>>Hey friends, did you know that Azure
offers a comprehensive VMware
environment as a service? Azure VMware
Solution enables you to migrate
VMs from your on-premises VMware
environment to VMware-based private
clouds in Azure using purpose built
hyperconverged dedicated nodes.
Shannon Kuehn is here to show me
how it works today on Azure Friday.
[Azure Friday theme]
>>Hey friends, I'm Scott and it's Azure
Friday. I'm here with Shannon Kuehn.
How are you? >>I am well, how are you?
>>I'm living the dream remotely
but it's okay. >>Right, right.
Hopefully, one day we're not
living it remotely. >>Indeed.
But speaking of living the dream remotely,
people need to access their
stuff in the cloud remotely.
And you have some amazing demos and
you're going to explain to me how people
can kind of accelerate that journey into
the cloud with Azure VMware Solution.
>>Yeah, so, in my role,
we spend a lot of time talking about digital
transformation and how you adopt cloud.
One of the fastest ways we've found
is leaning on Azure VMware Solution.
So, if anybody's followed the product over
the course of the last couple of years,
we had a second iteration of
this reach GA last September,
right around the Ignite timeframe
and this solution helps you move your
infrastructure on-prem into Azure
faster without having to think through
that reskilling conversation, right?
That usually leads to a lot of anxiety.
Folks in the traditional
system administration world,
they feel a little apprehensive
about having to embrace IaaS and a
bunch of new vernacular and tooling.
So, this is an awesome opportunity
to take that into Azure,
take the tooling the operational
best practices,
things that people are already doing.
I'm placing it directly into Azure
on the Azure VMware Solution
Enterprise platform, so. >>Cool,
so I understand that you have some
slides and a demo to look at.
>>I do,
I do so when you're taking a look at this.
This is the software
specifications and the hardware
specifications.
It should feel familiar if you
are a VMware admin.
This is what you're getting right now.
If you're deploying this service,
it should match up to something
that you've got on-prem.
Or maybe it's a version ahead and the big
piece here is it's called at the bottom here,
so you need three nodes per vSphere cluster.
That's the minimum.
There's a maximum of 16 nodes per
vSphere cluster and then a maximum
of 96 nodes in an Azure private cloud instance.
>>How many people do these kinds of things
usually -- I can't think about sizing.
All I can see is that this is massive and
you get huge amounts of compute. You could --
A whole organization could run on this.
>>Yeah, I would think so.
We recently adjusted the maximum
nodes to 96 nodes and I think that's
a direct result of bigger enterprises
saying, "Let's embrace this solution.
Let's try and migrate our VMs
from on-prem and move into Azure."
It's a really great conversation point
if you're trying to get out of the
kind of the hardware business, so to speak.
>>That's cool.
Alright. This is another example of just,
I don't need to manage this on-premises.
I can move it into the cloud or if I
really like my on-premises
one I can get in there too.
So you're really offering the customer.
choice. >>Right, exactly. Which brings me,
I think to my next slide here,
and I think, it's a really interesting piece.
So, the shared responsibility matrix.
We got one for AVS and I'll call it AVS,
right? 'cause Azure VMware Solutions
a little bit of a longer term,
but if you're looking at this,
you're looking at the fact that
Microsoft is on the hook for hardware.
I think that's a nice reality.
You don't have to be bugged at two or four in
the morning when something decides to fail,
'cause it always inevitably fails
when you're trying to take, you know,
some sleep and trying to actually
sleep throughout the night, right?
So, Microsoft will handle that. Microsoft
will handle any of the version upgrades,
the patching.
You can then focus your
time on your guest OS,
your lifecycle management related
to the applications that you're
building within your environment.
You can think about configuration
management as well.
Some customers haven't really
embraced that aspect because they've
been too busy fighting fires with
their actual hardware on-prem.
>>Dig it. Dig it.
this is really important.
Like, that is the whole point you
or your company should be focused
on the business needs of your
company and not the administrivia
area of managing these things.
And this matrix makes it really clear
about what your responsibilities
are and what well what our
responsibilities are and what VMware's
are. >>Agreed,
agreed. And I think it makes
a little bit of sense here to talk
about the actual architecture as well.
So, when you deploy AVS you're
getting those three nodes and you're
getting an ExpressRoute circuit.
Because it's bare metal,
it needs to be peered into Azure.
So, you first need to connect that
ExpressRoute into Azure and then from
there you'll connect that ExpressRoute to,
Well,
you actually have to have your own
ExpressRoute on-prem connected into
Azure and then once you've got your
on-prem ExpressRoute connected into
Azure plus your ExpressRoute circuit
or circuit that's provided to you
by AVS and deploying the service,
you can enable global reach and then
that's what handles the East-West
traffic routing between the two circuits.
That's how you think about migrating
your VM from on-prem all the way
into the AVS private cloud.
>>Dig it.
>>So yeah, so I think that's
it in terms of slides.
And then you know, let me do this.
I will. Move over here.
And we can dig into what it looks like
once it's deployed. >>All right, here we go. >>So,
the environment gets deployed and it looks
a lot like every Azure service, right?
You've got your overview,
your activity log, etc, etc.
You don't really start seeing
your AVS components until
you come down here to manage,
so let's take a look at
the connectivity section.
And this does take a little bit
of time. >>Now when I've connected
to things you know remotely in
a very non-sophisticated way,
there's there's port forwarding,
and I'm thinking about VPN and I'm
thinking about double NAT-ing and secure it.
There's fifty-eleven ways to make a
virtual machine available to
someone over remote desktop.
And I hope that this is going to
be super easy and I'm not going
to do any of the horrible things
that I've been doing in the past.
>>No, you shouldn't.
So when you're building the service,
you're providing a management IP address,
which is different than the virtual
network you're connecting it to.
So I give it a 10.5.0.0/22 network.
It needs a minimum of a slash 22 CIDR block,
and then it'll carve it up for you,
which is awesome.
You don't have to worry about
submitting your environment.
I always feel like that's
the area I struggle with.
I'm not a networking person, right?
I'm an infrastructure person and so you are...
You've got exposure into very fast
ways of configuring the environment,
so this is the vMotion network.
This is the private cloud network.
This instance has the Internet enabled.
This is where you could think about
Azure Virtual WAN.
Thinking about things like
Application Gateway,
I really once you get your
environment into Azure,
I often joke it's like achievement unlocked,
right? You get a chance to be much closer to
the ARM API's versus trying to think
about that in a hybrid scenario.
And it does work.
It's just a little bit different, right?
Once you're closer to all the API's and make
some of this onboarding a little easier.
So this is the ExpressRoute circuit itself.
You would request the authorization keys.
I've done some configuration here.
This one was automatically configured for me.
This is the HCX environment.
As it stands,
right this is accessible once I'm inside
the vNet in Azure and I'll show you how
I'm going to get into that environment,
then you can manage your HTX environment.
That's the piece that does the
migrations from on-prem into Azure.
This just to configure your public
IP and then this is to configure
the ExpressRoute Global Reach. >>OK.
>>I like this one a lot.
So we've got - these are the credentials,
right? This is the IP address.
This is the username.
Same with NXT.
You're not having to think about
the password. Azure is doing it,
so all you're presented with here is the
opportunity to copy it to the clipboard,
which makes us ridiculously secure.
I think prior to, customers would have
to input their password and work with
support and change at every 90 days,
which is not a fun reality if you're
thinking about trying to put something
in the calendar to change that.
So Microsoft now handles that related
to cycling in the passwords or cycling.
out the passwords. >>Clever. >>And so this
environment has three hosts.
I can edit this environment.
I can go up to four with this instance,
but if you needed more you'd
have to work with support.
It does require a support ticket and
then you would just save and within
about 25 minutes you have another
node which is much faster than what
it would normally be if you were
dealing with vSphere on-prem. >>Indeed.
>>So we've exposed some of
the networking pieces,
so like I had mentioned,
NSX-T was a little bit different
for every single customer.
I only have one segment on here
and this is what gets preconfigured
when you spin up the service.
But if you wanted to pull out
your network segments and you
weren't very familiar with NSX-T,
we've exposed it in a way where you can
go into the portal and add new segments,
which is awesome.
If you've got clients that need a
DHCP server or DHCP relay because
everybody does things so differently,
you can configure it inside of here
without having to go into the NSX-T
manager to configure it there.
Port mirroring, DNS.
These are the other two pieces
you can think about,
so it's troubleshooting and
thinking about name resolution.
So that's all handled in the portal.
If you needed it right,
let's go back here to the resource group,
so I've got a jump host
configured within the environment
and this is how I access AVS
because if you think about it,
it's VMware-as-a-Service so it's
kind of in between IaaS and PaaS.
It's not one over the other,
so there's pieces of it.
You need to have access to and I
need a jump host sitting behind an
Azure Bastion which the Azure Bastion
host is a way to provide secure
access into that VM without having to
expose the RDP port or the SSH port.
We grab the password, I for some
reason can't remember this. It's good,
it means I've created a secure password.
And now I am in the environment in Azure.
So yes, you know deploys you
need a way to access it.
It's just like VMware on-prem.
Everything is accessible via the
web portal and they've made me... >>So let
me stop here and just take a moment
'cause I want to absorb this.
'cause this might be hard for
people to see and understand.
'cause you have a browser and they
have another thing in a browser.
Would you minimize minimize the browser?
The second, the inner, the inner browser?
Here is what you're looking at
is we're in an HTML5, you know,
JavaScript, a modern web,
RDP client that's included in Azure
Bastion and I see that you have your
Start menu on the outside and then
you have the other Start menu.
>>Yeah, which is crazy and this service
is loved by a lot of customers.
As a result,
it's a great way for you to lock down
your environment and... >>That's amazing.
You don't have to install anything.
There's no extension, it's just you
just hopped into a machine securely.
>>Correct, and there's a public IP on the Azure
bastion environment, but not on the VM.
Which, >>Amazing.
>>Yeah, right,
it's super awesome and so I always
recommend keeping something in
the event that ExpressRoute ever
decides it doesn't want to work
right. Things do still happen
once you're in the cloud,
but this way you could access your
environment in the event there's ever
any sort of issue with an ExpressRoute
circuit coming from on-prem
into Azure. >>Slick. That's really cool.
>>So let's let's just take a look
at the actual portal next, right?
I think a lot of folks get hung up.
They think it's extraordinarily different,
and it's, it's not.
I was in the right environment.
Hang on.
So let's grab the VMware
IP address.
Looks just like VMware on-prem.
We'll launch the HTML5.
Cancel out of that.
I will grab the password.
Type this on in...
And now Azure will take care of this.
You don't have to worry about this,
but now we're in the environment.
So let's go into kind of the home screen.
Looks just like vCenter on-prem.
You'll know it's different though, because
you see northcentral.avs.azure.com.
>>OK, >>And then you can go into your
host in your clusters. This is where
you see the actual host deployed.
And you know you'll see kind of the
making the model the version of software.
So if I'm hearing you say that if I'm
a vSphere person, I'm right at home,
even though my VM's are now in Azure, right?
But you will see little things like this,
right northcentral.avs.azure.com.
And then you can think about
integrating with Azure too,
so there's ways in which to
build like content libraries.
So when you templatize your
VMS and you spin them up,
you want to spend them up fast.
So you kind of develop a template
you can store those templates
on Azure Blob storage as well,
so there's there's.
Interesting ways of picking apart
Azure without having to drink from
the funnel of Azure as your first go
around you can kind of pace yourself,
so to speak.
I think this helps a lot of enterprises
out who are trying to think through
what a digital transformation looks
like without having to worry about
skilling up - out the gate, right.
They can skill up at a pace that
makes more sense for their company.
>>That's really slick.
Would this even have been inconceivable
a few years ago, right?
>>Yeah, and it's it's a crazy reality.
In fact, at first I was a little hesitant,
but as I started to get more of an
understanding on how this actually works,
I was thinking to myself, man,
Microsoft is finally reaching
system administrators where they
are versus having them take on IaaS,
which I mean.
I'm sure you've seen this right.
The idea that customers get a little
apprehensive taking on something
that's brand new and slightly foreign.
This feels a lot less foreign.
This starts to lessen that conversation.
Related to skilling and the
apprehension and potential anxiety.
Right starts to kind of lessen all
of that and gets folks comfortable
with what it looks like,
and you have the same tooling, right?
So you've got capacity.
Use the web GUI.
You can also use VMware's PowerShell.
Components, which is essentially just called Power CLI.
You can think about using that as well,
and you can bring about certain
tools into the mix without having
to really refactor everything.
>>This makes me think about, unfortunately,
the second page of my multi-page resume.
It's always fun when the second
page of your resume becomes a
checkbox in Microsoft Azure.
And it's just like, well,
I just rip that page out now.
Like I don't need to know how
to rack these servers anymore.
I have checkbox now.
>>Right now you can actually sleep
at night and not have to worry about
something potentially failing, right?
Because you guys design around things to
make sure that you've got high availability,
but somebody's going to be on the
hook for replacing that power supply,
adding additional RAM if they
need to right and dealing with
host management and maintenance.
It's not a fun reality,
and I think a lot of customers are
realizing the value of getting out of
the data center business and actually
focusing on moving all of that into Azure.
Versus keeping it on-prem.
>>Very cool.
So where can I go and learn more
about this and where can customers
play? >>A couple of different spots so
we have the VMware hands on labs
And if you are a VMware administrator
you should be fairly familiar with
the fact that VMware does these
click through demos so you can
literally go to this link,
click on take this lab and there will
be a click like a guided click through
on how to set up the cloud deployment
and connectivity and then the second lab
deals with the migration components.
Remember HCX is the piece that
helps on that front so that helps
you kind of spin up the environment.
Deploy the environment and migrate
VMs so that's one place.
And then we're in the process of
building a number of learn modules.
Now there's only one live,
but in the very short order here
we should have two more live and
that will kind of complete the core
path for Azure VMware Solution.
So this one deals with the
deployment side of it,
so it's not not a fairly lengthy amount of
time to go through it right about an hour.
And you'll learn how to plan for it.
You'll plan for the network topology.
You'll deploy the service
connected to on-prem.
You'll configure those NSX-T components
like I had walked through in the portal.
You'll think about,
you, know ways to configure and
segment your network environment,
and then there's a knowledge
check which helps you get that
badge and then the summary,
which is an awesome spot to go to.
>>Fantastic,
>>The last link is just landing page, right?
There's a lot of really
great content in here.
There's a bunch of great tutorials.
There's a lot of great how to guides
and this keeps getting expanded upon.
So as we start thinking through more
integration scenarios as we start
working with more and more customers
who have unique situations that we
have to think through and solution,
we're building great pieces for
customers to take and implement
in their environment so you
know you've got the overview.
The Quickstarts, tutorials, concepts
all this on the left here really
helps you tell that tale and deploy
the environment within your world
so it makes it a little easier,
I think.
>>Alright, well thank you so much for your time. >>Sure,
thanks for having me. >>Alright I am
learning all about how to accelerate
my journey into the cloud with Azure VMware
Solution - today on Azure Friday.
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