(mechanical whirring)
- Coming up, we'll look at how you can run your
VMware workloads natively in Azure with
the new Azure VMware solution by CloudSimple.
Now we're gonna show you how you can create
a VMware private cloud in Azure
and move your on-premises VMware easily to Azure
while continuing to use your existing tools.
Azure support for native VMware
and unified management of VMware VMs
in both vSphere and Azure and how you can extend your VMware
environment by connecting it to Azure services.
(energetic electronic music)
- I'm joined today by Markus Hain
from the Azure engineering team.
Welcome to the show.
- Thank you for having me Jeremy.
- So we recently announced for our VMware customers
that we've got now the ability to lift and shift
VMware workloads straight into Azure
all using the new Azure service from Microsoft.
So, can you start by explaining
what the Azure VMware solution is?
- So AVS, or Azure VMware Solutions,
is a native-managed VMware service
that gets deployed in Azure
on top of Azure Bare Metal.
It's a way for you to essentially take
your VMware on-prem environment
and move that into Azure natively.
- So you don't have to convert your hypervisor
or your virtual machines, they'll just work.
- It will just work,
there's no nested virtualization going on,
so we deploy a clean vSphere vSAN NSX-T
on top of Azure Bare Metal.
And then it obviously allows you
also to leverage your existing tools,
processes that you have deployed
around your VMware on-prem environment
and just bring that into Azure.
- Now do we also manage the host or the nodes and the racks
that are kind of running all this stuff?
- Good question, Jeremy.
So we actually take care of the management,
so we do the underlying hardware maintenance,
we make sure the nodes are up all the time,
and we also make sure that when VMware,
for example, releases a new version of vSphere,
we would deploy that to your environment,
so all you have to worry
about is really managing your VMware environment.
- Now once you're in Azure then aren't there services
that connect to other Azure services and workloads?
- Yeah, that's one of the best parts.
So, when you bring your VMware workloads into Azure,
you can now connect to the plethora
of Azure services that we have available.
So if you wanna have close proximity
with your workloads to our AI farms, our ML farms,
that's all possible.
- So it really sounds like the best of both worlds
in terms of setting up hybrid connectivity.
You can maybe avoid having additional capacity
that you have to buy on-premises.
You can hook up a lot of workloads
to Azure Cloud effectively
and our different services that we have.
And maybe you don't have to buy
different server racks, let's say,
if things are startin' to go out of support,
you need to expand capacity.
All these different things that you can do now
by effectively running a private cloud within Azure.
- Yeah the great part is,
is that let's say you're a retailer
and you need additional capacity during December
when people are buying lots of gifts.
You can scale up capacity
and you can scale down when things
start to quiet down.
- Right, and I suppose there are also some good benefits
in terms of DR or business continuity
and having those solutions in place as well,
but how would I get started
building one of these out and really start
using the solution in Azure?
- Sure, let me show you.
Typically you'll start out on-prem with your vSphere client
and that just represents your data center,
VMware data center that you have on-prem.
Let's say, for argument's sake,
you wanted to move that into Azure.
So one of the first things that you would do in Azure
is discover the service types,
that's part of the resource provider
that give you the capability to start
building out the VMware cloud.
And so we have what we call
CloudSimple Services, CloudSimple Nodes,
and CloudSimple Virtual Machine.
So in order to get started
you would first have to provision obviously a subscription
and then a resource group and within that you can
then create a CloudSimple service.
And the service essentially provides the shell,
or the outer layer for the VMware cloud.
The service does require you to have
some networking information,
but other than that, that's it for the service
and once the service is up and running,
you then go into the CloudSimple configuration portal.
The CloudSimple configuration portal
is a single sign-on, one click from the Azure portal.
Eventually this will all be integrated into one portal.
For now it's one click.
And inside the CloudSimple configuration portal,
obviously provided you have now purchased the nodes,
which is the underlying hardware or the host
that you're gonna build your private cloud from.
You're gonna create your private cloud.
Now your private cloud has a few options
that you need to provide.
One is a name, very simple.
Two is location, very important,
so it needs to be close in terms of latency,
and three is then the node type.
So we have two node types today.
They all have different compute,
different memory, different storage.
And then lastly, what's the most important part
is you have to specify a network range
that you can use for the private cloud in Azure
that doesn't overlap with your on-prem network.
Once that is complete you essentially click
create private cloud and it will take
around 40 minutes to an hour to initially create.
- Okay, so you basically have wired up
the different service components.
You've created the outer shell, the vessel of the services.
Then you've hooked in nodes
which are basically your servers or racks,
kind of the bare-metal pieces where your VMs are gonna run,
and now you've got it all done, it takes, you said,
45 minutes to an hour or so to get up and running?
- That's correct, once the private cloud is created
you have some other options inside the CloudSimple portal
that you can look at.
For instance, you can create additional VLANs,
that can all be done through the GUI.
You could also, for example, create public IP addresses.
So public IP addresses are really useful
if you wanna let your virtual machines talk
outside to the internet.
Currently they're unlimited, that may change in the future.
You can set up your VPN connections.
So VPN, if you wanna do a site-to-site
or a point-to-site connection to this environment,
that's available to you.
And then you can get obviously monitoring
and logging and alerts from the CloudSimple portal.
It's fully exportable, and you can still use vCenter
to get all your log-in information
from your hosts in conjunction with tools like vROps,
vRealize Operations, log-in sites.
And we're planning to, down the line,
integrate a lot of these logs with our OMS service in Azure.
- Okay, so now we've got our on-premises VMware environment
wired into our cloud, Azure private cloud environment
that's running VMware as well.
Can we do something to move
the VMs then from on-prem into that Azure environment?
- Sure, so let me show you how you can,
for example, decommission a data center into Azure.
Typically, decommissioning usually involves thousands
of Vms, so we'd be using tools like HCX
or there's also third-party migration tools
available to you.
In this case, what we're gonna be showing now is
just moving one VM with a simple Fling utility
that's available from the VMware website
across the two vCenters.
- Alright let's move one.
- You can see that I've got my source site
or this would be my data center.
I have a number of VMs running here,
and we're gonna be using the utility to move CloneTest4
which is a smallish VM.
We're gonna move that across into our target data center
and so I'm just gonna show you the target side real quick.
So CloneTest4 doesn't exist there yet, and it's--
- [Jeremy] No tricks up your sleeve.
- No tricks up my sleeve.
And so I'm gonna go to my VMware Fling utility
Cross vCenter utility and it's already configured
so that I don't have to do that.
All I still have to do is essentially select
my virtual machine, so I'm just gonna look
for that CloneTest4.
There it is, you can see it's fairly small.
It's like a gig of disk space.
Gonna select it,
and everything else is already pre-selected for me.
I might also just select the right datastore.
By the way you saw there that we have anf.
That's actually Azure NetApp Files.
We're experimenting with other datastores for customers.
Azure NetApp, as you know is
an available storage type in Azure.
Now that I've selected the CloneTest4,
I'm gonna click Submit,
and that is initiated.
That should be running,
and let's go back to our VMware in Azure
and see when that VM comes across.
Just gonna do a refresh here.
We can see there that CloneTest4 has successfully migrated
from our on-prem environment into Azure.
- So it worked, so before then we talked
about the networking configurations that you did.
Now if I recall correctly in VMware
we're using VLANs but in Azure we're using VNet,
so how do you get the two different
networking paradigms to talk?
- That's a very good question.
Essentially in this case,
we've set up a site-to-site connection
between the two vCenters in order to move the VMs across.
But one of the advantages that the service supports
is classic VLANs which are automatically created for you.
How this works behind the scenes is
I have my on-premise network
that connects to Microsoft Azure via ExpressRoute.
When we provision the VMware private cloud in Azure,
this does the translation
between the different network paradigms
for you ensuring that the network in your private cloud
and Azure can effectively communicate
bi-directionally between classic VLAN and Azure VNets.
- Alright so now we've got everything running
in our private cloud in Azure
but are there any other integration points
then beyond the networking side that we can use with Azure?
- Sure, let me show you a good example of that.
So we actually have integration
with VMware VMs inside of Azure.
So developers who have applications
that consume both Azure and VMware resources
can now manage these in a single ARM template.
So I'm back in my Azure portal--
- [Jeremy] So we're in a provisional VM here, I presume.
- [Markus] We are in a provisional VM
back on the Azure portal.
And so we've already spoken about the CloudSimple service
and the nodes, and now we're gonna be covering
the CloudSimple Virtual Machines.
So in order to create a new virtual machine,
you would simply click Add,
and that will bring up a very familiar dialogue
like you have with Azure IaaS--
- [Jeremy] It's like a resource manager
template kinda, yeah? - Correct.
And so I just have to make the appropriate selection.
So I select the resource group.
I'm gonna call this virtual machine Test007,
and it's in the right private cloud.
I'm gonna choose a resource pool.
So I'm gonna put it into my DevTest
virtual machine resource pool,
and you'll see that resource pool is
actually a VMware nomenclature,
it's not a Azure nomenclature.
And so we've mapped resource pools
to resource groups in Azure.
- Right.
- From a template perspective,
so do I wanna create a Windows VM or a Ubuntu VM?
These templates are actually coming
from your content library in VMware.
They're not from the Azure Marketplace
as you would normally create Azure IaaS VMs.
So I've selected, I'm actually gonna select
the CentOS template this time.
And once I've done all my selections,
I can just say review and create,
and this will then send to deployment,
and I can at this point now go to my vSphere client
and that VM should be visible within a matter of seconds.
So we can see deployment is in progress, so--
- [Jeremy] We've basically sent all the commands to initiate
the build-out of the virtual machine
within the vSphere environment effectively.
Now you can actually monitor it from vSphere.
- [Markus] Correct.
And you can see we head back in our vSphere client,
VMware in Azure,
and you can see the new Test007 VM that was created.
It seems to be running already,
so what we can actually do now
is go back to our Azure portal,
and let's go back to our virtual machines,
and let's find this VM.
We can see confirmation there that it was created.
I just want to show you a few other things.
So when you click on the virtual machine,
it acts like an Azure IaaS virtual machine.
Which means that you can put metrics on it,
you can create alerts on it.
For example if I wanna change the disk size
of the virtual machine,
I can go into the disk
and I can add additional hard disks to it,
or I can change the size of the disk.
I can change the network interfaces.
I can allocate more cores to the virtual machine,
just by moving the slider.
So it acts like an Azure IaaS virtual machine
but it's actually a VMware virtual machine.
- Very cool, so now that we're in Azure,
do you need to do anything
to actually connect up additional Azure services?
Can I actually select from the, kind of the plethora
of things that we can do in Azure?
- Yeah, so if we go back
and we look at all the Azure services
that are available to you today,
as you know there's many,
and you might have your eye on certain services
depending on certain workloads.
So what I've gone and created is
an Azure application gateway
and Azure application gateways are really useful.
They're a type of load balancer
that operate at layer seven
versus traditional load balancers
that operate at level four.
And layer seven is the application layer
and that really allows me
to be very specific around redirecting traffic.
Let's say based on URL, so we would have images in the URL.
You can send it to one web server and if you have videos
in your URL you can send it to another web server.
- [Jeremy] Makes sense. Yeah.
- It also facilitates the Azure application app gateway
and there are more advanced appliances
available in our marketplace.
This is a service that you can use
as a starter service.
If you want more advanced functionality,
you can go to the Azure Marketplace
and deploy appliances there
but this particular service comes with a WAF,
a web application firewall,
that acts really to inspect traffic
as it comes in and will look for things
like SQL injection attacks or cross-site scripting.
So going into the configuration of this app gateway,
you can see that you can specify backend pools,
and backend pools essentially make up your web backends,
all your web-end servers.
And as part of this backend pool,
what we're using in this case,
we have the choice to either use virtual machines
that sit inside of Azure
or, we can choose an IP target.
And our IP target right now is
actually a VMware virtual machine
that sits in our VMware in Azure deployment.
You can obviously have more than one.
You can have many,
and each server has a rule associated to it.
So you could, for example,
redirect traffic that fits a certain criteria
as it hits that web server to another site.
- Yep, and since they're all static IPs you can just target
the ones that you want to target
from within your VMware environment that's running in Azure.
- Correct.
Going back to the application gateway configuration,
when you create the application gateway
you either specify to use a public IP or a private IP.
In this case we've used a public IP.
So what we're gonna do
is we're gonna hit this application gateway
and see if it actually redirects the traffic
to our VMware web server inside of Azure VMware.
- Alright let's try it out.
- [Markus] Alright so let's give it a copy here
and I'm just gonna get out of full screen,
open a new browser window, type in that address,
gonna remove that part, and I'm gonna hit enter
and it brings up our web server that sits
inside of VMware in Azure on a VMware VM,
with a Apache web server.
And so this essentially means that we've taken traffic
from our Azure load balancer
and we've routed that all the way
into the VMware private cloud
to hit our backend pool of VMware web servers.
- Right, so this has basically punched its way
all the way down to that virtual machine.
It's really, really awesome stuff and great overview
of how you can actually run your VMware environments
natively in Azure, but what's next in this space?
- We've really just scratched the surface today.
There's lots more that we are working on to make
bringing your VMware environments to Azure
as seamless as possible.
This includes the work that we are doing
around storage integration,
and to bring you more computer options
and container integration.
- And if I want to build out one of these today
which regions for Azure is this available today?
- So today we are available in US East and West regions
and we are obviously adding capacity as fast as possible
to serve our customers rate of demand
and we'll be available in West Europe
within the next few months.
And if you want to learn more about the solution,
just click on the link below.
- Great stuff, thank you Markus,
and thank you for watching.
Also, don't forget to subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics
if you haven't already.
That's all the time we have for this show.
Goodbye for now.
(upbeat electronic music)