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VMworld US 2016 Buzz: My wrap up thoughts + a VMworld Hot or Not

September 20th, 2016 No comments

I arrived at VMworld a little sceptical this year. So much is changing in IT, cloud and DevOps is actually delivering the promises of a better way to do things, I wasn’t sure VMware was up to the task of pivoting/extending beyond being the best VM hypervisor/management company around.

Cloud Native

I do see tons of things happening at VMware. Cloud native apps and container management are being worked on furiously as the immediate existential threat to the VM being the unit of IT consumption. Is this enough? Do we need to manage containers as VMs or should we be doing things differently? Squashing your existing applications into containers just as a packaging format and then having to back them up doesn’t really move the needle, you’re just moving the unit of consumption to a container yet with the same “restrictions” you had with your VMs.

It was a real shame Docker wasn’t on stage and relegated to a small booth. Docker has developer mindshare and is dying to get into enterprises, surely VMware and Docker can work together, Microsoft doesn’t seem to have a problem with this.

Although things are moving extremely quickly in IT nowadays, there is very much a long tail because if applications need to be rewritten to take advantage of this cloud native world, it’s not going to happen any time soon.

Yet, because new applications can be written much more quickly and delivered to customers much more quickly, business have more more choice and agility when it comes to changing the software/services they use so that long tail may dwindle quicker than VMware would like.

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VMworld US 2016 Buzz: The Parties!

September 14th, 2016 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld US 2016 coverage:

The VMworld parties are part of the experience, vendors & community get together to sell and socialise. Here are some of the parties I attended to get an idea of what’s happening out of the conference center.

Sunday

Welcome Reception

VMworld itself kicks off its sales side with the opening of the Solutions Exchange by a Welcome Reception, at first glance it looks like not much has changed with the move from San Francisco to Vegas with plenty of companies eager to tell you their stories.

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VMUG Member Party

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VMworld US 2016 Buzz: Office of the CTO Stand: P4: Programmable Data Planes

September 14th, 2016 No comments

I made a point as I always do at VMworld to head to the VMware Office of the CTO booth to have a glimpse into the future. I spoke to Mihau Budiu who also talked at a session which I blogged about: VMworld US 2016 Buzz: Hot Topics in VMware Research – CTO9406 so here are my notes from that:

Towards a programmable Internet

Mihau talked about P4 (Programming Protocol Independent Packet Processors). I had heard about P4 on the Packet Pushers Podcast (is that P3?). This is a programming language for programmable dataplanes so it allows you to reprogram the data plane which could be switches, FPGA’s, network cards, software switches, VMs etc.

This allows you to build customisable protocols easily as new protocols normally take forever to get ratified. P4 looks great, you can reprogram switches on the fly to make it much more simple to run multiple kinds of networks or any kind of network extension rather than being hampered by current headers.

Here are the pics from the CTO stand display:

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VMworld US 2016 Buzz: Office of the CTO Stand: Corfu Distributed Shared Log

September 14th, 2016 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld US 2016 coverage:

I made a point as I always do at VMworld to head to the VMware Office of the CTO booth to have a glimpse into the future.

I had been to a session which I blogged about: VMworld US 2016 Buzz: Hot Topics in VMware Research – CTO9406 so here are my notes from that:

Michael Wei spoke about Corfu which is an open source distributed open scale platform. He went through how a typical application becomes distributed which leads to a whole bunch of tools to get this working. Corfu is meant to solve this by being a distributed shared log with strong consistency for massive scale. Corfu objects are in-memory, highly available data structures and are being baked initially into NSX to provide a much more scalable and flexible control plane. They are also researching new programming models to be able to take advantage of this.

Corfu OneData is a new project using this platform for BigData. This provides a common Big Data store but still using native Hadoop/MySQL/Cassandra etc. APIs

Read more about Corfu here: https://research.vmware.com/projects/1

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VMworld US 2016 Buzz: Office of the CTO Stand: CLOVE: Congestion-Aware Load Balancing from the Virtual Edge

September 14th, 2016 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld US 2016 coverage:

I made a point as I always do at VMworld to head to the VMware Office of the CTO booth to have a glimpse into the future. I spoke to Aditi Ghag.

This is all about building a congestion aware, fine-grained, distributed network load balancer. This means as soon as the packet enters the network at the vSwitch or physical network switch when using SDN you can decide on which path it takes rather than having the network load balancing have to consult a central service.

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I haven’t found an associated research paper, if there is one out on the internets somewhere, let me know and I’ll link to it.

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VMworld US 2016 Buzz: Office of the CTO Stand: Enabling vMotion with Passthrough SR-IOV Network Devices for Latency Sensitive Apps

September 14th, 2016 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld US 2016 coverage:

I made a point as I always do at VMworld to head to the VMware Office of the CTO booth to have a glimpse into the future. I spoke to Xin Xu.

Currently VMware has a number of features for allowing latency sensitive apps to have a more direct path to the hardware which obviously speeds things up. However this breaks some other useful functionality. VMware is working on allowing vMotion for latency sensitive apps when using SR-IOV Network devices.

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You can read more details of the research paper here:

http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?ftid=1703154&id=2892256

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VMworld US 2016 Buzz: Office of the CTO Stand: Exo-Clones: Better Container Storage Management Across the Clouds

September 14th, 2016 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld US 2016 coverage:

I made a point as I always do at VMworld to head to the VMware Office of the CTO booth to have a glimpse into the future.

I had had a look at the stand talking about Exo-Clones and then also attended a session by Christos Karamanolis, who is also a VMware Fellow, I blogged about the whole sessions: VMworld US 2016 Buzz: An Industry Roadmap: From storage to data management – STO7903 which covers more about the portable snapshots part of it, very interesting tech, well worth reading.

Portable snapshot functionality allows snapshots to be exported as stand-alone files which can then be imported into somewhere else. They work in the same way as git commits work in a distributed source control system so you always know the source tree of where the snapshots have come from. These portable snapshots are called Exo-clones.

During the session Christos talked about extending the portable snapshots idea with a distributed file system for cloud native apps, called VFS which would sit on top of VSANs file system, VDFS (vSphere Distributed File System) and provide a file system that could massively scale for cloud native apps.

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You can then also do better dedupe and manage container images.  If you are refreshing thousands of containers in multiple sites, currently you can’t do block level differential updates, Exo-clones would give this to you. You can also use Exo-clones to do rapid copies of Big Data, Christos did a demo of just this.

Here are the pics from the Office of the CTO booth in the solutions exchange to give you more of an idea.

The portable snapshot functionality would be there to for example be a

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There is also an excellent and very in-depth paper written by VMware’s Richard P. Spillane, Wenguang Wang, Luke Lu, Maxime Austruy, Christos Karamanolis, and Rawlinson Rivera

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotstorage16/hotstorage16_spillane.pdf

Again, we see the VSAN team pushing advancements which are useful in other areas of vSphere, here being cloud native apps.

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VMworld US 2016 Buzz: An Industry Roadmap: From storage to data management – STO7903

September 14th, 2016 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld US 2016 coverage:

Next up to another storage session with one of the fathers of VSAN, Christos Karamanolis, who is also a VMware Fellow, I’ve heard Christos speak a number of times and he’s very much worth listening to.

Christos started reiterating that data provides tremendous business value potential with a huge uptick in the amount of data stored.

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Storage is not going to traditional storage arrays, analysts say disk arrays are rapidly declining compared to the amount of data produced. This is due to the rise of Software Defined Storage, either via hyperscale server SAN storage or enterprise server SAN storage.

Data is also becoming more mobile in a hybrid cloud world which is an IT nightmare, CIOs have no idea what data goes to AWS/Azure.

Today’s storage products do not meet the requirements of the evolving IT industry, HCI overcomes legacy limitations with a seamlessly integrated architecture.

Christos talked about Data LifeCycle Management.

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VMworld US 2016 Buzz: The VMworld Store

September 14th, 2016 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld US 2016 coverage:

I took some pictures of the things for sale in the VMworld Store, one of the ways to buy presents for your kids

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VMworld US 2016 Buzz: The Solutions Exchange

September 14th, 2016 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld US 2016 coverage:

I didn’t actually spend as much time as I normally do in the Solutions Exchange this year. I didn’t have any burning questions for particular vendors or new lines or inquiry. I was super busy covering other things anyway. However I think I messed up and should have (somehow) made more time. I did walk through all the aisles and worked out who was there and importantly who was on the outside of the hall with the newer stuff.

I should have chatted to them more, I probably had badge scan fatigue!

I took some pics:

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