VMworld 2018 - Day 1
OK, here we go. Let the Deep Learning® begin...
(NB: As there was so much information shared each day, I may use short sentences rather than long descriptive paragraphs full of context. This way, I can get the information out to those who were unable to attend VMworld in person as quickly as possible. Also, I focused on cloud and NSX this year with some security, operations and EUC thrown in.)
General Session - Technology Superpowers
Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO, kicked off VMworld 2018 in his usual positive and friendly manner. Pat is one of my favorite leaders in the IT industry. This year is VMware's 20th "birthday" and Pat's 6th year as CEO.
Pat then introduced a fun birthday video and made a big reveal of his VMware "tattoo". His comment was "What happens in Vegas sometimes doesn't stay in Vegas"😊
History Lesson on VMware
Act 1: ESX Multiplatform
Act 2: VDI Multiplatform
Act 3: NSX Multi-vendor interoperability
Act 4: Easier cloud migrations
Next Act: Multi-cloud.
WWT, where I work, is completely in sync with multi-cloud and have been investing significantly here. Nice to hear VMware seeing the same customer trend.
Question from Pat: Is running a business about people or profit? Can a company do well and do good? If you have been following Pat lately, you will have noticed the global outreach that he has been personally involved in.
VMware Global Impact: 540M tons of carbon emissions reduced by virtualization since VMware began. That's enough energy to drive a car 1T miles.
VMware was named #17 on the Fortune "Change the World" list.
On the topic of global impact, Pat announced that Malala would be the special guest during Tuesday's general session. (This was a very moving session. Please see my notes on Malala in my Day 3 post.)
VMware defines the four current "Tech Superpowers" as Cloud, Mobile, AI, IOT
- Cloud: Cloud has amazing reach but 5% of the world has no access
- Mobile: Donated and low-cost phones are bringing information to remote populations
- AI/ML: Pat was in charge of engineering for the 486 chip in 1986. he proposed that Intel must make 486 a great AI chip. That idea was scrapped. Today AI is driving discovery.
- Edge Computing/IOT: Example: Modern hard hat with VR/AR access to building plans that lets workers "see through walls".
VMware Vision: Any Device, Any Application, Any cloud
Today, we are seeing a need for multi-cloud as hybrid cloud is driven by IT Operations and public cloud is being driven by developers and lines of business. VMware Cloud Foundation is the easy path to multi-cloud and HCI is the easiest method to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation. VSAN is at the heart of VMware-based HCI and there are currently 15,000 VSAN customers.
Mercy Ships
Mercy Ships deploys traveling, floating, health care ships. Mercy Ships Runs on Dell Technologies products. A new Mercy ship will be going live in Africa and Pat will be there.
Andy Jassy, CEO AWS
Two years ago VMware & AWS announced their partnership. Andy & Pat discussed how far VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-AWS) has come and what is next. NSX-T with Direct Connect is in preview and very close to production. That is huge.
A few customer examples:
A few customer examples:
- MIT migrated 3,000 VMs over three months to VMC-AWS
- Brinks moved 600 VMs to VMC-AWS for D/R
Announced VMC-AWS M5. Some highlights:
- Storage is very cost effective.
- VSAN backed by on Elastic Block Storage
- Bulk live migration
- PKS coming (Chad Sakac cheered 😀)
- The huge announcement was Amazon Relational Database Service on VMware on-premises. That was a surprise and targeted directly at Oracle.
Managing Everything
Project Dimension manages cloud plus on-premises plus IoT
Project Dimension manages cloud plus on-premises plus IoT
Pulse 2.0 manages IoT devices as a service. Scales to 500M devices.
VMware Cloud Operations for the Management of Multi-Cloud
VMware Cloud Operations for the Management of Multi-Cloud
Pat announced the intention of VMware to acquire CloudHealth out of Boston to analyze and manage multi-cloud cost, usage, security, and performance in one place
CTO Ray O'Farrell
Kubernetes
All major providers run containers in VMs
VMware would like you to think of VMware PKS as Enterprise Kubernetes
Wendy Carter, VMware Senior Director ran through a demo with Ray of the Wavefront UI for PKS. Wavefront makes managing containers at scale much easier.
vRealize and Machine Learning
Ray ran through a pretty slick vRealize Operations demo moving unused NVIDIA GPUs from a quiet VDI environment to a heavy Machine Learning environment on the fly. The ML environment showed yellow in vRealize Operations and after moving the GPUs, vROps showed green and the ML job ran much faster.
Workspace One simplifies all the end user complication
It was announced that Dell will provision a custom Workspace One load on laptops for customers at the factory
Workspace One Intelligence
AI to solve end-user compute issues.
AI to solve end-user compute issues.
Find applications that are blocking Windows 10 from being upgraded with security patches.
ESXi Fault Tolerant on ARM!!
This completely surprised me. A demo showed an application running in fault-tolerant mode on ESXi. Then it was revealed that the ESXi servers were ARM IoT devices. Wow.
ESXi Fault Tolerant on ARM!!
This completely surprised me. A demo showed an application running in fault-tolerant mode on ESXi. Then it was revealed that the ESXi servers were ARM IoT devices. Wow.
vSphere Platinum
A new version of vSphere with AppDefense built in. Great idea. Reducing the attack surface of applications is becoming more effective than protecting the perimeter.
A new version of vSphere with AppDefense built in. Great idea. Reducing the attack surface of applications is becoming more effective than protecting the perimeter.
vSphere Platinum includes AppDefense-NSX which learns about applications and locks down the network accordingly. Learn. Lock. Adapt.
Session: Hybrid Cloud Architecture Design and Best Practices for VMware Cloud on AWS
Aarthi Raju, Wen Yu, AWS
NSX-T
NSX-T makes some improvements over NSX-V in terms of architectural design.
NSX-T Allows all traffic to be over AWS Direct Connect.
NSX-T adds BGP routing. NSX-V is static routing.
NSX-T supports micro-segmentation
Some use cases:
Oracle AWS
Oracle RAC Multi-cast not supported in AWS VPC, but adding VMC-AWS NSX adds support for multicast.
RAC requires shared storage. VSAN adds shared storage through VMC-AWS.
Oracle RAC, RMAN, DataGuard all work on VMC-AWS
Can restore an on-premises RMAN backup to S3 into the VMC-AWS cluster.
DataGuard can be used to keep two clusters in sync multi-cloud
Once databases are synced through DataGuard, one can initiate a switchover to make AWS the primary copy if you want or if you need to for DR
Veeam
S3 can be a backup destination
Can use AWS Storage Gateway (ESXi VM) on-premises to present iSCSI storage to Veeam which then moves data to S3.
One can have an AWS Storage Gateway running in VMC-AWS and use that to restore from the Veeam S3 bucket to VMC-AWS VMs
Commvault
Can backup to S3 over public internet or use VPCe
VPCe = VPC Endpoint via Elastic Network Interface (ENI).
ENI is like a vNIC but in AWS.
Commvault Gateway VM makes this happen
Dell EMC Appliances
Dell EMC backup appliances can backup to S3 using the Dell EMC Cloud D/R Add-On (CDRA) virtual appliance. Avamar & Data Domain is read from the CDRA and sent to S3. VMs can be restored to VMC-AWS.
Session: VMware NSX - Network, Security, and Operations - Design Studio (NDA)
Well friends, this was an NDA session so I cannot share any details. The team behind the new UI for NSX-T took a few of us through some screenshots and asked for usability feedback.
What I can share is that all the NDA Design Studios were held in the Wedding Chapel which made my day. :)
What I can share is that all the NDA Design Studios were held in the Wedding Chapel which made my day. :)
Session: Beyond Horizon 7: Moving to a Digital Workspace with Workspace ONE
This session was outside my core focus on cloud and NSX this week, but I have a long history with Horizon, so I found this interesting.
Different deployment models for Horizon
On-premises through cloud to managed cloud. (In a later post, I will detail Horizon on Azure which was also interesting.)
Bringing desktop apps and SaaS apps together
Workspace ONE supports Windows 10, macOS, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, and Rugged/Connected things
Identity Manager for SSO
On-premises with Horizon 7, cloud option with Workspace One
Different deployment models for Horizon
On-premises through cloud to managed cloud. (In a later post, I will detail Horizon on Azure which was also interesting.)
Bringing desktop apps and SaaS apps together
Workspace ONE supports Windows 10, macOS, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, and Rugged/Connected things
Identity Manager for SSO
On-premises with Horizon 7, cloud option with Workspace One
Pod & Block design
One management block plus multiple resource blocks make up a pod.
One management block plus multiple resource blocks make up a pod.
A Wokspace ONE pod will support up to 10,000 users
Global entitlements allow linking multiple pods for greater scale into a Cloud Pod Federation
VMware Identity Manager (vIDM) information flow
IDEXX Customer Case Study
IDEXX is a Global pet healthcare company headquartered in Maine
8,000 employees
25,000 endpoints
Non-persistent desktops
Deployed a Workspace ONE pod in the US and a pod in the Netherlands
Session: A Practitioners Guide to Migrating Workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS
Important Features of VMC-AWS
Hybrid Linked Mode to link on-premise and AWS vCenters
VPC connection for networking
VMC-AWS is fully supported by VMware including human chat support
VMC-AWS stretch clusters can be placed across multiple availability zones for increased HA
Some recommendations when planning for VM migration to VMC-AWS
Some recommendations when planning for VM migration to VMC-AWS
Build a migration team across IT & Application groups
Group your VMs by the downtime they can support. Move the VMs that can handle prolonged downtime first.
Group your VMs by the downtime they can support. Move the VMs that can handle prolonged downtime first.
Look at application dependencies
VMware's Suggested AWS Migration Assessment
VMware Cost Insight is a free SaaS tool to get an estimate of the cost of running VMs in VMC-AWS. Can be found at: vmcsizer.vmware.com
VMware's Suggested AWS Migration Assessment
VMware Cost Insight is a free SaaS tool to get an estimate of the cost of running VMs in VMC-AWS. Can be found at: vmcsizer.vmware.com
vRealize Network Insight analyzes network for application flow and application dependency mapping. Network Insight is not free but there is a free 30-day trial.
WWT/Dell EMC Customer Reception at Skyfall Lounge
WWT & Dell EMC sponsored an evening reception on the 64th floor of the Delano at the Skyfall Lounge. This event was very popular with customers and sold out early. The Skyfall Lounge has a beautiful view of the Vegas Strip from the outdoor patio. It was warm on the patio when the event began, but after an hour, the temperature dropped and was very comfortable. The WWT marketing department did an amazing job planning this event and choosing such a beautiful location.
The wait staff was excellent and very attentive. Even though the venue was at capacity, there was always a member of the wait staff passing by every few minutes. This is a photo from up behind the bar looking across the venue and out onto the patio:
I hope you have enjoyed this post from Day 1. I value and welcome your feedback. Video recordings of sessions can be found here. Now on to the Day 2 post...
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