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VMworld US 2014: The Day 3 Buzz

August 28th, 2014

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IMG_4906Another Run VMworld with a smaller group of us today. Last night’s parties must have been good!

Meet the Virtual Volumes Product Team

There was no general session today so I started with a group discussion with the Virtual Volumes Product team of Patrick Dirks and Suzy Visvanathan. Groups discussions are smaller groups rather than presentations so there are plenty of audience participation. VMware has been discussing VVols publicly since VMworld 2011. The discussion revolved around the things that VVols is trying to solve and ultimately provide true VM centric storage where you can manage each virtual disk independently rather than lumping them all together in a big LUN where the storage system doesn’t have any visibility. VVols also push more storage processing down to the array with VASA 2. Policy is very central to VVols. Policies are built from capabilities that the array can provide such as replication, encryption and performance guarantees. As with VSAN you don’t provision VMs to a datastore but rat her against a policy. The storage array then decides where physically to place the VM based on the policy rather that you picking a physical datastore yourself.

IMG_4908Some other things that I picked up were:

VADP APIs are fully supported with VVols.

There were concerns about the queue depth for PEs and where performance bottlenecks could be. Array’s won’t necessarily have a single PE, in fact it could dynamically create them on the fly to spread out load and increase performance.

Many partners in the session asking questions to help them with their additional products like backup etc..

NFS vs. iSCSI is an implementation detail. VMware wants to be completely agnostic so can support any protocol. Although NFS will still not have any inherent multi-pathing capabilities, the array can present multiple PEs which would then mean multiple IP addresses which would increase overall throughput for the system, it may not be true multi-pathing but gives you some of the benefits of pNFS but with NFSv3. I am still trying to work out how you would choose between NFS and iSCSI. When you migrate over you would probably go with what you have now but what do you choose for a new installation. Do you go iSCSI for the multi-pathing since VVols now gives you the VM level of detail you had with NFS. I need to chat to NetApp to find out what their thoughts are as the NFS pioneer with vSphere.

Talk about the benefits of VVols and policy was mentioned as one of the major drivers, In fact policy is the major benefit even over VM granularity.

vSphere 6.0

Some more information was announced about the upcoming features in vSphere 6.0. Although not officially announced yet, some of the sessions today covered features to expect which I’ve written about:

vExpert Daily

I was then a panelist again on the vExpert Daily where we talked about what’s going on at VMworld.

I will post the recording when it is available

VSAN Architecture Deep Dive

Next up was getting deeper with a VSAN deep dive by Christian Dickmann one of the lead developers for VSAN and Christos Karamanolis, the architect of VSAN. I had attended a VMworld Discussion group last year at VMworld with Christos and Christian and wanted to find out what’s new.

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This is covered in a separate post: VMworld 2014 US: VSAN Architecture Deep Dive #STO1279

Virtual Volumes Technical Deep Dive

I had really wanted to go to the VVols Technical deepdive with Rawlinson Rivera and Suzy Visvanathan but timings meant I would have been late so a session I will certainly be looking at after the show.

Solutions Exchange

I had a last walk around the Solutions Exchange before it closed today.

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vCloud Automation Center Overview and Glimpse into the Future

Last up for the day was a vCAC update from VMware product managers Nikunj Nemani, Rich Bourdeau and Long Wang.

This is covered in a separate post: VMworld 2014 US: vCloud Automation Center Overview and Glimpse into the Future #MGT2175

VMware CTO Stand

Here are some pictures I took of the boards displayed at the VMware CTO stand which show previews of technology VMware is working on which could be years out, a glimpse into the future

Click to enlarge:

Congress for Openstack

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Network Function Virtualisation

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Auto-Scaling Cloud Applications Using Machine Learning

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Automated Management of “Sick” VMs for Cloud Applications

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VMFork, A Fresh Approach to Application Publishing

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Virtualised High Performance Computing

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VMworld Party

Then it was the official VMworld party which was held in the Moscone Center. Last year VMware took it to another level for the 10th year holding in AT&T Park which is the baseball stadium we run past every day. There was no way to have the same atmosphere in a conference venue.

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For fun I have a Jawbone UP this year which tracks my movement, I did 22292 steps and travelled 21.62km.

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  1. September 14th, 2014 at 10:37 | #1

    This is really good coverage of VMWORLD it is like I went.

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