I warn you in advance to be on the lookout, because they really want to get you in. In fact! They want to convert you. You can be a beginner in the world of VMware- based virtualization, or even a seasoned “old” professional, if you have earned the title with the past dozen or so years of experience you have accumulated since VMware set foot in the server rooms and data centers of our small country. Either way, you are in the crosshairs.
I myself first marveled at ESX version 2.5.2 when my colleagues and I tried to find a meaningful role for an eight-processor server monster at the time, sometime towards the end of 2005. What I experienced then and there markedly defined the next fifteen years of my career. Since then, versions have just kept coming, 3, 4, 5, 6... Not only in the main versions, but also in the decimal versions, and even in the update packages, there have been such "tricks", technologies, things to understand and learn that were just enough motivation for a person, having converted from the numerous "religious" trends to the church of VMware, to slowly become a preacher himself.
Now let me tell you a little about you. Please, you are a little different from the others. Why do I say this? It would be a bit of a cheap and shallow trick to get you to buy your new vacuum cleaner from me. So why? From experience. Imagine a highly credible proselytizer (that would be me now) whom any religion could hire for a week. As a lecturer one week, he preaches at a course for beet sugar fanatics that the “one true way” is bread with jam and sweet milk, and the next week he recruits believers with deep conviction for the aspartame-birch sugar-norbiápd church. This hired proselytizer watches faces while he works. He watches reactions. Who asks questions, who is interested? Who is the one who plays in the back row all the time, “watches movies” and surfs the Internet all week? Who is the one who comes late and hangs out at noon? It defines a very simple definition: in the flock gathered around every religion, there are basically two types of people. One who CAME, and the other who WAS SENT. Not only “mostly” or “basically”, but with very, very few exceptions, everyone COME to VMware trainings. Those who come want to receive, are interested, pay attention. They ask questions and argue. They don’t hang out, they don’t surf the Internet all day in the classroom. So, if you come to a VMware course , you typically create a group of people in the classroom who are not satisfied with flat and unnecessary knowledge, with collected course materials without concepts. The day goes by quickly with you and with you. Why?
The mass of people I have met as a speaker and educator over the past twenty years is a good sampling frame, and thus allows for fairly accurate statistical findings. (Be careful, I deliberately avoid naming competing platform(s) and comparing them to them in this article! At the same time, this very comment draws your attention to the fact that I have an opinion on the subject, but I will not reveal it. Infinitely diplomatic, but cunning, isn't it? 😊)
Those who come to VMware training courses , that is, you and your colleagues, are in the vast majority of cases not beginners in the areas of operation, system integration, troubleshooting and troubleshooting. It is not possible to understand a virtualization framework without being fundamentally aware of the characteristics of physical servers, network concepts, the role, behavior and components of storage. You may not be an anointed magician in the given field, but you have seen it before, or at least you know what it is about. Virtualization can be built on such foundations, because you understand and know the problems that virtualization itself provides answers to. That is why you are a little different from the others. And for this, I thank you, you.
Oh my goodness, this was just the introduction! Due to the release of VMware vSphere 7 – which happened this year, in the spring of 2020 – and the courses associated with the new version, the Training360 training center asked me to create a teaser document that could be used for promos and newsletters. Well, we're fine, I typed a lot of characters, you and I have already been mentioned, but nothing about poor vSphere 7. But I planned to describe so many beautiful and interesting things! The thing got stuck there, because I couldn't decide who to address. After all, you could be a prospective student of the vSphere 7 Install Configure Manage course , i.e. a beginner in the world of vSphere, or the aforementioned "old" fox, who has already gone through the knowledge of the Optimize and Scale , Troubleshooting , and even Design courses – in a previous version.
Useful, great truths can be described for beginners, but advanced people focus more on new things and changes.
Those who are just starting to get acquainted with the world of VMware vSphere can proceed most easily in version 7 according to the usual scenario: To start with, there is the ICM basic course and its direct continuation, Optimization and Scaling . After that, it is worth moving on to the special areas, such as vSAN , NSX, which is closely related to the vSphere system, NSX-T , Automation and private cloud options, management tools, such as vRealize Operations , or Log Insight. There may be Site Recovery Manager , VDI, i.e. Horizon, and Workspace ONE… A nice big white spot on the map that could be colored.
So, what do advanced users get from vSphere 7?
Don't be scared, just a short list follows, but before that I would like to announce a sad loss: The vSphere WEB Client, loved and respected by everyone, based on Flash technology, left us here with the release of version 7, forever. Its memory lives in our hearts, goodbye Flash, we will never forget it! Well, that's for sure! There are few things I plan to scare my future grandchildren with, but they will cry sleeplessly from grandpa's flash horror stories if I tell them... Rest in peace.
Have you seen Update Manager? It has been transformed into Lifecycle Manager, with expanded functionality, and you can now also strive for cluster-level firmware and software consistency.
Containerized Virtualization? The answer: Kubernetes! Docker has been present in data centers for a long time, VMware's solution offers a clustered environment, and with a little NSX, we can even enforce dynamic network changes on containers. (I don't fully understand this sentence either, but it sounds so convincing that it has to stay. I just ask you to nod your head for now, we'll discuss the details in the relevant course. 😊)
Security. You know, this is the thing that many people talk about a lot, but relatively few do. Identity Federation, i.e. ADFS integration, improved KMS functionality, Trust Authority, TPM, Secure boot. Advanced topics, for connoisseurs.
Dynamic allocation using DRS. DRS is an ancient routine in the world of vSphere, but it has been transformed in version 7, becoming faster-responsive and perhaps making better decisions about load rebalancing.
vMotion improvements enable faster, less disruptive moves, even for extremely large VMs.
vSAN could be a separate topic, but it is so tightly integrated into vSphere that it deserves to be discussed here. New features in version 7 include NVMe hot-plug and the NFS server role for external clients.
The thesis could be continued by listing countless other minor new features and changes, or it could be concluded very elegantly by discussing everything in the courses anyway. However, this article is being written in September 2020, so we cannot ignore the fact that the first major update package for vSphere 7, U1, will be released soon. What will we get in that?
The most important ones:
- Even larger cluster with up to 96 ESXi hosts
- 10,000 manageable virtual machines in a cluster
- Version 18 virtual machines with up to 768 vCPUs
- 24TB RAM per ESXi host
- EVC (Enhanced vMotion Compatibility) can also extend to VM vGPU, i.e. EVC for Graphics
Finally! Looking around in the small Hungarian reality, I can say that the 24TB Host RAM and the 768 vCPU fill a pressing shortage for us, for which we have been impatiently waiting for the solution, I think right, right? Or not? I also say that there is no Windows Domain Controller that would not be grateful for a virtual hardware configured with 768 vCPU! You are shaking your head now! You are right, I also have the terrible suspicion that I am not telling the truth.
We can also discuss scaling issues starting this fall, in the vSphere 7 courses .
Come, don't wait for them to send you! If they do, you might not be in the right place.