and Web Application Firewall (WAF) is used to protect web applications and API’s, while SDWAN provides secure connectivity across sites and cloud applications.

You can find more NHS specific guidance on this topic in the NHS Micro-Segmentation Solution Brief which covers architectures for datacentre and connected medical devices.

Check out the official VMware Explore 2023 Barcelona Day 3 Recap for the full scoop featuring more innovative sessions, Hands-on-Labs, and live podcasts. And that’s a wrap, but save the date! VMware Explore 2024 Barcelona has been confirmed for 4-7 November, at Fira Gran Via.