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Since VMworld there’s been a huge amount of news about EMC(Dell)+Virtustream_vCloud Air. Basically EMC(Dell) will be consolidating most of its cloud assets under Virtustream which will be spun out as a separate company with EMC(Dell) owning 50% and VMware the other half. I’ll go into more details of the spin out but first here’s what I learnt speaking to them at the show.

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

I had a chat to Andy Sugden from Virtustream who EMC acquired recently. I had some misconceptions about Virtustream and how they competed with vCloud Air. Virtustream basically has software called xStream which big enterprises (on or off-prem) or service providers use to create managed instances of SAP and some other big applications. This takes a lot of the complexity away from managing these apps and provides a secure wrapper around the whole app up and down the entire stack so it can work in a multi-tenant environment and ticks all the security and compliance boxes. You can also create and manage performance and availability SLAs using the software. IBM use it (mmm, not for much longer I guess!). I can certainly see integration with vCloud Air by bringing some more of that secure multi-tenancy to vCloud Air but the big apps Virtustream manage aren’t the first applications people are moving to the public cloud so its normally a managed cloud offering, it was certainly interesting to get a better understanding.

What’s new and what does it mean?
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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”.

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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

Guido Appenzeller – Chief Technology Strategy Officer of Networking & Security, VMware, Inc.
Joe Baguley – CTO EMEA, VMware
Paul Strong – VP & CTO Global field, VMware

Ray O’Farrell was sick so couldn’t make it, hope he gets well!

My notes, hard to encapsulate as it was a pretty broad discussion!

Paul Strong led the panel and went through each CTO and asked about their role

Guido: NSX.

Joe: EVO:Rail, IoT and unikernels

Paul: Connecting R&D to partners and customers. integration back into R&D

Guido: Networking previously virtually integrated (same stack) unlike servers. Networking sales model changing to be like servers.

Local switching is easy, future is all about global connectivity with security built in.

Joe: talking about second effect, for example having virtualised networking, what will that mean, like cars being the enabler for Walmart which couldn’t exist without people being able to drive to out of town Walmarts yet the invention of the car couldn’t have predicted Walmart.

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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

EMEA CTO Joe Baguley led the discussions with Martijn Baecke, Aaron Sweemer, Chris Sexsmith and Robbie Jerrom all from VMware which was to highlight VMware’s vision for next generation application development and hosting. The chat went through micro-services, 12 factor apps and how they could be deployed using PaaS and/or containers.

HA & FT are no longer needed. No resilience in infrastructure is required but pushed to the developers to create. This then becomes everyone’s responsibility to coordinate which isn’t an easy thing to do, I see more passing the buck!

There was some background on how agile makes things faster.

There was an interesting discussion for a typical use case for enterprise applications in that there’s no way you can make the entire application cloud native. There may be backend databases for example or even customer records on a mainframe which will never reach the cloud native world. Joe mentioned he is seeing a lot of traction for changing the middle of a 3 tier app so not messing with the back-end or the front end but breaking apart all the middleware into microservices to make them more efficient. Going cloud native for an application doesn’t have to mean going all in.

Read more…

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

Day 2 kicked off after breakfast with again sort of a repeat of the VMworld US keynote kicked off by the engaging Sanjay Poonam, the EUC boss.

Sanjay has really lit a fire under VMware’s EUC, started talking about the amazing effect of smartphones, AirWatch is the tech company VMware bought which now manages mobile devices (and future IoT) but Windows 10 support is the big news as announced at VMworld US. This will bring together mobile and PC management which could be very attractive for enterprises.

Announced Boxer acquisition which is simple, secure access to email, content and apps.

The Boxer team, which will join the AirWatch team, has developed a mature personal information management (PIM) solution for enterprises that offers a container approach to mobile application management and security. Boxer has partnered with industry leaders and supports market leading productivity, enterprise and social networking solutions including Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Gmail, iCloud, Salesforce, Twitter, Outlook and Yahoo, just to name a few.

Rory Clements, Solutions Engineering Director for EUC then went through the same demo that Microsoft came on stage for in the US version and demoed AirWatch managing Windows 10 as well as using App Volumes on physical as part of Project A2

Single sign-on across multiple devices and applications (over 40) with AirWatch.

Sanjay and Rory then showed a windows application remoted on a Tesla and then the mixing of AirWatch and NSX network security.

Sanjay then tried to get the crowd chanting “EUC will Rock You” with the backing of some drummers!

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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

OpenNebula

I spent quiet a bit of time in the Solutions Exchange and made a point of going through the New Innovators section. I found OpenNebula which seems a very simple private cloud enabler which piqued my interest after worrying about the complexity of vRealize Automation and vCloud Director for private cloud. It seems a very simple solution, download an .OVA, suck in your templates and then provide a portal to clients to be able to deploy cloud like those templates, very simple just what many companies need. I believe it is even open source with an Apache license.

Open Nebula says it is an enterprise-ready turnkey solution for deploying private clouds, You can use KVM, Xen or ESXi as your hypervisor and can also layer it over vCenter to provide a multi-tenant private cloud.

As a consumer you can use AWS EC2 and EBS APIs, it has a marketplace of appliances ready to be run in OpenNebula, has chargeback/accounting, auditing, RBAC, quotas, etc. a pretty comprehensive list of features.

Community support is available or you can pay for commercial support straight from the developers.

I will certainly be downloading their software and having a look.

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

Cirba

I spoke to Bill Chatzidakis from Cirba as I’ll be visiting them soon on a Tech Field Day event. He went through what Cirba is (been around 10+years in different incarnations!).  It’s a software product which is all about capacity planning and right sizing your environment, targeted at enterprises and service providers to manage big numbers of VMs. It has nifty graphs for telling you which clusters are over or under subscribed and collects a month’s worth of data to work out best placement of VMs. This is DRS on steroids, an approach VMTurbo is also tackling. You can create models for what your VMs require in terms of resources, availability, security and then Cirba can tell you what clusters you have available (vSPhere, Hyper-V, KVM) and where best to host these. You can use Cirba integration with vRealize Automation so as part of the approval process it will reserve future capacity in Cirba for the VMs. Once approved, Cirba talks back to vRealize Automation for the deployment. It uses multiple metrics so can push together VMs or push them apart using many measurements as well as what it thinks the VM will be doing in the future based on previous history. Cirba says it is therefore far more proavtively responsive rather than reactive like DRS.

Cloud placement is going to be an interesting future conundrum: what cloud, what location, what network, what price, what risk, what availability?

This was a good primer before I get to hear more in a few weeks.

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

I suppose you could say VMworld for most attendees (partners were having their 1st day yesterday) kicked off with the General Sessions.

The keynote had  fair amount of content common to the VMworld US keynote with some local changed information.

There was no point live blogging as a lot of the content has been covered previously so well by Scott Lowe.

Jean-Pierre Brulard, SVP and GM for EMEA started the show off.

10k attendees, 96 countries, 2.3k VMUG members.

He mentioned Destination Give back which is a VMware Foundation charity programme focussed on children, education , health, environment.

Read more…

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

Session was led by Chris Crafford, a Practice Manager, VMware

This again was a high level overview of the technologies available and went through what microservice are, the 12 factor apps I mentioned in the lab I did and why they are better for cloud environments. Microservices only manage the data they care about, are accessed only via the service, there are no shared libraries.

Chris mentioned an interesting thing I hadn’t thought of for the definition. Microservices need to be automatically deployed to make them true microservices, its not good enough to just have services that are micro.

Chris went through one of the major tenets of microservices which is all about failure management, assume failure and have an architecture that mitigates the impact of the faults, errors and failures at runtime.

Then Chris went on to talk about migrating legacy applications which must be done as an evolutionary approach. Choose the most business urgent to break out first. Use containers for this new bit and leverage best practices for CI/CD, automating all the steps. Learn and improve and then repeat for the next service that has been prioritised.

Another thing Chris mentioned was some deployments use one microservice per container but this makes management more challenging so consider a business role mapped to a container model instead.

The short session ended with a vCloud Air commercial, VMware funnily enough says it is the ideal target for migration of legacy applications particularly with the recent announcements with layer 2 networking between your data center and vCloud Air and container security with NSX.

The future of vCloud Air and how it will integrate with EMCs recent aquisition of Virtustream now becomes very interesting as vCloud Air is being moved out of VMware direct management and folded directly into Virtustream. Who knows what the future holds.

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

“DevOps, Containers, Docker, Mesos, Kubernetes, Microservices, 12-factor applications, 3rd platform, oh my!” is how it is described.

The VMware Hands-on-Labs are available online from http://labs.hol.vmware.com/ and the VMworld specific ones are available from: http://labs.hol.vmware.com/vmworld. It doesn’t seem the VMworld labs are available yet post show and this lab isn’t available with the main ones so hopefully this will appear soon.

This was a big ‘ol lab with plenty of content. Labs are in 90 minute slots which you can extend by 20 minutes and topics may not be finished in time so you may need another session to complete.

All the seats were full when I arrived but I was able to use my own laptop and just connect over the internet to do the lab, I could have done it from anywhere in the world. Kudos to the lab team, they’ve done a great job, the layout was great, no delays or any connectivity issues.

This lab went through a fair amount of background information on what microservices are (splitting apart monolithic applications into many more nimble parts) and listed the 12 factors that ideally make up a cloud native applications. You can read more about them at http://12factor.net/ and in plain English http://www.clearlytech.com/2014/01/04/12-factor-apps-plain-english/

The lab then went through an explanation of containers, Docker (company that does containers) and Kubernetes (container orchestrations)

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