VMworld US 2016 Buzz: Day 2 General Session Thoughts
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
VMware’s energetic Sanjay Poonen who is EVP & GM for End User Computer and has also taken on the role of Global Marketing head honcho kicked off the day 2 keynote. Initial talk about “digital transformation”. I still can’t believe in this day and age we need to highlight this but I’m sure its a nod to CxOs who still need to drive digital into their businesses. I suppose working in IT, I have a blinkered view of this and assume “digital” is obvious. Sanjay used this to highlight VMware’s proposition to make the data-center cloud ready and prepare end users for the mobile-cloud era.
Any Cloud
Sanjay highlighted again the “Any Cloud, Any Device, Any Application” an obvious change from last year’s “One Cloud….” which when I heard it last year seemed daft, no-one was ever thinking of using a single cloud. He highlighted the existing partnerships with Microsoft, Apple and Google (note, not AWS).
Workplace ONE
This lead into Workplace One, VMware’s EUC focused suite of applications, the idea to bring apps and identity together, unified desktop and mobile management, security everywhere.
Sanjay went through a few demos of parts of the apps, Workday which is an HR app, Box which is a email and calendar app, showing how you can annotate docs live from file repositories like Dropbox. You can see contacts from AD.
Stephanie Buscemi, EVP from Salesforce came on stage to demo what the view from a phone would be like for a Sales Manager which uses the Workplace ONE single sign-on.
I get the feeling we’ve see the same story for a while now, I’m hoping the integration is is becoming more substantial than just skin deep.
Free Fusion/Workstation
Free licenses for everyone with the VMworld app for VMware Fusion / Workstation, a nice touch although apparently someone posted a code online so the whole world could grab it and the promo had to be halted by the end of the conference!
Airwatch
Then the keynote moved onto VMware AirWatch which is for endpoint management, mobile, VDI, PC and even IoT. He reiterated the huge number of partners they work with in this space.
Conditional Access
Next up was a demo of Conditional Access which is part of Workspace ONE. This was actually quite cool, its a native data loss prevention (DLP) capability so when something from a financial information spreadsheet was copied into the clipboard, the figure couldn’t be pasted into Twitter. You can also integrate NSX into this kind of scenario to dissalow access to some company information from external networks. The days of enterprises relying on anti-virus and firewalls to block the leaking of sensitive information are so far gone, DLP is going to so much more important.
Trustpoint
Next up was from the recentish Tanium acquisition showing off the now rebranded VMware TrustPoint. The demo was highlighting inventory information and also being able to see for example MD5 hash information for all running apps in real time to spot things that you don’t want. You can then use actions to say deploy a new version of an app or kill the application, looks like it does a fair amount in the forensic analysis space as well. The key is having a real time view of all the apps running in your environment with Google like search and then able to take action. I can see this being very useful, how much time and effort is spent tracking down what versions of something is installed or running when a Heartbleed vulnerability comes out. Current inventory scanning is fairly basic, this looks like the next step.
Cloud Native
Poonen them brought on stage chief CTO, Ray O’Farrel who did some scene setting before bringing on stage Cloud Native CTO, Kit Colbert. Kit is a great presenter who has some of the style of previous CTO, Steve Herod. Kit went through the rise of modern applications, explaining the differences between traditional and cloud native apps which are container based and how this brings operational challenges. VMware wants to be able to offer an enterprise class cloud native application experience basically based around two products, vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) and Photon Platform.
VIC is all about giving developers a native Docker experience while on the back end instantiated containers AS VMs rather than IN VMs. This means you can manage and operate your containers as you would other VMs, connect them to networks & storage etc.
On to a demo showing VIC with NSX integration as well a vROPs so you can manage performance at a container layer because it is actually a VM.
New with vRealize Automation 7.1 which was demoed is automating the provisioning of Virtual Container Hosts (VCH) which is part of VIC. This is the Docker API endpoint. Each VCH is backed by a vSphere resource pool. VCHs also maintain a cache of container images. The container image filesystem layers are maintained by mapping to VMDKs hosted on vSphere datastores in a similar to snapshots.
All the talk was about operationalising containers with a consistent view, the same as VMs, the jury is still out with me whether treating/building containers as VMs is the right way to go. VIC doesn’t work with other container orchestration engines so you may have a battle on your hands convincing your developers to use VIC on the back-end, even if it does support native Docker APIs, there’s no Mesos, Swarm etc. available. VIC’s Docker integration is what’s called a “facade” so there’s no reason additional facades can not be created in the future for other container management solutions.
We would like more!
I was disappointed that VIC was only moved from last year’s private beta to a more public beta, its on GitHub at http://github.com/vmware/vic-product so you can give it a try but with the container management ecosystem moving so quickly, it feels like VMware is taking it slow.
The keynote moved to Photon Controller which is an open-source system for managing hardware, containers, and clusters at scale, you can find it at: https://github.com/vmware/photon-controller
No other news on Photon Platform which is the native container runtime with a lean and mean stripped down ESXi without all the infrastructure availability parts of DRS/HA. Is VMware keeping announcements for Barcelona?
The Cloud Native section seemed a bit of a let down. Why not have Docker onstage, all the talk was about the operational aspect of containers and nothing this year about the developer experience. In fact Docker wasn’t even mentioned as an official partner in all of this (CoreOS, Hashicorp, Mesosphere, Pivotal, and Rancher were). I know that a number of VMware developers moved over to Docker so there’s certainly a synergy. I feel VMware isn’t courting Docker as much as it should be. The integration could be great. VMware very much wants to be relevant in the future container space and Docker would love to leverage VMware’s smarts in scheduling, a much broader networking and storage ecosystem and deep tentacles within the enterprise. If you fear Docker, VMware, you will not get anywhere.
NSX
Rajiv Ramaswami, Networking and Security boss came on stage to show NSX, 400% growth over the past 18 months, a customer story and a demo of vRealize Network Insight which has good looking pictures of deep network visibility. As networks get more complicated and traffic can take so many different paths, visibility is going to get so much more important and even in this command line driven world, visual graphics make a big difference, I like the focus on visually operating the network.
VSAN
Yanbing Li came on stage to talk hyper-converged, now at 5000 customers with big customers using business critical apps.
More customer stories talking about simplifying storage management. Increase operational simplicity, achieve 50% savings, eliminate New IT silos is the message.
There is an analytics engine being worked on as well as encryption coming soon.
She did a demo on nested fault domains and Cloud Foundation linking private cloud to IBM SoftLayer.
VSAN will be a great fit for VIC and Photon Platform she said.
The VSAN team is doing great things within VMware, putting pressure on the hypervisor and vCenter teams to advance at the pace VSAN needs.
You can view the entire key note here:
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