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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 then attended a session to expand on the Day 1 announcements around NSX connecting multiple clouds together.

The session was run by VMware Chief Technology Strategy Officer, Guido Appenzeller and customer Isao Eguchi from Nomura Research Institute.

The session went through how networking is changing to support tomorrow’s applications, multiple hypervisors, multiple clouds, multiple platform architectures. Guido mentioned the first change is the software independence from hardware. He used the analogy of the PC which had a motherboard from Dell, CPU from Intel and OS from Microsoft. This hasn’t happened in networking until now. Network virtualisation is part of this disaggregation by being able to run software in the hypervisor.

The second change is the evolution of the application, applications today run as distributed systems. He went through the sales pitch that you still need a hypervisor for containers.

The future for NSX is connecting public and private clouds and running traditional and cloud native applications.

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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

VMs, Containers, and Mega-Clouds: Connecting the Dots [MGT10599-S]

I’ve been getting more involved in containers recently and so am wanting to hear more about how to navigate the choices of where to run containers.

VMware’s Cloud Management BU Boss Ajay Singh was joined by customers Marshall Holloway from SAIC and Campbell McClean from Bharti Airtel to share some of their cloud journey decisions.

Ajay had a picture (photoshopped obviously) showing him as a developer!

Campbell was  particularly good customer presenter who mentioned they were in the middle of transitioning all their customer facing to apps to containers.

Marshall said SAIC train dolphins for the military! He also had a nice way to explain what they need from a container management perspective. “We need a conveyer belt that disciplines containers”. This was the message echoing what VMware is trying to be seen as, the grown up enterprise infrastructure on which you should run containers. I would have liked to see a bit more explanation as to what VMware products SAIC was using for its containers management other than NSX. NSX may be the glue but is the choice of VMware technology based on a networking decision rather than a container management decision?

Project Admiral

We then had a tech preview of a new container management solution called Project Admiral which is a container management extension for vRealize Automation where you can automate the deployment of container hosts as well as containers. These can then be fed into blueprints to deploy any number of solutions and obviously tie into NSX etc.

vRealize Network Insight

Then we also had a demo of what looks like a great visualisation tool for NSX, we saw how you can trace flows trough the virtual as well as physical networks and look at network utilisation pretty pictures!

I’ve said numerous times the term hybrid cloud is limiting when we are really talking about multi-clouds so I was happy to hear Campbell and Marshall talk about the multi-cloud, hybrid application future.

VMworld2016 has made the recording of many sessions publicly available but not this one it seems.

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

This was a session I was interested in as it covers the financial services industry where I currently work and also had my fellow London VMUGer , Simon Gallagher, presenting who I know has been doing a fairly extensive EUC deployment.

Manasee Dash and Harry Labana from VMware hosted with Matt Casper from Prudential, Simon Gallagher from UBS and Billy Matkovich from First Data.

Any project, particularly EUC which covers a raft of VMware, Microsoft and Citrix technologies is going to be hard work and I know Simon has his work cut out for him.

The panelists talking about being on the 3rd version of their evolving VDI platform, trying to give the impression of persistent desktops but delivered by non-persistent desktops.

The session was to talk about the shift in how financial companies are operating now from not just workstations but a user device perspective with smart phones, tablets and laptops used by remote/travelling workers and even entire remote branches.

Employees want smartphone connectivity to enterprise apps and data yet enterprises need to keep it all available, secure and cost effective. Financial companies are under some fairly strict regulations which impact how they can do IT.

What was interesting was hearing how all of the companies are using VDI in some form not to just necessarily have a VDI deployment a but rather a single deployment model for local and remote workers. This may cost more than a physical desktop on a desk but gives them more flexibility.

One of the points was being able to be efficient with a deployment model by using non-persistent desktops yet providing a persistent desktop experience so you are not hampering your staff with a poor experience. App-V and App Volumes AppStacks were the tools of choice on top of VDI.

The balance is creating a VDI environment that is manageable at scale without reducing functionality to still give that usable experience.

As VMworld2016 has made the recording publicly available, you can view the session here:

http://vmware.mediasite.com/mediasite/Play/087bb3f92cd243419cbaff30381e76f21d?catalog=dbf1ec28-2557-4dd3-a381-e5fe4ceabc40

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:

http://vmware.mediasite.com/mediasite/Play/ba4cb7ce031845f5a3ac824053f8adbb1d?catalog=dbf1ec28-2557-4dd3-a381-e5fe4ceabc40

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 planned to attend a session on one of the products I’ve written extensively about over the years, vCenter. After VMworld last year I had some things to say about the product management and direction of vCenter so was hoping to see how a year may have changed things. The session was unfortunately oversubscribed by the time I arrived so I missed out but caught up from a few people.

This was run by Vivienne Cleveland from FexEx, Jason Juha from Boeing and Madhup Gulati who’se the Product Manager from VMware.

The session focused on the vSphere 6 appliance and went through some of the new updates with the Update 2 release. Nothing too interesting that I didn’t know or that can’t be gleaned from the interwebs.

I was more interested in the tech previews of what’s coming up. At last year’s group discussion there was talk of higher availability for the VCSA and this was mentioned again. This is going to be an active-passive setup where vCenter can fail over to a warm standby in the same site. As I mentioned before this is a start but likely won’t satisfy the needs of companies that need to rely heavily on their management environment for cloud deployments or VDI and really need a scale out highly available environment.

VMware has also been hinting over the years that it will develop its vRealize Air management platform to include vCenter. Think vCenter in the cloud but nothing was apparently mentioned today other than what’s part of VMware Cloud Foundation.

I was disappointed to not be able to attend as I was just 2 minutes late.

I attended another vCenter session shortly afterwards, see my post: VMworld US 2016 Buzz: Ask the vCenter Server Experts Panel – INF9083

As VMworld2016 has made the recording publicly available, you can view the session here:

http://vmware.mediasite.com/mediasite/Play/ba4cb7ce031845f5a3ac824053f8adbb1d?catalog=dbf1ec28-2557-4dd3-a381-e5fe4ceabc40

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”.

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General Session: Seeing and Creating the Unimaginable

Today is the wind down to VMworld when all the announcements are out. I usually love the final day general session as it gives us a peak at what else is happening outside the VM/cloud/IT bubble. Today’s talks covered satellites hunting lost cities, 3D printers building robots and synthetic biology, a much needed look at something else!

Sarah Parcak, Satellite Archaeologist, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Sarah talked about her work using satellites to hunt down lost ancient sites, how’s that for a cool job, think of that next time you’re hunting down ancient snapshots!

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No General Session today so straight into sessions

Virtual SAN Management Current & Future [STO7904]

Although I’m fairly up to date with the new features of VSAN I wanted more of a peak into the future. VSAN Architect Christian Dickmann was one of the initial developers for VSAN and has done an incredible job bringing VSAN to market.

As a quick summary of the vision, VSAN is bringing “appliance like experience” on your choice of hardware, different storage policies per VM.

HCI is the driver for further revolution in simplicity, the next stage for VSAN is to double down on simplification and this wasn’t just for VSAN but for vSphere as a whole. They are questioning every knob in the vSphere + VSAN universe and seeing if they can make it simpler.

The biggest simplification opportunities include:

• install / upgrade for both software and hardware
• setup of the entire vSphere stack
• introducing infrastructure analytics
• take data centre management to a new level

Christian went on to say they are thinking about this by being able to provide both Choice and Simplicity. You can chose your hardware and yet still get the same simplicity of install and operations.

The theme was not really about just VSAN and this was very good to hear, so much more integration between products planned and a huge focus on automated ad simpler deployments.

He then went through 6 demos.

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Day 2 General Session: Competitive Advantage in the Multi-Cloud Era – Connecting
People, Apps & Data to Propel your Business Forward. [GS-TUE]

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 Workloace ONE single sign-on.

Free Fusion/Workstation

Free licenses for everyone with the VMworld app for VMware Fusion / Workstation, a nice touch.

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.

Trustpoint

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VMworld TV has a preview of VMworld

Day 1 General Session

This is VMware’s opportunity to articulate its strategy and help us understand where it is heading. I was not expecting too much technical information but rather some announcement highlights and a sense of how relevant VMware is in a rapidly changing cloud world. The theme of this year’s show is “be_Tomorrow” rather than 2015s “Ready for Any”. So, are we moving from a sort of getting ready for something phase to actually deploying the technology our future businesses can use?

CEO Pat Gelsinger started talking about his perspective on the industry of digital business (does anyone ever talk about analogue business!?) and of course on the state of the cloud. Poor Pat was recovering from a foot injury 10 weeks ago and still had to walk around the stage for 90 minutes.

The keynote had lots of customer references starting with GE and CVS pharmacy.

Pat then went through some figures showing cloud adoption. The forecast is 50% cloud usage (public and private) by 2021 and 50% public cloud adoption by 2030. I still wonder how people work out whether they actually have a private cloud. IoT was also mentioned, there will be 18 billion devices connected by 2020. Cloud IT is permeating the business and the physical world with IoT.

So, on to the announcements. I’ll be honest, I don’t think they did a great job articulating the why of what they are announcing. VMware has two issues which it is trying to work around. It has a portfolio that is difficult and expensive to integrate, this is hampering adoption of for example vRealize and also NSX. Secondly, VMware is seen as less relevant in the public cloud space due to a very traditional operating model for vCloud Air and a ever changing technology stack for its cloud software.

I find the terms used and sometimes products delivered over the years don’t necessarily build on each other and it feels like VMware is having to change tack a little too often. I will go further to say I believe the less than hoped for uptake of actual private cloud deployment rather than just standard virtualisation is directly due to the complexity of deploying VMware’s automation and cloud management platforms. Having both vCloud Director as well as vRealize as competing yet sometimes complimentary offerings has been crazy. If I had to ask how long would it take for you to set up a private cloud using VMware technologies, what would you say? I’m rambling I see, I’ll hopefully have more time to expand later.

So, onto the announcements.

VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Cloud Foundation is a “VMware’s unified Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) platform for the private and public cloud”. Their words not mine obviously. This bundles together vSphere, VSAN and NSX into an integrated stack to solve the deployment pain customers currently have.

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