In the first series on this post I looked at Azure VMs and provided a comparison with IONOS Enterprise Cloud, in the second part we looked at AWS, this final post of the series will look at comparing Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
As a bit of background in case you haven’t read the first or second parts yet, I’ve been working with the major cloud vendors for some years now and for me performance has always been a key factor when choosing the right platform, I’ve always struggled in finding the right balance of cost vs performance when choosing the right platforms and have created this blog to highlight some of the differences.
I’ve just started a new role as Cloud Architect for 1&1 IONOS Enterprise cloud and one of the main factors in coming here was the technology and some of the claims that it makes especially with performance and simplicity. This blog will highlight those performance claims and also the cost benefit that choosing the right cloud provider will be for you.
For these tests I’ve kept it simple, I’m using small instances that will host microservices so cost is one variable but performance is another, I will be creating an instance with 1 vCPU and 2Gb RAM, this system will be a base line for testing and I will use Novabench (novabench.co.uk) for some basic CPU and RAM performance modelling. There are so many tools out there but I find this one real quick and simple to test against some key attributes I will also be using the same tool for the instances so not unbiased results too.
So on with the comparison and next up is GCP for this I’ve selected a custom VM size as this is as near as consistent with other instances on the clouds I have been testing, The CPU used is an Intel Xeon 2.3Ghz and the price for this including windows server licensing and support costs comes out at £50.64 per month
GCP Pricing calculator for Custom VM
For IONOS Enterprise Cloud I’ve also selected a similar spec as GCP which is a 1 CPU and 2Gb RAM and have used the Intel Haswell E5-2660v3 based chip for the OS as this will be as close to the custom VM in GCP, Like GCP I’ve also included the Windows Server license cost in the subscription along with 24/7 support which is actually free. The monthly cost for this server is £59.18 so comparing costs of using IONOS Enterprise Cloud there is a slight benefit of using GCP as you would save £102.48 over the year, so looks like GCP has a cost edge over IONOS, so what about the performance.
IONOS Enterprise Cloud Pricing for GCP 1 CPU 2Gb RAM equivalent
First I wanted to see how the external and internal internet connectivity was performing, to no big surprise IONOS way out performed Azure by a factor of 2, which is to be expected given the infrastructure back end design running on InfiniBand and the datacentre interconnects. The download speed was comparable for Google which you would expect from the internet giant.
Next the focus turned to CPU, RAM and disk performance for this I ran the Novabench performance utility and performed tests on both servers, the tests did throw up some major differences between the two. Let’s take a look at GCP first
GCP custom 1 vCPU & 2GB Ram VM Novabench Results
The GCP results were interesting to a point that twice as much resources are to be required to get to the same level of the IONOS instance.The GCP instance had a more or less half that of a score for its CPU, RAM and Disk benchmark compared to IONOS but it must be noted that the GCP resources are shared resources instances being hosted on GCP, the RAM score was also at a much lower throughput with a difference of 11964 MB/s, but what was noticeable was that the disk read and write performance was half that of IONOS. the write speed was not what would be expected from SSD storage.
The IONOS Enterprise cloud exhibited near twice the values from the results to GCP.
IONOS Instance Novabench result
Conclusion
Due to the dedicated resources that are used by IONOS Enterprise Cloud it becomes apparent that other Public Cloud vendors have to double (GCP & AWS) or even quadruple (Azure) their resource configurations to be comparable in performance to IONOS. Comparing GCP to IONOS to catch up to a similar performance of that of IONOS Enterprise Cloud the GCP instance would need to be reconfigured to a custom VM with 2 vCPUs and 4Gb RAM size this is 2 times the resources of the IONOS Instance which would increase the monthly cost to £94.57 which would equate to £1134.84 for the year of which you would have to pay an extra £423.96 per year for an equal performance instance of that of the IONOS instance.
GCP custom 2 vCPU& 4GB Ram VM Novabench Results
Can you really justify that type of expense of spending an additional £400 per year for just one system for the same performance? IONOS Enterprise Cloud provides dedicated CPU and Memory and is surely the way to go.
Don’t just take my word for it, give it a go yourself, I’m sure you’ll be impressed with the results.
These are deprecated and will be removed in future versions, might as well change them now:
sed -i 's/normal_check_interval/check_interval/g' /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/templates.cfg sed -i 's/normal_check_interval/check_interval/g' /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/printer.cfg sed -i 's/normal_check_interval/check_interval/g' /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/switch.cfg sed -i 's/retry_check_interval/retry_interval/g' /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/templates.cfg sed -i 's/retry_check_interval/retry_interval/g' /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/printer.cfg sed -i 's/retry_check_interval/retry_interval/g' /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/switch.cfg sed -i 's/^command_check_interval/#command_check_intervald/g' /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg
We use Nagiosgraph, therefore we need this to continue processing data (the config file which we restored from the backup does contain the line already, therefore it’s mainly for future references).
sed -i 's/process_performance_data=0/process_performance_data=1/g' /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg
Nagios Core 4.4.2 Copyright (c) 2009-present Nagios Core Development Team and Community Contributors Copyright (c) 1999-2009 Ethan Galstad Last Modified: 2017-08-24 License: GPL
Things look okay – No serious problems were detected during the pre-flight check
If there are any configuration mismatches between the old and the new Nagios versions that affect your set up, then change them accordingly.
In this tutorial, we will cover the installation of Nagios 4, a very popular open source monitoring system, on CentOS 7 or RHEL 7. We will cover some basic configuration, so you will be able to monitor host resources via the web interface. We will also utilize the Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE), that will be installed as an agent on remote hosts, to monitor their local resources.
Nagios is useful for keeping an inventory of your servers, and making sure your critical services are up and running. Using a monitoring system, like Nagios, is an essential tool for any production server environment.
Prerequisites
To follow this tutorial, you must have superuser privileges on the CentOS 7 server that will run Nagios. Ideally, you will be using a non-root user with superuser privileges.
This tutorial assumes that your server has private networking enabled. If it doesn’t, just replace all the references to private IP addresses with public IP addresses.
Now that we have the prerequisites sorted out, let’s move on to getting Nagios 4 installed.
Install Nagios 4.4.5
This section will cover how to install Nagios 4 on your monitoring server. You only need to complete this section once.
Install Build Dependencies
Because we are building Nagios Core from source, we must install a few development libraries that will allow us to complete the build.
We must create a user and group that will run the Nagios process. Create a “nagios” user and “nagcmd” group, then add the user to the group with these commands:
Download the source code for the latest stable release of Nagios Core. Go to the Nagios downloads page, and click the Skip to download link below the form. Copy the link address for the latest stable release so you can download it to your Nagios server.
At the time of this writing, the latest stable release is Nagios 4.4.5. Download it to your home directory with curl:
mkdir ./nagios cd ./nagios wget https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagioscore/releases/nagios-4.4.5.tar.gz
Extract the Nagios archive with this command:
tar zxf nagios-4.4.5.tar.gz
Then change to the extracted directory:
cd nagios-4.4.5/
Before building Nagios, we must configure it with this command:
./configure --with-command-group=nagcmd
Now compile Nagios with this command:
make all
Now we can run these make commands to install Nagios, init scripts, and sample configuration files:
sudo make install sudo make install-commandmode sudo make install-init sudo make install-config sudo make install-webconf
In order to issue external commands via the web interface to Nagios, we must add the web server user, apache, to the nagcmd group:
sudo usermod -G nagcmd apache
Install Nagios Plugins
Find the latest release of Nagios Plugins here: Nagios Plugins Download. Copy the link address for the latest version, and copy the link address so you can download it to your Nagios server.
At the time of this writing, the latest version is Nagios Plugins 2.3.1. Download it to your home directory with curl:
cd ../ wget https://nagios-plugins.org/download/nagios-plugins-2.3.1.tar.gz
Extract Nagios Plugins archive with this command:
tar xvf nagios-plugins-*.tar.gz
Then change to the extracted directory:
cd nagios-plugins-*
Before building Nagios Plugins, we must configure it. Use this command:
Enter a password at the prompt. Remember this login, as you will need it to access the Nagios web interface.
Note: If you create a user that is not named “nagiosadmin”, you will need to edit /usr/local/nagios/etc/cgi.cfg and change all the “nagiosadmin” references to the user you created.
Nagios is ready to be started. Let’s do that, and restart Apache:
To enable Nagios & Apache to start on server boot, run this command:
systemctl enable nagios systemctl enable httpd
Optional: Restrict Access by IP Address
If you want to restrict the IP addresses that can access the Nagios web interface, you will want to edit the Apache configuration file:
sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/nagios.conf
Find and comment the following two lines by adding # symbols in front of them:
Order allow,deny Allow from all
Then uncomment the following lines, by deleting the # symbols, and add the IP addresses or ranges (space delimited) that you want to allow to in the Allow from line:
# Order deny,allow # Deny from all # Allow from 127.0.0.1
As these lines will appear twice in the configuration file, so you will need to perform these steps once more.
Save and exit.
Now start Nagios and restart Apache to put the change into effect:
Open your favorite web browser, and go to your Nagios server (substitute the IP address or hostname for the highlighted part):
http://nagios_server_public_ip/nagios
Because we configured Apache to use htpasswd, you must enter the login credentials that you created earlier. We used “nagiosadmin” as the username:
After authenticating, you will be see the default Nagios home page. Click on the Hosts link, in the left navigation bar, to see which hosts Nagios is monitoring:
As you can see, Nagios is monitoring only “localhost”, or itself.
Let’s monitor another host with Nagios!
Monitor a CentOS 7 Host with NRPE
In this section, we’ll show you how to add a new host to Nagios, so it will be monitored. Repeat this section for each CentOS or RHEL server you wish to monitor.
On a server that you want to monitor, install the EPEL repository:
sudo yum install epel-release
Now install Nagios Plugins and NRPE:
Now, let’s update the NRPE configuration file. Open it in your favorite editor (we’re using vi):
Find the allowed_hosts directive, and add the private IP address of your Nagios server to the comma-delimited list (substitute it in place of the highlighted example):
allowed_hosts=127.0.0.1,10.132.224.168
Save and exit. This configures NRPE to accept requests from your Nagios server, via its private IP address.
Once you are done installing and configuring NRPE on the hosts that you want to monitor, you will have to add these hosts to your Nagios server configuration before it will start monitoring them.
Add Host to Nagios Configuration
On your Nagios server, create a new configuration file for each of the remote hosts that you want to monitor in /usr/local/nagios/etc/servers/. Replace the highlighted word, “yourhost”, with the name of your host:
sudo vi /usr/local/nagios/etc/servers/yourhost.cfg
Add in the following host definition, replacing the host_name value with your remote hostname (“web-1” in the example), the alias value with a description of the host, and the address value with the private IP address of the remote host:
define host {
use linux-server
host_name yourhost
alias My first Apache server
address 10.132.234.52
max_check_attempts 5
check_period 24x7
notification_interval 30
notification_period 24x7
}
With the configuration file above, Nagios will only monitor if the host is up or down. If this is sufficient for you, save and exit then restart Nagios. If you want to monitor particular services, read on.
Add any of these service blocks for services you want to monitor. Note that the value of check_command determines what will be monitored, including status threshold values. Here are some examples that you can add to your host’s configuration file:
Ping:
define service {
use generic-service
host_name yourhost
service_description PING
check_command check_ping!100.0,20%!500.0,60%
}
SSH (notifications_enabled set to 0 disables notifications for a service):
define service {
use generic-service
host_name yourhost
service_description SSH
check_command check_ssh
notifications_enabled 0
}
If you’re not sure what use generic-service means, it is simply inheriting the values of a service template called “generic-service” that is defined by default.
Now save and quit. Reload your Nagios configuration to put any changes into effect:
sudo systemctl reload nagios.service
Once you are done configuring Nagios to monitor all of your remote hosts, you should be set. Be sure to access your Nagios web interface, and check out the Services page to see all of your monitored hosts and services:
Conclusion
Now that you monitoring your hosts and some of their services, you might want to spend some time to figure out which services are critical to you, so you can start monitoring those. You may also want to set up notifications so, for example, you receive an email when your disk utilization reaches a warning or critical threshold or your main website is down, so you can resolve the situation promptly or before a problem even occurs.
By default MariaDB is not secured, so you will need to secure it first. You can do this by running mysql_secure_installation script:
sudo mysql_secure_installation
Answer all the questions as shown below:
Set root password? [Y/n] n Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
Your Centos host is now ready for your application and is configured as a LAMP server
Finally grabbed some time to setup a new self hosted WordPress site, all the previous posts are now there, I’m using the IONOS Enterprise Cloud to host the site and incorporated Cloudflare for higher levels of resiliency and performance.
In the first series on this post I looked at Azure VMs and provided a comparison with IONOS Enterprise Cloud, this next part will focus on AWS.
As a bit of background in case you haven’t read the first part yet, I’ve been working with the major cloud vendors for some years now and for me performance has always been a key factor when choosing the right platform, I’ve always struggled in finding the right balance of cost vs configuration when choosing the right platforms and have created this blog to highlight some of the differences.
I’ve just started a new role as Cloud Architect for 1&1 IONOS Enterprise cloud and one of the main factors in coming here was the technology and some of the claims that it makes especially with performance and simplicity. This blog will highlight those performance claims and also the cost benefit that choosing the right cloud provider will be for you.
For these test I’ve kept it simple, I’m using a small instances that will host microservices so cost is one variable but performance is another, I will be creating an instance with 1 vCPU and 2Gb RAM this system will be a base line for testing and I will use Novabench (novabench.co.uk) for some basic CPU and RAM performance modelling. There are so many tools out there and I find this one real quick and simple to test again some key attributes also using the same tool for the instances will show unbiased results too.
So on with the comparison and next up is AWS, as AWS doesn’t have a 1 CPU and 2GB RAM flavour to choose from I’ve selected the M4_large size as this is as near as consistent with other instances on the clouds I have been testing all be it double that of the IONOS Enterprise Cloud size, the CPU used is an Intel Haswell E5-2660 and the price for this including windows server licensing and support costs comes out at $140.55 per month which equates to £109.22 as calculated by Google currency converter at the time of writing.
AWS Pricing calculator for M4 Large
For IONOS Enterprise Cloud I’ve also selected a slightly reduced spec to AWS and have used the Intel Haswell E5-2660v3 based chip for the OS as this going by my testing should be very close to the M4 Large instance in AWS, as with AWS I’ve also included the Windows Server license cost in the subscription along with 24/7 support which is actually free. The monthly cost for this server is £50.96 so comparing costs of using IONOS Enterprise Cloud there would be a saving of £699.12 over the year, a saving is a saving so on paper the costs look good so far.
IONOS Enterprise Cloud Pricing
Now what about performance tests between the two? First I wanted to see how the external and internal internet connectivity was performing, to no big surprise IONOS way out performed AWS by a factor of 2, which is to be expected given the infrastructure backend design running on InfiniBand and the datacentre interconnects.
Next the focus turned to CPU, RAM and disk performance for this I ran the Novabench performance utility and performed tests on both servers, the tests did throw up some major differences between the two. Let’s take a look at AWS first
AWS M4 Large Instance Novabench Results
The AWS results were interesting to a point that twice as much resources were required to get to the same level of the IONOS instance. The AWS instance had a more or less equal score for its CPU, RAM and Disk benchmark but it must be noted that the AWS resources are shared resources instances being hosted on AWS, the RAM score was also at a lower throughput with a difference of 5733 MB/s, but what was noticeable was that the disk read and write performance was half that of IONOS.
The IONOS Enterprise cloud exhibited similar results to AWS but consumed half the resources.
IONOS Instance Novabench result
Conclusion
Due to the dedicated resources that are used by IONOS Enterprise Cloud it becomes apparent that other Public Cloud vendors have to double (AWS & Google) or even quadruple (Azure) their resource configurations to be comparable in performance to IONOS. When comparing AWS to IONOS to get to similar performance of that of IONOS Enterprise Cloud the AWS instance would need to be reconfigured by a factor of 2 which would increase the monthly cost to $140.55 or £109.22 which would equate to £1310.64 for the year of which £700.12 would be for the cost of an equal performance instance of that of the IONOS instance, don’t forget this is for a single system so once you’re deploying 100s or 1000s of instances that soon racks up.
Can you really justify that type of expense of spending an additional £700 per year for one system for the same performance? IONOS Enterprise Cloud provides dedicated CPU and Memory and is surely the way to go.
I’ve been working with the major cloud vendors for some years now and for me performance has always been a key factor when choosing the right platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service, I’ve always struggled in finding the right balance of cost vs configuration when choosing the right platforms and have created this 3 part blog to highlight some of the differences I’ve seen between Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.
I’ve just started a new role as Cloud Architect for 1&1 IONOS, working in the Enterprise Cloud division, and one of the main factors in coming here was the technology stack and the surrounding network settings and some of the claims that it makes especially with performance and simplicity. This blog will highlight those performance claims and also the cost-benefit that choosing the right cloud provider will be for you.
For the tests I’ve kept it simple, I will be using small instances that will host eventually host microservices with Docker so cost will be one variable but performance is another, I will be creating an instance with 1 vCPU and 2Gb RAM, this system will be a baseline for testing, I will use Novabench (novabench.com) for some basic CPU and RAM performance modelling. There are so many tools out there but I find this one real quick and simple to test against some key attributes, I will also use the same tool for all the cloud vendors instances so this should show unbiased results too.
Let’s start by looking at Azure and for this I’ve selected the A1_v2 size as this consistent with other instances on the clouds I will be testing, The CPU used is an Intel Haswell E5-2673 v3 and the price for this including windows server licensing and support costs comes out at £62.20 per month
Azure Pricing calculator for A1_v2
For IONOS Enterprise Cloud I’ve also selected a similar spec and have used the Intel Haswell E5-2660 v3 based chip for the OS as this will be very close to the A1_v2 instance in Azure, Like Azure I’ve also included the Windows Server license cost in the subscription along with 24/7 support which is actually free. The monthly cost for this server is £50.96 so comparing costs of using IONOS Enterprise Cloud there would be a saving of £134.88 over the year, a saving is a saving, so on paper the costs look good so far.
IONOS Enterprise Cloud Pricing for A1_v2 equivalent
Now, what about performance tests between the two? First I wanted to see how the external and internal internet connectivity was performing, so no big surprise, IONOS way outperformed Azure by a factor of 3, which is to be expected given the infrastructure back end design running on InfiniBand and the datacentre interconnects.
Next, the focus turned to CPU, RAM and disk performance for this I ran the Novabench performance utility and performed tests on both servers, the tests did throw up some major differences between the two. Let’s take a look at Azure first
Azure A1_v2 Instance Novabench Results
The Azure instance had a low score for its CPU benchmark which makes sense as the CPU is a shared resource with other instances being hosted on that Hyper-V cluster node within the Azure cloud, the RAM score was also low with a throughput of 3929 MB/s, but what was noticeable was that the disk read performance was good with a throughput of 163 MB/s but write speeds were a complete polar opposite.
The IONOS Enterprise cloud eclipsed the metrics of the Azure instance and really showed off the advantage of having dedicated CPU and memory resources for the instance
IONOS Instance Novabench result
The CPU performance was 385% that of the CPU in Azure and for Azure to achieve a similar score an additional 3 CPUs would have to be added to maintain the same CPU score. The RAM speed also was way beyond that of Azure and achieved 19318 MB/s a factor of 3 times faster, the disk read & write performance both outperformed Azure, it did maintain an equal throughput for both write and read speeds with writes outperforming by 18 times that of Azure. Just a note here that I used a standard HDD as the storage medium and could have used an SSD instead which would have increased the performance even more.
Finally, I configured another instance in IONOS Enterprise Cloud using an AMD Opteron 62xx 2.8Ghz processor to see it that could match the Intel-based Azure instance and for much of the benchmark scores it was comparable to the Azure instance, even better the cost of the instance was £31.52 a month giving a saving £368.16 over the year. It should be mentioned that IONOS Enterprise Clouds let you configure cores and storage at will in the most granular way possible: core by core and Gigabyte by Gigabyte.
IONOS AMD Instance Novabench result
Conclusion
For Azure to catch up to similar performance of that of IONOS Enterprise Cloud the Azure instance would need to be reconfigured to a A4_v2 size this is 4 times the resources of the IONOS Instance which would increase the monthly cost to £182.44 which would equate to £2210.64 for the year of which £1599.12 would be for the cost of an equal performance instance of that of the IONOS instance.
Azure A4_v2 Instance Novabench Results
Can you really justify that type of expense of spending an additional £1600 per year for the same performance? IONOS Enterprise Cloud employs KVM based virtualisation making extensive use of hardware virtualisation and maps the CPU power of a real core to a vCPU and provides dedicated memory so it is surely the way to go.
VMware is announcing vSphere 6.7, the latest release of the industry-leading virtualization and cloud platform. vSphere 6.7 is the efficient and secure platform for hybrid clouds, fueling digital transformation by delivering simple and efficient management at scale, comprehensive built-in security, a universal application platform, and seamless hybrid cloud experience.
vSphere 6.7 delivers key capabilities to enable IT organizations address the following notable trends that are putting new demands on their IT infrastructure:
Explosive growth in quantity and variety of applications, from business-critical apps to new intelligent workloads.
The rapid growth of hybrid cloud environments and use cases.
On-premises data centers growing and expanding globally, including at the Edge.
Security of infrastructure and applications attaining paramount importance.
Let’s take a look at some of the key capabilities in vSphere 6.7:
Simple and Efficient Management, at Scale
vSphere 6.7 builds on the technological innovation delivered by vSphere 6.5, and elevates the customer experience to an entirely new level. It provides exceptional management simplicity, operational efficiency, and faster time to market, all at scale.
vSphere 6.7 delivers an exceptional experience for the user with an enhancedvCenter Server Appliance (vCSA). It introduces several new APIs that improve the efficiency and experience to deploy vCenter, to deploy multiple vCenters based on a template, to make management of vCenter Server Appliance significantly easier, as well as for backup and restore. It also significantly simplifies the vCenter Server topology through vCenter with embedded platform services controller in enhanced linked mode, enabling customers to link multiple vCenters and have seamless visibility across the environment without the need for an external platform services controller or load balancers.
Moreover, with vSphere 6.7 vCSA delivers phenomenal performance improvements (all metrics compared at cluster scale limits, versus vSphere 6.5):
2X faster performance in vCenter operations per second
These performance improvements ensure a blazing fast experience for vSphere users, and deliver significant value, as well as time and cost savings in a variety of use cases, such as VDI, Scale-out apps, Big Data, HPC, DevOps, distributed cloud native apps, etc.
vSphere 6.7 improves efficiency at scale when updating ESXi hosts, significantly reducing maintenance time by eliminating one of two reboots normally required for major version upgrades (Single Reboot). In addition to that, vSphere Quick Boot is a new innovation that restarts the ESXi hypervisor without rebooting the physical host, skipping time-consuming hardware initialization.
Another key component that allows vSphere 6.7 to deliver a simplified and efficient experience is the graphical user interface itself. The HTML5-based vSphere Client provides a modern user interface experience that is both responsive and easy to use. With vSphere 6.7, it includes added functionality to support not only the typical workflows customers need but also other key functionality like managing NSX, vSAN, VUM as well as third-party components.
Comprehensive Built-In Security
vSphere 6.7 builds on the security capabilities in vSphere 6.5 and leverages its unique position as the hypervisor to offer comprehensive security that starts at the core, via an operationally simple policy-driven model.
vSphere 6.7 adds support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware devices and also introduces Virtual TPM 2.0, significantly enhancing protection and assuring integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system. This capability helps prevent VMs and hosts from being tampered with, prevents the loading of unauthorized components and enables guest operating system security features security teams are asking for.
Data encryption was introduced with vSphere 6.5 and very well received. With vSphere 6.7, VM Encryption is further enhanced and more operationally simple to manage. vSphere 6.7 simplifies workflows for VM Encryption, designed to protect data at rest and in motion, making it as easy as a right-click while also increasing the security posture of encrypting the VM and giving the user a greater degree of control to protect against unauthorized data access.
vSphere 6.7 also enhances protection for data in motion by enabling encrypted vMotion across different vCenterinstances as well as versions, making it easy to securely conduct data center migrations, move data across a hybrid cloud environment (between on-premises and public cloud), or across geographically distributed data centers.
vSphere 6.7 introduces support for the entire range of Microsoft’s Virtualization Based Security technologies. This is a result of close collaboration between VMware and Microsoft to ensure Windows VMs on vSphere support in-guest security features while continuing to run performant and secure on the vSphere platform.
vSphere 6.7 delivers comprehensive built-in security and is the heart of a secure SDDC. It has deep integration and works seamlessly with other VMware products such as vSAN, NSX and vRealize Suite to provide a complete security model for the data center.
Universal Application Platform
vSphere 6.7 is a universal application platform that supports new workloads (including 3D Graphics, Big Data, HPC, Machine Learning, In-Memory, and Cloud-Native) as well as existing mission critical applications. It also supports and leverages some of the latest hardware innovations in the industry, delivering exceptional performance for a variety of workloads.
vSphere 6.7 further enhances the support and capabilities introduced for GPUs through VMware’s collaboration with Nvidia, by virtualizing Nvidia GPUs even for non-VDI and non-general-purpose-computing use cases such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and more. With enhancements to Nvidia GRID™ vGPU technology in vSphere 6.7, instead of having to power off workloads running on GPUs, customers can simply suspend and resume those VMs, allowing for better lifecycle management of the underlying host and significantly reducing disruption for end-users. VMware continues to invest in this area, with the goal of bringing the full vSphere experience to GPUs in future releases.
vSphere 6.7 continues to showcase VMware’s technological leadership and fruitful collaboration with our key partners by adding support for a key industry innovation poised to have a dramatic impact on the landscape, which is persistent memory. With vSphere Persistent Memory, customers using supported hardware modules, such as those available from Dell-EMC and HPE, can leverage them either as super-fast storage with high IOPS, or expose them to the guest operating system as non-volatile memory. This will significantly enhance performance of the OS as well as applications across a variety of use cases, making existing applications faster and more performant and enabling customers to create new high-performance applications that can leverage vSphere Persistent Memory.
Seamless Hybrid Cloud Experience
With the fast adoption of vSphere-based public clouds through VMware Cloud Provider Program partners, VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as other public cloud providers, VMware is committed to delivering a seamless hybrid cloud experience for customers.
vSphere 6.7 introduces vCenter Server Hybrid Linked Mode, which makes it easy and simple for customers to have unified visibility and manageability across an on-premises vSphere environment running on one version and a vSphere-based public cloud environment, such as VMware Cloud on AWS, running on a different version of vSphere. This ensures that the fast pace of innovation and introduction of new capabilities in vSphere-based public clouds does not force the customer to constantly update and upgrade their on-premises vSphere environment.
vSphere 6.7 also introduces Cross-Cloud Cold and Hot Migration, further enhancing the ease of management across and enabling a seamless and non-disruptive hybrid cloud experience for customers.
As virtual machines migrate between different data centers or from an on-premises data center to the cloud and back, they likely move across different CPU types. vSphere 6.7 delivers a new capability that is key for the hybrid cloud, called Per-VM EVC. Per-VM EVC enables the EVC (Enhanced vMotion Compatibility) mode to become an attribute of the VM rather than the specific processor generation it happens to be booted on in the cluster. This allows for seamless migration across different CPUs by persisting the EVC mode per-VM during migrations across clusters and during power cycles.
Previously, vSphere 6.0 introduced provisioning between vCenter instances. This is often called “cross-vCenter provisioning.” The use of two vCenter instances introduces the possibility that the instances are on different release versions. vSphere 6.7 enables customers to use different vCenter versions while allowing cross-vCenter, mixed-version provisioning operations (vMotion, Full Clone and cold migrate) to continue seamlessly. This is especially useful for customers leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS as part of their hybrid cloud.
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As the ideal, efficient, secure universal platform for hybrid cloud, supporting new and existing applications, serving the needs of IT and the business, vSphere 6.7 reinforces your investment in VMware. vSphere 6.7 is one of the core components of VMware’s SDDC and a fundamental building block of your cloud strategy. With vSphere 6.7, you can now run, manage, connect, and secure your applications in a common operating environment, across your hybrid cloud.
This article only touched upon the key highlights of this release, but there are many more new features. To learn more about vSphere 6.7, please see the following resources.
As part of any new vSphere release, VMware expects to make compatible versions of dependent products available within one quarter of general availability in most cases. At vSphere 6.7 general availability, compatible versions of VMware Horizon, VMware NSX, VMware Integrated OpenStack and VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will not be available. Existing Horizon, NSX, VIC and VIO customers are advised not to upgrade to vSphere 6.7 until compatible versions become available. For additional information on Horizon, NSX, VIC and VIO compatibility, please contact your VMware account team or reseller partner.
Also, you can write a small batch file with the route commands and add it to the startup folder to add the routes at startup (similar to the startup scripts in Solaris)
For more options like flushing the IP Routing table or to delete, modify IP Routing table entry use the route command with no arguments. This displays the various options for the route command.
The following listings are a comprehensive collection of the flagship hypervisor product by VMware. All bold versions are downloadable releases. All patches have been named by their release names. Please note that the ESXi hypervisor is available since version 3.5.