VMworld US 2016 Buzz: Ask the vCenter Server Experts Panel – INF9083
Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld US 2016 coverage:
- VMworld US 2016: The Day 0 Buzz
- VMworld US 2016: The Day 1 Buzz
- VMworld US 2016: The Day 2 Buzz
- VMworld US 2016: The Day 3 Buzz
- VMworld US 2016: The Day 4 Buzz
I had the opportunity to hear more about vCenter from an expert panel.
The panel consisted of all VMware employees including vCenter R&D Director, Dilpreet Bindra, Technical Marketing’s Ryan Johnson and SDDC Integration Architect Blair Fritz as well as TMs Emad Younis and Adam Eckerle who I have met a number of times.
The session started going through the evolution of vCenter Server. They asked for a show of hands of who was running the VCSA and I would think 70% of the attendees said they were which surprised the panel (in a good way!). There was talk of further development of a migration tool for moving from 5.5 on Windows to the VCSA for vSphere 6.0 Update 2. They couldn’t say when it will be available but hinted it will be soon.
Also talking HA for vCenter, they are working on the Active/Passive HA for vCenter but did also mention that the ultimate plan is an Active/Active vCenter. That’s something I didn’t know, can’t wait!
As this was interactive, there were many questions, mainly about migrations and deployments but people generally happy with the VCSA. One of the quotes from the panel to a performance question was “We’re working on pretty awesome performance things for VCSA.”
I have to say this session came across so much better than last year’s group discussion. I don’t know if it was just a change in people presenting but I really had the feeling that customer pain points were being looked at and vCenter limitations were acknowledged rather than dismissed. I can see there has been more of a focus for vCenter and have heard separately there is work going on to fix some of the basics. We can see more rapid releases with nearly weekly updates to the beta HTML5 Web Client. I still think vCenter has a (long) way to go and needs a design rethink but at least I see a future when a year ago I had lost some faith.
I will be writing some more about the good changes I’m hearing about happening within VMware.
As VMworld2016 has made the recording publicly available, you can view the session here:
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