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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 time on the Sunday pre-VMworld to take one of the Hands-On-Labs and you can get set up quicker at the show using your own laptop with a BYOD option.

The labs are available publicly at http://labs.hol.vmware.com/ but I see the ones from the show have not been made available yet.

These were the opening times for the week:

07:00AM – 06:00PM  Sunday, August 28
10:30AM – 06:00PM  Monday, August 29
10:30AM – 06:00PM  Tuesday, August 30
08:00AM – 05:00PM  Wednesday, August 31
08:00AM – 03:00PM  Thursday, September 1

As one of my goals for VMworlds is always to look at future technology, One of the ways to possibly get an idea of some of the announcements is to see what labs are new this year. I spotted: VMware Cloud Foundation Fundamentals [SPL-1706-SDC-5] which was described as helping you to “gain a better understating of how EVO SDDC provides an easier way to deploy and operate a private cloud on an integrated Software Defined Data Center system”.

This was a hint to the General Session announcement on VMware Cloud Foundation so it may be worth checking the labs for future shows to see what may be anounced.

However I decided to take Cloud Operations With Photon Platform [SPL-1730-USE-2]

Photon Platform is VMware’s announced but not released ESXi platform for running containers natively. The design goals are an API-first Model, so a user-experience for automation of infrastructure consumption and operations using RESTful APIs, a Fast, Scale-out Control Plane allowing the creation of 1000s of new VM-isolated workloads per minute, and supporting 100,000s of total simultaneous workloads as well as Native Container Support(e.g. Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Pivotal CF / Lattice, and Mesos).

VMware’s other cloud native hosting product, also announced yet not released but open source is vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) which is for running Docker containers on your existing vSphere Infrastructure. Your developers see a native Docker API yet vSphere deploys a VM per container in the background so your containers can be managed with your existing tools just like VMs so you can back them up, provide networking, manage performance etc.

Photon Platform however is purely for containers and targeted at scale-out container only hosting.

The lab was all about setting up a private cloud on the Photon Platform control plane and then deploying cloud native applications using Docker and Kubernetes.

I’m liking how all the new Cloud Native web interfaces are clean and simple, hopefully a sign of things to come for vCenter itself.

Flavors

I also learned about how disks will be handled with a new term called flavours.

There are three kinds of Flavors in Photon Platform; VM, Ephemeral Disk and Persistent disk Flavors.  Ephemeral disks are what you are used to with your current ESXi environment.  They are created as part of the VM create and their lifecycle is tied to the VM.  Persistent disks can be created independent from any VM and then subsequently attached/detached.  A VM can be created, a persistent disk attached, then if the VM dies, the disk could be attached to another VM.  Flavors define the size of the VMs (CPU and RAM), but also define the characteristics of the storage that will be used for ephemeral (Boot) disks and persistent storage volumes.    You specify the VM and disk flavors as part of the VM or Disk creation command.