vSphere Market & Customer Stories (2019-2020)
High Accuracy Time in vSphere
Market Story
As a platform vendor, we want vSphere to be the best platform to run all applications. Whether it's trading platforms for financial services sector or video streaming services for the entertainment industry, our customers require VMware's vSphere platform to support high accuracy time synchronization in order to run their application workloads on our virtual machines.
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Not supporting this we risk losing our value proposition that vSphere can support every application. Retention is key. By loosing our value proposition, we risk our customers migrating application workloads to bare metal servers or some custom solution. This is adding unnecessary complexity and increases maintenance costs for our customers as these silos of bare metal servers or custom solutions are management/configured differently than in vSphere and requires additional staffing and training.
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Customer Story
Customers have a wide variety of uses cases which require their application workloads running of virtual machines managed by vSphere to support high accuracy time-stamping and synchronization.
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Market in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) is a EU law that provides harmonized regulation for investment services across the 31 member states by increasing competition and investor protection in investment services. New financial regulations in Europe, such as MiFID Level 2 (MiFID II) introduces 20 articles of this directive specified technical implementation measures, including RTS ( Regulatory Technical Standard) and requirements for time stamping and business clock synchronization. Many high profile financial customers will be impacted by MiFID II when these regulations go into effect in January, 2018.
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Financial trading platforms require high accuracy time to handle trading transactions. For example, when a sell trading transaction is executed and a buy for that trade is also executed by multiple individuals at the same second, the trading platform will need to high accuracy time to the millisecond level in order to determine who first executed the buy trade in order to award that person the buy trade.
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The entertainment industry that provides video streaming services also require their application workloads to support high accuracy time in order to support real time movies streaming to millions of customers nation/world wide.
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User Story
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Use a time protocol which allows the synchronizing of time in their virtual infrastructure to the millisecond level to meet regulatory standards/requirements and stay compliant.
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Keep application workloads on the vSphere platform to continue the ease of VI management and low maintenance costs instead of having to find other solutions that support high accuracy time.​
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Software Guard Extension
Market Story
Intel's SGX enhances application security by providing a set of instructions that increases the security of code and data by partitioning sensitive data into enclaves. Enclaves are private regions in memory that are used to protect content such sensitive data and are encrypted and decrypted by the CPU portion of memory. Virtual machines are now able to be configured to utilize such server related hardware.
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User Story
VI admins need a way to configure VMs to utilize host SGX hardware functionality, so that application developers can encrypt and decrypt sensitive app data on secure enclaves.
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A host that supports Intel's SGX functionalities should be able to be utilized by a virtual machine.
Extend Enhanced vMotion Compatibility with Graphics Support
Market Story
VMware exposes a specific set of graphics features according to the hardware version, and all graphics vendors that support this hardware version must provide these features. With common hardware versions, 3D VMs can live vMotion across graphics vendors and software renderer. This presents a problem if we choose to expose a feature that a graphics vendor or our software renderer does not support.
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User Story
VI admins should be able to migrate VMs to a host that supports the graphic features that are required by the hardware version of the VM.
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Use Enhanced vMotion Compatibility to allow the setting of a graphics baseline feature set, so that a virtual machine that requires a certain set of graphics features can easily migrate to a supported host.