VMworld17 It was …. Nice.
As I wrote in my last post (Check it out ) this was my first time in #VMworld so I didn’t know what to expect to from the venue itself, sessions, the audience, etc. My mission was to meet interesting people and hear interesting stuff in the sessions.Let’s say that the people were definitely interesting, rather the sessions slightly less.
If we start with the sessions — I did expect to get more out and see how we can leverage the new announcements and how our customers can benefit from these announcements.
VMware announced, as you already know, about the cooperation with #AWS,
What does it actually mean? The offering of AWS & VMware will be pushed towards customers by the VMware team — that means that AWS team is irrelevant here from the business side. The solution means that you will get a full SDDC solution (vCenter, vSphere, vSAN, NSX) that holds four (4) physical nodes as a minimum and can scale up to sixteen (16) , you can have a full SDDC after two (2) hours only. However, this solution is currently available only in Oregon, USA
They are already talking about expanding it and by the beginning of 2018 it will be available in other regions in the US in late 2018 it will be available in Europe as well.
What do we need it for? Using this solution will enable you to scale-out to the public cloud from your private cloud via VMware vRealize Automation, it will make it a real #hybrid #cloud solution. In the next release, you will be able also to create L2 VPN between onprem and public cloud which will you to vMotion the machines to the cloud and back.
Not like VMware, you can’t oversubscribe in the public cloud, so if one of your AWS Instances isn’t utilizing the entire stack of this resource it’s basically money thrown out.In addition, usually with on-prem you are utilizing 50–60 % of the resources in order to keep your growth factor and in case you will need failover your VMs, while using SDDC in AWS you can scale-out your SDDC by spinning on a vSphere host and automatically it will kick-in under 10 minutes. Therefore, you can utilize more of the cluster most of the time and keep it on a daily basis around 90%. Furthermore, think about having an HA automatically adding a new host to the cluster while keeping the old one decommissioned if it’s HW failure.
What about using AWS Services with Vmware? All of #AWS services are available for usage through the VMs on the VMware side. Think about having multiple VMware VMs like databases that are legacy types and can leverage the EC2 Spot instances or even ECS.
That’s impressive. And finally, but you didn’t hear it from me …. I’ve heard that possible EBS (Amazon Elastic Block Store) will be the storage for the VMware vSphere cluster, the NvME I’m guessing will be the caching layer in the near future J. An additional feature, Again …NOT heard it from me, vRealize Automation will be able to manage also the VMware On-prem, VMware SDDC on AWS & AWS web services side, you will get a single dashboard with the same look and feel.
The announcements on #Pivotal #PKS on top of VMware was slightly disappointing, I mean they are investing lots in the Cloud Foundry where it should be an enterprise platform and now in addition also they are going to put their money on Kubernetes project which is a most used container orchestration I believe and becomes a type of standard, but it looked like that PKS & PCF are overlapping which brings me to why continue the PCF for long term . From the other hand, the Integrated containers future looks good and to be able to run VIC along side a VM will be very good for IT staff management. I see a way where the PKS and #VIC will somehow work together in the future.
I do believe that VMware has a long vision of how they will more and more leverage this, so let’s wait and see.
VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) had also new announcements, and I do feel they are interesting. They have added Containers support users that can run VMs alongside containers on VIO.. By using VMware vRealize Integration with VIO, you can now embed OpenStack components in blueprints. OpenStack deployments can now be managed via the Horizon UI as an independent tab in vRA. You can scale under a single VIO deployment, multiple vCenter for large-scale environments. In addition, they have added support for live VM resize (CPU , Memory & disk) without the need to shut down the VM , they also added Firewall as a service and much more
There is something interesting I want to share with you. I’ve gone through the booths to see what’s new and if there are any special new vendors in the show. I found out something amazing that I can’t understand why. I saw that lots of well-known storage companies attended and I try to figure out why? I’m talking about companies such as Infinidat, NetApp, PureStorage , HDS, Kaminario, Qnap and of course EMC ,HP all these companies took part in the show, why I was wondering? Because I couldn’t find what is the new message these companies are bringing to the table. It wasn’t what I expected from them but as I said before “I didn’t come with expectations” J
In a quick look, #Rubrik made a great scene around their product and they have put up a nice show, I don’t know if the product is quite there yet but they are here to make noise for sure. From the other hand, #Veeam which is usually my favorite vendor didn’t bring to many major announcements that you can say “WOW”. The CDP Feature is a good thing and it’s about time they did it and of course the NAS backup which is a must today to compete in the Enterprise products with the giants. Other than that I wasn’t blown away, but let us see the final release and see how they will surprise us.
For conclusion, I do see a bright future for VMware with the AWS collaboration, there is much potential here and I believe it will actually balance the market more from companies that went full-in the cloud and companies that where on-prem only. This is my highlight of course from VMworld this year.
See you next year #VMworld18, it was a great experience meeting amazing people, meet some clients and frankly also enjoy the wonderful city of Barcelona.
