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Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld Europe 2015 coverage:

• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day –1 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 0 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 1 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 2 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 3 Buzz

This session was delivered by Martijn Baecke and Robbie Jerrom, both from VMware, who were on the earlier panel. The session started talking about the transition from the client/server era into mobile/cloud. There have been huge changes in how software is being engineered, witness VMworld having a DevOps day today. There still needs to be a way to host both the apps of what they call yesterday (in reality 99% of apps running anywhere!) and the new generation of cloud native apps. VMware wants to ensure it can provide the platform to support both these worlds. The term used was future proofing so the idea is to build an infrastructure for your current workloads that can also be extended to deliver the new cloud native apps. The work needs to be done to transform current infrastructure but keeping one management later.

They looked at various strategies such as starting with a new cloud and rebuilding apps but this is a good choice for cloud native only, something not feasible for many companies. Greenfield can be done, starting again, but yet this is another environment to manage with upfront investment. Unsurprisingly they suggest using vSphere as the cornerstone of your infrastructure. Use software defined storage with hyperconverged/VVOLs and NSX for networking. Having a single platform makes it much easier to automate and orchestrate.

A great quote was given “Automation=Speed, Orchestration=Control”.

Things in the mobile-cloud era are so much faster you need to be able to deliver infrastructure quicker.

They went through Photon OS/Photon Platform, Project Bonneville & Lightwave.

Developer as a service.was talked about. This is facilitating developers with self-service using their APIs (what I had asked about previously in the CTO panel) yet provide the underlying applications to support the scale.

Monitoring also important, of course using vRealize Operations showing what I had seen at the VMware Booth on Day 0 with showing containers natively within vRealize Ops.

It’s all about a developer-enabled SDDC.

DR is all about redeployment and running in an active/active state for cloud native apps yet using SRM/VDPA to protect traditional workloads but with a common management layer.

It’s also not about the tech but working towards proper DevOps by evolving people and processes.

It was a generally interesting session but I think I have enough of a handle on cloud native apps to anticipate how this affects the transformation and how to run both on your existing infrastructure.