Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US. My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
A quick post to provide some closing thoughts on VMworld US 2019 and link to the posts I did during the event. Not in that order. I’ll add to this as I come across interesting posts from other people too.
This was my fourth VMworld US event, and I had a lot of fun. I’d like to thank all the people who helped me out with getting there, the people who stopped and chatted to me at the event, everyone participating in the vCommunity, and VMware for putting on a great show. I’m looking forward to (hopefully) getting along to it again in 2020 (August 30 – September 3).
Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US. My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
As part of my attendance at VMworld US 2019 I had the opportunity to attend Tech Field Day Extra sessions. You can view the videos from the Apstra session here, and download my rough notes from here.
More Than Meets The Eye
A lot of people like to talk about how organisations need to undertake “digital transformation”. One of the keys to success with this kind of transformation comes in the form of infrastructure transformation. The idea is that, if you’re doing it right, you can improve:
Business agility;
Application reliability; and
Control costs.
Apstra noted that “a lot of organisations start with choosing their hardware and all other choices are derived from that choice, including the software”. As a result of this, you’re constrained by the software you’ve bought from that vendor. The idea is you need to focus on business-oriented outcomes, which are then used to determine the technical direction you’ll need to take to achieve those outcomes.
But even if you’ve managed to get yourself a platform that helps you achieve the outcomes you’re after, if you don’t have an appropriate amount of automation and visibility in your environment, you’re going to struggle with deployments being slowed down. You’ll likely also find that that a lack of efficient automation can lead to:
Physical and logical topologies that are decoupled but dependent;
Error-prone deployments; and
No end to end validation.
When you’re in that situation, you’ll invariably find that you’ll struggle with reduced operational agility and a lack of visibility. This makes it hard to troubleshoot issues in the field, and people generally feel sad (I imagine).
Intent, Is That What You Mean?
So how can Apstra help? Will they magically make everything work the way you want it to? Not necessarily. There are a bunch of cool features available within the Apstra solution, but you need to do some work up front to understand what you’re trying to achieve in the first place. But once you have the framework in place, you can do some neat stuff, using AOS to accelerate initial and day 2 fabric configuration. You can, for example, deploy new racks and L2 / L3 fabric VLANs at scale in a few clicks:
Streamline new rack design and deployment;
Automate fabric VLAN deployment;
Closed-loop validation (endpoint configuration, EVPN routes expectations); and
Include jumbo frame configuration for overlay networks.
The idea behind intent-based networking (IBN) is fairly straightforward:
Collect intent;
Expose intent;
Validate; and
Remediate.
You can read a little more about IBN here. There’s a white paper on Intent-based DCs can be found here.
Thoughts
I don’t deal with complicated network deployments on a daily basis, but I do know some people who play that role on TV. Apstra delivered a really interesting session that had me thinking about the effectiveness of software solutions to control infrastructure architecture at scale. There’s been a lot of talk during conference keynotes about the importance of digital transformation in the enterprise and how we all need to be leveraging software-defined widgets to make our lives better. I’m all for widgets making life easier, but they’re only going to be able to do that when you’ve done a bit of work to understand what it is you’re trying to do with all of this technology. The thing that struck me about Apstra is that they seem to understand that, while they’re selling some magic software, it’s not going to be any good to you if you haven’t done some work to prepare yourself for it.
I rabbit on a lot about how technology organisations struggle to understand what “the business” is trying to achieve. This isn’t a one-way problem either, and the business frequently struggles with the idea that technology seems to be a constant drain on an organisation’s finances without necessarily adding value to the business. In most cases though, technology is doing some really cool stuff in the background to make businesses run better, and more efficiently. Apstra is a good example of using technology to deliver reliable services to the business. Whether you’re an enterprise networker, or toiling away at a cloud service provider, I recommend checking out how Apstra can make things easier when it comes to keeping your network under control.
Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US. My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
As part of my attendance at VMworld US 2019 I had the opportunity to attend Tech Field Day Extra sessions. You can view the videos from the NetApp session here, and download my rough notes from here.
Enhanced DC Workloads
In The Beginning There Were Workloads
Andy Banta started his presentation by talking about the evolution of the data centre (DC). The first-generation DCs were resource-constrained. As long as there was something limiting (disk, CPU, memory), things didn’t get done. The later first-generation DCs were comprised of standalone hosts with applications. Andy called “2nd-generation DCs” those hosts that were able to run multiple workloads. The evolution of these 2nd-generation DCs was virtualisation – now you could run multiple applications and operating systems on one host.
The DC though, is still all about compute, memory, throughput, and capacity. As Andy described it, “the DC is full of boxes”.
[image courtesy of NetApp]
But There’s Cool Stuff Happening
Things are changing in the DC though, primarily thanks to a few shifts in key technologies that have developed in recent times.
Persistent Memory
Persistent memory has become more mainstream, and application vendors are developing solutions that can leverage this technology effectively. There’s also technology out there that will let you slice this stuff up and share it around, just like you would a pizza. And it’s resilient too, so if you drop your pizza, there’ll be some still left on your plate (or someone else’s plate). Okay I’ll stop with the tortured analogy.
Microvisors
Microvisors are being deployed more commonly in the DC (and particularly at the edge). What’s a microvisor? “Imagine a Hypervisor stripped down to only what you need to run modern Linux based containers”. The advent of the microvisor is leading to different types of workloads (and hardware) popping up in racks where they may not have previously been found.
Specialised Cores on Demand
You can now also access specialised cores on demand from most service providers. You need access to some GPUs to get some particular work done? No problem. There are a bunch of different ways you can slice this stuff up, and everyone’s hip to the possibility that you might only need them for a short time, but you can pay a consumption fee for however long that time will be.
HPC
Even High Performance Compute (HPC) is doing stuff with new technology (in this case NVMeoF). What kinds of workloads?
Banking – low-latency transactions
Fluid dynamics – lots of data being processed quickly in a parallel stream
Medical and nuclear research
Thoughts
My favourite quote from Andy was “NVMe is grafting flesh back on to the skeleton of fibre channel”. He (and most of us in the room) are of the belief that FC (in its current incantation at least) is dead. Andy went on to say that “[i]t’s out there for high margin vendors” and “[t]he more you can run on commodity hardware, the better off you are”.
The DC is changing, and not just in the sense that a lot of organisations aren’t running their own DCs any more, but also in the sense that the types of workloads in the DC (and their form factor) are a lot different to those we’re used to running in first-generation DC deployments.
Where does NetApp fit in all of this? The nice thing about having someone like Andy speak on their behalf is that you’re not going to get a product pitch. Andy has been around for a long time, and has seen a lot of different stuff. What he can tell you, though, is that NetApp have started developing (or selling) technology that can accommodate these newer workloads and newer DC deployments. NetApp will be happy to sell you storage that runs over IP, but they can also help you out with compute workloads (in the core and edge), and show you how to run Kubernetes across your estate.
The DC isn’t just full of apps running on hosts accessing storage any more – there’s a lot more to it than that. Workload diversity is becoming more and more common, and it’s going to be really interesting to see where it’s at in ten years from now.
Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US. My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Here are my rough notes from “HBI3487BUS – Rethink Data Protection & Management for VMware”, presented by Curt Hayes (Cloud and Data Center Engineer, Regeneron) and Mike Palmer (Chief Product Officer, Druva). You can grab a PDF copy of my notes from here.
The World is Changing
Cloud Storage Costs Continue To Decline
67 price decreases in AWS storage with CAGR of (60%) – AWS
68% (110+) of countries have Data protection and privacy legislation – United Nations
40% of IT will be “Versatilists” by 2021 – Gartner
54% of CIOs believe streamlining storage is best opportunity for cost optimisation – ESG
80% of enterprises will migrate away and close their on-premises DCs by 2025 – Gartner
256% of increase in demand for Data scientists in last 5 years – Indeed
Druva’s 4 Pillars of Value
Costs Decrease – storage designed to optimise performance and cost reduces per TB costs, leaving more money for innovation
I think the folks at Druva have been doing some cool stuff lately, and chances are quite high that I’ll be writing more about them in the future. There’s a good story with their cloud-native architecture, and it was nice to hear how a customer leveraged them to do things better than they had been doing previously.
Two things really stood out to me during this session. The first was the statement “[t]he best work you can do is when you don’t have to do it”. I’ve heard it said before that the best storage operation is one you don’t have to do, and I think we sometimes lose site of how this approach can help us get stuff done in a more efficient fashion, ultimately leading to focussing our constrained resources elsewhere.
The second was the idea of looking beyond data protection. The “secondary storage” market is riding something of a gravy train at the moment, with big investment from the VC funds in current and next-generation data protection (management?) solutions. There’s been some debate over how effective these solutions are at actually deriving value from that secondary data, but you’d have to think they’re in a prime position to succeed. I’m curious to see just what shape that value takes when we all start to agree on the basic premise.
Sponsored sessions aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I like hearing from customers about how it’s worked out well for them. And the cool thing about VMworld is that there’s a broader ecosystem supporting VMware across a number of different technology stacks. This makes for a diverse bunch of sessions, and I think it makes for an extremely interesting vendor conference. If you want to learn a bit more about what Druva have been up to, check out my post from Tech Field Day 19 here, and you can also find a useful overview of the product here. Good session. 3.5 stars.
Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US. My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
These are my rough notes from “HBI3516BUS – Scaling Virtual Infrastructure for the Enterprise: Truths, Beliefs and the Real World” was a sponsored panel session hosted by George Crump (of Storage Switzerland fame) and sponsored by Tintri by DDN. The panellists were:
JP: Hyper-V is not really for the enterprise. Configuration, and automation were a challenge. Tintri made it easier to deal with the hypervisor.
JD: You put a bunch of disks and connect it up to what you want to. It’s really simple to setup. “Why would you want to go complex if you didn’t have to?”
MB: When we had block storage, we were beholden to the storage team. We’ve never had problems with their [Tintri’s] smallest hybrid arrays.
AA: Back in the ESX 2.5 days – single LUN per VM. We would buy our arrays half-populated – ready to grow. We’re now running 33 – 34 devices. Tintri was great with QoS for VMs. It became a great troubleshooting tool for VMware.
GC: Reporting and analytics with Tintri has always been great.
MB: We use Tintri analytics to create reports for global infrastructure. Tintri will give you per-VM allocation by default. Performance like a Tivo – you can go back and look at analytics at a very granular level.
GC: How did the addition of new arrays go with Global Center?
MB: We manage our purchases based on capacity or projects. 80 – 85% we consider additional capacity. Global Center has a Pools function. It does a storage vMotion “like” feature to move data between arrays. There’s no impact.
JP: We used a UCS chassis, Tintri arrays, and Hyper-V hypervisor. We used a pod architecture. We knew how many users we wanted to host per pod. We have 44000 users globally. VDI is the only thing the bank uses.
AA: We’re more of a compute / core based environment, rather than users. One of the biggest failings of Tintri is that it just works. When you’re not causing problems – people aren’t paying attention to it.
MB: HCI in general has a problem with very large VMs.
AA: We use a lot of scripting, particularly on the Red Hat (RHV) side of things. Tintri is fixing a lot of those at a different level.
GC: What would you change?
JP: I would run VMware.
MB: The one thing that can go wrong is the network. It was never a standardised network deployment. We had different network people in different regions doing different things.
JP: DR in the cloud. How do you do bank infrastructure in the cloud? Can we DR into the cloud? Tested Tintri replicating into Azure.
AA: We’re taking on different people. Moving “up” the stack.
Consistency in environments. It’s still a hard thing to do.
Wishlist?
Containers
A Virtual Appliance
Thoughts
Some folks get upset about these sponsored sessions at VMworld. I’ve heard it said before that they’re nothing more than glorified advertising for the company that sponsors the session. I’m not sure that it’s really any different to a vendor holding a four day conference devoted to themselves, but some people like to get ornery about stuff like that. One of my favourite things about working with technology is hearing from people out in the field about how they use that technology to do their jobs better / faster / more efficiently.
Sure, this session was a bit of a Tintri fan panel, but I think the praise is warranted. I’ve written enthusiastically in the past about how I thought Tintri has really done some cool stuff in terms of storage for virtualisation. I was sad when things went south for them as a company, but I have hopes that they’ll recover and continue to innovate under the control of DDN.
When everything I’ve been hearing from the keynote speakers at this conference revolved around cloud-native tools and digital transformation, it was interesting to come across a session where the main challenges still involved getting consistent, reliable and resilient performance from block storage to serve virtual desktop workloads to the enterprise. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be looking at what’s happening with Kubernetes, etc, but I think there’s still room to understand what’s making these bigger organisations tick in terms of successful storage infrastructure deployments.
Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US. My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Here are my notes on gifts, etc, that I received as an attendee at VMworld US 2019. Apologies if it’s a bit dry but I’m just trying to make it clear what I received during this event to ensure that we’re all on the same page as far as what I’m being influenced by. I’m going to do this in chronological order, as that was the easiest way for me to take notes during the week. Whilst every attendee’s situation is different, I was paid by my employer to be at this event.
Saturday
My wife kindly dropped me off at the airport. I flew Qantas economy class from BNE – SYD – SFO courtesy of my employer (Digital Sense). My taxi to the hotel was also covered by my employer. I stayed at The Fairmont on Nob Hill. This was also covered by my employer. On Saturday night we went out and fought valiantly against jet-lag.
Sunday
On Sunday I went to the conference venue and picked up my VMworld backpack (containing a notepad, pen, and water bottle). I was also given a VMworld-branded pop socket because I’d uploaded my photo for my badge to the portal earlier.
On Sunday afternoon I attended a VMware Cloud Provider Technical Advisory Board (TAB) Meeting. Lunch consisted of rice, chicken, fish, and salad. My manager saved the day by fetching real flat white coffees from Bluestone Lane. During the break I had some coffee and a choc-chip cookie. As we left we were all given a VMware cloud provider platform polo shirt and Keen wireless charging desk clock.
That night there was an attendee welcome reception in the Solutions Exchange. I had 2 Sapporo beers, some shrimp and some cheese. I also picked up:
I then headed over to the VMunderground party at Tabletop Tap House. I caught up with a few people and helped myself to 2 Coronas, 1 Firestone 805 and some bruschetta.
Monday
Before the general session I grabbed some coffee and a muffin from the Square. I also managed to grab a vExpert gift bag, consisting of one of those drawstring bags, a vExpert 2019 pin and sticker, and a Raspberry Pi 3. I then swung by the VMUG stand and picked up my VMUG leader gift – a nice leather notepad folio.
For lunch I had one of the boxed turkey sandwiches.
For dinner a group of use met at Osha Thai Restaurant. We convinced them to let us share plates from the set menu, and I had a bit of everything. For appetizers we had:
Kobe beef wasabi roll with carrot, celery and mint
Miang Kham Shrimp – lettuce wrapped with shrimp, ginger, lime, roasted coconut, peanut, fresh chilli, and coconut herb caramel.
Vegetarian crispy roll – silver noodle, shiitake mushroom, cabbage and carrot served with sweet and sour plum sauce
Tuna Tower – yellow fin tuna tartare with mango, avocado and sriracha sesame oil
There was also a really tasty Shrimp Tom-Kha coconut soup. And for the main course they served:
Volcanic Beef – wok-fried grilled premium USDA flank steak with Thai basil, bell pepper in lava sauce
Chu-chi salmon – pan-seared salmon fillet served with “Chu-Chi” fragrant and flavourful red curry
Pad Thai – Classic Pad Thai noodles, tamarind reduction, peanut with choice of chicken or tofu
Country chicken – stir-fried lightly battered chicken with cashew, onion, garlic and honey-ginger sauce
It was all really nice. These people put down their credit cards to pay for it:
Thanks to Keith Townsend for organising the evening. I also had 3 Singha beers. I took a ride-sharing service paid for by Stephen Foskett and walked from his hotel back to mine.
Tuesday
On Tuesday morning I was fortunate enough to be selected to attend a vExpert breakfast with Cohesity CEO Mohit Aron at Grill in the St Regis hotel. I had 2 cups of coffee, and the “Local Farm” egg sandwich, with a scramble of organic Petaluma farmed eggs, Hobbs smoked black pepper bacon, cheddar cheese, and sourdough bread. We were also given a Cohesity mug that surprisingly survived the flight home. Regular readers of the blog will know I’m a fan of Cohesity and this was a great opportunity to learn more about Mohit.
After the general session I did another whip around the Solutions Exchange and picked up:
I had the box lunch again, which consisted of a chilli rubbed beef torta sandwich with avocado, black been puree, grilled onions, roaster tomatoes and cotija cheese on teller bread, a lemon bar dessert, and an apple. Later in the afternoon I stopped by Super Duper as I knew I wouldn’t have much time for dinner in the evening. I had the Super Burger with cheese, and a Pilsner. My arteries did not thank me.
I then headed over to the Dell Technologies Cloud & VMware VeloCloud MeetUp at The Grid on 4th Street. I had 2 Holy Ghost Pilsner beers and Dell very kindly gave me a DJI Osmo Pocket camera and 32GB Sandisk microSD card. Big thanks to Konnie for having me along.
I then headed back to my hotel and Howard Marks swung by in a cab to take me to The Orpheum to see Hamilton. I now understand what all of the fuss is about. Big thanks to John White at Expedient for the tickets. I took a ride-sharing service back to the hotel – this was paid for by Becky Elliot.
Wednesday
On Wednesday morning I walked down to the venue with Becky. We stopped at Starbucks and I had an egg, bacon, and cheese sandwich – it was just what I needed. I attended two Tech Field Day Extra sessions in the morning, and had 2 coffees and some extremely tasty Baklava (provided by Al Rasheed). For lunch we had Mexican, consisting of corn tortillas, rice & beans, house made carnitas, cheese quesadillas, sour cream, guacamole, salsa, and house made churros.
After lunch I headed back to the Solutions Exchange for a final walk around and picked up:
A Druva shirt;
Some stickers, a cable organizer, and a glasses cleaner from Apstra;
Some more Gorilla Guides and stickers from ActualTech Media; and
I then attended a 3-hour VCPP APJ Roundtable event at the W Hotel. I helped myself to some bottled water while I was there.
For dinner I caught up with some of the Tech Field Day crew at Thirsty Bear. This is a taps-style place, and I had devilled eggs, pulled pork empanadas, buffalo chicken empanadas, bacon and corn flatbread, and bacon-wrapped shrimp. I also had 3 Kolsch beers. We then retreated across the road to the bar at the W Hotel where I had 1 Cal Lager. This was paid for by Stephen Foskett. I then took a ride-sharing service back to the hotel with Becky Elliot. This was paid for by Becky.
Thursday
On Thursday my colleagues and I attended a NetApp EBC in Santa Clara. NetApp paid for our transport to and from the city. We had breakfast there, consisting of coffee, potato gems, bacon, quiche and a muffin. We were also given a NetApp-branded notepad and socks. For lunch we had 6 cheese mac and cheese, beef short rib, grilled chicken, mashed potato, salad, and water.
I had 2 Stella Artois beers and some crumbed prawns during the happy hour. We then headed to Birk’s Restaurant for dinner. I had 3 Firestone Pivo beers, blackened ribeye and mashed potatoes, and a shrimp cocktail for dinner. This was paid for by NetApp.
When we returned to the hotel we checked out the Tonga Room. I had a Fog Lifter cocktail, which seemed to have a lot of rum and crushed ice in it. This was paid for by my colleague.
Friday
We went for breakfast at Lori’s Diner and I had the Blues Burger. The blue cheese worked pretty well I thought. We then headed over to Pier 39 to check out some of the tourist shops and ended up having lunch at the Barrel House Tavern in Sausalito. I had the Tartare Tacos consisting of four wonton tacos (2 ahi tuna and 2 salmon tartare) with avocado mousse, summer slaw, chili oil, soy lime vinaigrette, and chili aioli. It was really nice. I also had 3 Kolsch beers. Once we were back at the hotel I took a cab to SFO and flew home via LAX. Please now enjoy this photo of a baseball card with my likeness on it – thanks Rubrik!
Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US. My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Here are my rough notes from “HBI2537PU – Cloud Provider CXO Panel with Cohesity, Cloudian and PhoenixNAP”, a panel-type presentation with the following people:
Ari Paul – Product Marketing, Cloud Providers, VMware
YR: William, given your breadth of experience, what are some of the emerging trends you’ve been seeing?
WB: Companies are struggling to keep up with the pace of information generation. Understanding the data, storing and retaining it, and protecting it. Multi-cloud adds a lot of complexity. We’ve heard studies that say 22% of data generated is actually usable. It’s just sitting there. Public cloud is still hot, but it’s settling down a little.
YR: William comes from a massive cloud provider. What are you guys using?
WB: We’ve standardised on vCloud Director (vCD) and vSphere. We came from build our own but it wasn’t providing the value that we hoped it would. Customers want a seamless way to manage multiple cloud resources.
YR: Are you guys familiar with VCPP?
AP: VCPP is the crown jewel of our partner program at VMware. 4000+ providers, 120+ countries, 10+ million VMs, 10000+ DCs. We help you save money, make money (things are services ready). We’re continuing to invest in vCD. Kubernetes, GPUs, etc. Lots of R&D.
YR: William, you mentioned you standardised on the VMware platform. Talk to us about your experience. Why vCD?
WB: It’s been a checkered past for vCD. We were one of the first five on the vCloud Express program in 2010 / 11. We didn’t like vCD in its 1.0 version. We thought we can do this better. And we did. We launched the first on-demand, pay by the hour public cloud for enterprise in 2011. But it didn’t really work out. 2012 / 13 we started to see investments being made in vCD. 5.0 / 5.5 improved. Many people thought vCD was gong to die. We now see a modern, flexible portal that can be customised. And we can take our devs and have them customise vCD, rather than build a customised portal. That’s where we can put our time and effort. We’ve always done things differently. Always been doing other things. How do we bring our work in visual cloud into that cloud provider portal with vCD?
YR: You have an extensive career at VMware.
RR: I was one of the first people to take vCD out to the world. But Enterprise wasn’t mature enough. When we focused on SPs, it was the right thing to do. DIY portals needs a lot of investment. VMware allows a lot of extensibility now. For us, as Cohesity, we want to be able to plug in to that as well.
WB: At one point we had 45 devs working on a proprietary portal.
YR: We’ve been doing a lot on the extensibility side. What role are services playing in cloud providers?
AP: It takes away the complexities of deploying the stack.
JT: We’re specifically in object. A third of our customers are service providers. You guys know that object is built for scale, easy to manage, cost-effective. 20% of the data gets used. We hear that customers want to improve on that. People are moving away from tape. There’s a tremendous opportunity for services built on storage. Amazon has shown that. Data protection like Cohesity. Big data with Splunk. You can offer an industry standard, but differentiate based on other services.
YR: As we move towards a services-oriented world, William how do you see cloud management services evolving?
WB: It’s not good enough to provide some compute infrastructure any more. You have to do something more. We’re stubbornly focussed on different types of IaaS. We’re not doing generic x86 on top of vSphere. Backup, DR – those are in our wheelhouse. From a platform perspective, more and more customers want some kind of single pane of glass across their data. For some that’s on-premises, for some its public, for some it’s SaaS. You have to be able to provide value to the customer, or they will disappear. Object storage, backup with Cohesity. You need to keep pace with data movement. Any cloud, any data, any where.
AP: I’ve been at VMware long enough not to drink the Kool-Aid. Our whole cloud provider business is rooted in some humility. vCD can help other people doing better things to integrate. vCD has always been about reducing OPEX. Now we’re hitting the top line. Any cloud management platform today needs to open, extensible, not try to do anything.
YR: Is the crowd seeing pressure on pure IaaS?
Commentator: Coming from an SP to enterprise is different. Economics. Are you able to do a show back with vCD 9 and vROps?
WB: We’re putting that in the hands of customers. Looking at CloudHealth. There’s a benefit to being in the business management space. You have the opportunity to give customers a better service. That, and more flexible business models. Moving into flexible billing models – gives more freedom to the enterprise customer. Unless you’re the largest of the large – enterprises have difficulty acting as a service provider. Citibank are an exception to this. Honeywell do it too. If you’re Discount Tire – it’s hard. You’re the guy providing the service, and you’re costing them money. There’s animosity – and there’s no choice.
Commentator: Other people have pushed to public because chargeback is more effective than internal show back with private cloud.
WB: IT departments are poorly equipped to offer a breadth of services to their customers.
JT: People are moving workloads around. They want choice and flexibility. VMware with S3 compatible storage. A common underlying layer.
YR: Economics, chargeback. Is VMware (and VCPP) doing enough?
WB: The two guys to my right (RR and JT) have committed to building products that let me do that. I’ve been working on object storage use cases. I was talking to a customer. They’re using our IaaS and connected to Amazon S3. You’ve gone to Amazon. They didn’t know about it though. Experience and cost that can be the same or better. Egress in Amazon S3 is ridiculous. You don’t know what you don’t know. You can take that service and deliver it cost-effectively.
YR: RR talk to us about the evolution of data protection.
RR: Information has grown. Data is fragmented. Information placement is almost unmanageable. Services have now become available in a way that can be audited, secured, managed. At Cohesity, first thing we did was data protection, and I knew the rest was coming. Complexity’s a problem.
YR: JT. We know Cloudian’s a leader in object storage. Where do you see object going?
JT: It’s the underlying storage layer of the cloud. Brings down cost of your storage layer. It’s all about TCO. What’s going to help you build more revenue streams? Cloudian has been around since 2011. New solutions in backup, DR, etc, to help you build new revenue streams. S3 users on Amazon are looking for alternatives. Many of Cloudian’s customers are ex-Amazon customers. What are we doing? vCD integration. Search Cloudian and vCD on YouTube. Continuously working to drive down the cost of managing storage. 1.5PB in a 4RU box in collaboration with Seagate.
WB: Expanding service delivery, specifically around object storage, is important. You can do some really cool stuff – not just backup, it’s M&E, it’s analytics. Very few of our customers are using object just to store files and folders.
YR: We have a lot of providers in the room. JT can you talk more about these key use cases?
JT: It runs the gamut. You can break it down by verticals. M&E companies are offering editing suites via service providers. People are doing that for the legal profession. Accounting – storing financial records. Dental records and health care. The back end is the same thing – compute with S3 storage behind it. Cloudian provides multi-tenanted, scalable performance. Cost is driven down as you get larger.
YR: RR your key use cases?
RR: DRaaS is hot right now. When I was at VMware we did stuff with SRM. DR is hard. It’s so simple now. Now every SP can do it themselves. Use S3 to move data around from the same interface. And it’s very needed too. Everyone should have ubiquitous access to their data. We have that capability. We can now do vulnerability scans on the data we store on the platform. We can tell you if a VM is compromised. You can orchestrate the restoration of an environment – as a service.
YR: WB what are the other services you want us to deliver?
WB: We’re an odd duck. One of our major practices is information security. The idea that we have intelligent access to data residing in our infrastructure. Being able to detect vulnerabilities, taking action, sending an email to the customer, that’s the type of thing that cloud providers have. You might not be doing it yet – but you could.
YR: Security, threat protection. RR – do you see Cohesity as the driver to solve that problem?
RR: Cohesity will provide the platform. Data is insecure because it’s fragmented. Cohesity lets you run applications on the platform. Virus scanners, run books, all kinds of stuff you can offer as a service provider.
YR: William, where does the onus lie, how do you see it fitting together?
WB: The key for us is being open. Eg Cohesity integration into vCD. If I don’t want to – I don’t have to. Freedom of choice to pick and choose where we went to deliver our own IP to the customer. I don’t have to use Cohesity for everything.
JT: That’s exactly what we’re into. Choice of hardware, management. That’s the point. Standards-based top end.
YR: Security
*They had 2 minutes to go but I ran out of time and had to get to another meeting. Informative session. 4 stars.
Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US. My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Here are my rough notes from “HCI2888BU – Site Recovery Manager 8.2: What’s New and Demo”, presented by Cato Grace and Velina Krasteva (Senior PM for SRM and vSphere replication, VMware). You can grab a PDF copy of my notes from here.
SRM Product Overview
When you hear “disaster recovery” what do you think of? Natural disasters? DR is not just about natural disasters. It can also power, networking, people. Site Recovery Manager supports hypervisor-based and array-based replication. SRM about adding value to your replication.
Workflows?
Non-disruptive testing
Automated testing isolated network
Ensures predictability of RTO
Automated Failback
Re-protect using original recovery plan
Streamlines bi-directional migrations
Automated Failover
Runbook automation
Single-click initiation
Emphasises fastest possible recovery after outage
Planned Migration
Ensures zero data loss and app consistency
Enables disaster avoidance and DC maintenance or migration
Simplified deployment and operations with SRM as an appliance
Parity with Windows version
Simple OVF deployment
SRAs with the appliance setup as Docker containers
Greatly simplify SRM deployment, maintenance and upgrades.
Built on PhotonOS
Upgrading to the appliance – upgrade to 8.2 on Windows first, then migrate to the appliance. There’s a blog post on that here, and documentation here.
Improved ease of use with config import / export UI
Now entirely UI based
Export / backup and import / restore capabilities for entire SRM configuration
Includes entire SRM configuration (VMs, PGs, RPs, IP customisation, array managers, etc)
Enables simple DB migration
API and vRO workflow enhancements
Configure IP customisation
Add / remove datastores from array-based replication PGs
Remove post-power on tasks
Check status of VR replication
List replicated VMs
Get VR configuration
List replicated RDMs and Array Managers
New Workflows
New in SRM
Set IP settings
Update group datastore
Delete callouts
New in vSphere Replication
Check replication stats
Enhancements to SRM pack for vROps
Overcome DR monitoring challenges with global visibility into SRM environment
Mitigate risk associated with SRM component downtime
New views displaying
Recovery status
Count of VMs in recovery plans
Lots more
New arms for VMs that are in Protection Groups and not part of recovery plans
vSphere Replication Pack for vROps
Ability to monitor
RPO violations
Per VM metrics
Incoming replications
Outgoing replications
Replication status
Transferred bytes
Alerts
Replication Settings
UI Enhancements
Adjust colour schemes for optimal viewing
Capacity information available in the Protection Groups Datastores tab
Ability to provide in-product feedback – the smiley face icon
Support for NSX-T
Integration with NSX-T lets you use the network virtualisation to simplify the creation snd execution of recovery plans and accelerate recovery
Encrypted VMs Support
Full support for replicating, protecting, and recovering encrypted VMs
Encryption of replication traffic available per VM
Improved Logging Options with Syslog Support
Increased awareness of potential issues
Easier to troubleshoot issues
More opportunity for analysis
Tech Preview
We also went through a tech preview of what might be on the horizon with SRM. Note that this is all futures, and VMware may or may not end up delivering this as part of a future product.
SRM Support for vVols with Array-based Replication
Support protection and orchestrated recovery of VMs that are running on Virtual Volume datastore and are replicated by policy-based native array replication.
Automatic protection
Disk resting feature for vSphere Replication
Thoughts
I always enjoy these SRM sessions. Every time I make it along to VMworld US I try and get to Cato’s sessions. Even if you’re familiar with SRM, they’re a great summary of current, latest, and future product capability. SRM is a really cool solution for managing both migration and DR activities. And I don’t want to think about the number of times vSphere Replication has gotten us out of a spot doing cross-platform storage migrations. Cato and the team really know their stuff, so if you get a chance, do check out their other sessions this week.
Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US. My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Here are my rough notes from the Monday General Session at VMworld US 2019. You can grab a PDF of them here.
Pat Gelsinger takes the stage. Welcome to VMworld 2019 and thank you. Thrilled to be back in San Francisco, the hub of tech on the planet. Sorry to those Las Vegas lovers out there.
Tech in the age of any. There’s a natural tension between choice and complexity. We create that choice, but we have to make it work. “Strength lies in differences, not similarities” (Stephen Covey).
At VMworld there are 100 countries represented, 5000 different organisations, 22% are learning Klingon (!). NuqneH!
[image courtesy of VMware]Welcome the Pivotal family to team VMware. Welcome Carbon Black to the family too. Read more about those acquisitions here.
In October it will be 4 decades in technology for Pat. Each of these areas are permeating our every day life
2009
52 Million apps in the world
5 million app developers
2019
335 Million apps
13.5 million developers
Technology for Good
Tech amplifies the good and the bad. But what does it mean to shape technology as a force for good? We, as technologists, need to participate in the shaping. For example, schools at Nairobi in Kenya. On Friday, Callum Eade swam the English channel to raise money for cancer research. Callum takes the stage.
PG: Why do it?
CE: It was an insurmountable goal. Something I wanted to do was “Make My Mark”. I’m also wearing a jacket from Tour de Cure. Specific cancer – children cancer. No one should have to bury a child. Program for a tumour called DIPG. Mortality rate unchanged – every diagnosed child dies within the first 12 months.
PG: My son battled Hodgkins-Lymphoma. It takes a team.
CE: It does. My wife, son, and daughter are here in the front row. The training was arduous. Pat, you stood up at our all hands meeting in APJ six months ago and reinforced the importance of career and family balance.
PG: Why the English Channel?
CE: 10 years ago it seemed like a really good idea. The distance is the same as from SFO to Palo Alto and it was really cold.
PG: What’s next?
CE: As far as the charity was concerned, a lot of people in this room contributed. The request from the pledge was $100K. We raised $130K. We’re going to go on holiday as a family, do something together.
CE leaves the stage.
PG: From floating hospitals to flying hospitals. Let’s hear from Angel MedFlight – Video.
Higher success bringing the patient to the organ.
But what about the law of unanticipated consequences. We’ve bought together communities online, and then created platforms for disinformation. End of privacy. Bitcoin is bad – it’s not okay. Apparently. VMware wants to “Do good engineering, and engineering for good”. 12 million non-profits in the world. 4.5% of global GDP is non-profit sector. Larger than the GDP of Germany. They do great work, but they’re technology sucks. Video – Working with Tech Soup enable all of those other missions out there. Grow the tech talent pool. Historically served the smallest organisations. Working with a million coders. 24% are women (not enough). Rebecca Masisak (CEO) is here. Working with them to scale their mission.
Who’s Doing It?
“There’s never been a more exciting time to be a technologist”. There’s also never been a more important time to be a technologist. Who will operationalise the powers of edge, AI, IoT in the world? You. No one is more qualified, more capable to do that. If you’re a VCP, you’re qualified. Shout out to VCIX folks, VMUG leaders, the VCDXs.
The VMware vision remains unchanged. Any cloud, any app, any device, with intrinsic security. Is this innovation helping us or harming us? Does it inspire us? Empower us?
Customers
Comcast – getting a handle on chaos. Built a modern private cloud with connection to the public cloud.
FedEx – leveraging VCF and Pivotal.
IHS Markit
Multi-Cloud Strategy
VMware have worked hard on multi-loud, and have built a preferred partnership with Amazon. They’re also working with IBM, Google, and Microsoft, enabling an “any-cloud” environment. They want you to be able to “Build, Run, Manage, Connect, Protect” your workloads. Kubernetes has emerged as ubiquitous infrastructure, joining developers and IT operators. Now Pat’s going to “get some help from a Kubernetes celebrity”. Joe Beda – the first committer to Kubernetes, this guy’s a rock star – and he’s now a Principal Engineer at VMware. Joe takes the stage. PG: “Can we take a selfie?”. Joe talks about “Goldilocks level between devs and IT ops”. Wanted it to span any infrastructure.
Complexity vs flexibility.
What enterprises need is a secured opinion through this journey, and VMware is well placed to do this, with Heptio acquired, Pivotal, and Bitnami. We’re excited to be bringing this to market – VMware Tanzu (Swahili for branch).
Build Modern Apps
Run Enterprise Kubernetes
Manage Kubernetes for developers AND IT
Pivotal and Kubernetes like peanut butter and jelly. What if we build it into vSphere? Announcing Project Pacific.
Uniting vSphere and Kubernetes
Extending vSphere for ALL modern apps
Enabling Dev and IT Ops collaboration
30% faster than a traditional Linux VM, 8% faster than bare metal
Talked about build, but what about run? The challenge is how we manage across a diverse environment. There’s a loss of efficiency, security. This is why VMware acquired CloudHealth and they’ve now announced “CloudHealth Hybrid”. But what’s the difference between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud? The goal is to give you the tools to manage or have consistent ops in a multi-cloud world. What about hybrid cloud? You also want a consistent infrastructure experience. VMware Cloud Foundation is the platform for Hybrid cloud.
Also working with MS Azure (announced at DTW earlier this year). Now globally available. US and Europe. Australia by the end of the year. Announced Project Dimension with Dell. Now available VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. DCaaS. Partnership with Equinix
Operate in a hybrid cloud world?
Taking vRealize hybrid
Automation
Operation
Network insight
Log insight
DRaaS and DPaaS – doing a lot with Dell EMC.
Edge and Telco
What’s the edge?
1. Where the physical and the digital worlds intersect
2. Distributed, low-latency infrastructure located close […]
RM: 80% of purchases still happen in store. We’re all getting more and more impatient by the day. Speed, responsiveness, scale is all becoming critical. 90% of our production workloads on VMware
TS: We have 600 apps. 5 or 10 SaaS. The others needed to move to cloud. Why not refactor? We’re a heavily regulated environment. We can’t take the risks to transform our apps. Sitting on 100 million lines of code. Moved all apps to VMC on AWS. Well, 95% +. We’re 2/3 through the journey.
SP: Do you migrate, modernise, do both?
RM: 1000 apps across the board. Critical to us to migrate what’s critical to the business without disruption. There hasn’t been a database we didn’t like. Being able to modernise without disrupting was a challenge. Pivotal played a critical role. 60 – 70% of apps modernised through PKS.
SP: We don’t call it lift and shift, we prefer migrate.
SP: Your migrate strategy is Azure. But in the middle is VMware. Yes.
SP: Tim, in the M and M world.
TS: Running 5% of apps in containers now. We wanted to push to migrate this year.
Why is consumer life so easy and enterprise so hard?
Consumer simple, enterprise secure. “Every employee in the world should be using Workspace ONE”. Dell unified workspace product.
Why invest in digital employee experience?
23% more likely to be an industry leader
60% more likely to be a growth company
41% more likely to have a positive Employee Net Promotor Score (eNPS)
Video plays. SP: My latest favourite topic is security.
Solid session. 3.5 stars. Watch the replay here. Read more about Project Pacific and Tanzu here. Scott Lowe’s coverage of the general session can be found here.
Here are some links to some random news items and other content that I recently found interesting. You might find them interesting too. Episode 20 – feels like it’s becoming a thing.
I don’t read Corey Quinn’s articles enough, but I am glad I read this one. Regardless of what you think about the enforceability of non-compete agreements (and regardless of where you’re employed), these things have no place in the modern workforce.
If you’re getting along to VMworld US this year, I imagine there’s plenty in your schedule already. If you have the time – I recommend getting around to seeing what Cody and Pure Storage are up to. I find Cody to be a great presenter, and Pure have been doing some neat stuff lately.
Speaking of VMworld, this article from Tom about packing the little things for conferences in preparation for any eventuality was useful. And if you’re heading to VMworld, be sure to swing past the VMUG booth. There’s a bunch of VMUG stuff happening at VMworld – you can read more about that here.
I promise this is pretty much the last bit of news I’ll share regarding VMworld. Anthony from Veeam put up a post about their competition to win a pass to VMworld. If you’re on the fence about going, check it out now (as the competition closes on the 19th August).
It wouldn’t be a random short take without some mention of data protection. This article about tiering protection data from George Crump was bang on the money.
Backblaze published their quarterly roundup of hard drive stats – you can read more here.
This article from Paul on freelancing and side gigs was comprehensive and enlightening. If you’re thinking of taking on some extra work in the hopes of making it your full-time job, or just wanting to earn a little more pin money, it’s worthwhile reading this post.
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