VMworld 2015 Wrap Up

9/3/2015

VMworld started this year with the usual check-in process and backpack pickup. This years backpacks was a lot nicer than last year with better room for things like laptops, etc.

Food, as you can see from this picture below, gave new meaning to convenience. The food, pre-packaged and ready to go, offered several choices of which, I picked the best of the worst. The "continental" breakfast was fruit and carbs. Nothing looked continental and lacked eggs and any meat selection.

I walked the Moscone and visited where the vendor booths were setup and took the below pictures. The vendors were out in full force and after first general session I collected approximately 31 t-shirts and miscellaneous gadgets.

The VMUG booth this year was moved to the Moscone West, 2nd floor. There was a hang space, t-shirt giveaway, VMUG Advantage sign-ups, and much more. Overall the booth was a great success servicing hundreds of attendees within the first hours of opening.

This years theme of "Ready for Any" had me wondering, Any what? So, a bit concerned I armed myself for what could be lurking just around the corner. I wasn't sure if NSX Ninjas were going to pop out at any second and attack so I made a mental note to not trust anyone.

Day one announcements made at the first General Session:

VMware Extends Unified Hybrid Cloud Platform – New public cloud services and software-defined solutions from VMware allow customers to build applications faster, improve IT security, rapidly recover from disasters and drive meaningful business value.
VMware Previews vSphere Integrated Containers and Photon Platform – Unveiled today as a technology preview, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will enable IT teams to support any application, including containerized applications, on a common infrastructure. The Photon Platform was designed for DevOps teams planning to build large pools of commodity computing capacity that solely run cloud-native applications.
Introducing VMware EVO SDDC – The new software-defined data center allows customers to more easily deploy and operate virtual infrastructure as a service and provide efficiency, agility and control for building and operating private, public and hybrid clouds.

Day two brought even more to the stage during the second of the General Sessions:

NSX - now supports cross-vCenter configurations, meaning that network and security features no longer need manual synchronization between sites and deployments. The cross-vCenter functionality also enables cross-vCenter vMotion, which was a new feature in vSphere 6 but was not available if you used NSX. New troubleshooting capabilities called “traceflow,” which allows IT staff to trace a packet from source to destination across the whole NSX deployment.
VMware VSAN - VMware has added several new major features. It now supports vSphere 6 stretched clusters, allowing customers to replicate data between geographically diverse sites, and synchronous replication between those sites. For remote office use, VSAN can be scaled down to two nodes, mirroring storage between the nodes for availability while being managed by a central, home office vCenter instance. SMP Fault Tolerance, a feature introduced in vSphere 6, is now supported on VSAN, as well as Windows Failover and Oracle RAC clustering technologies. Virtual SAN Health Check plugin and the Virtual SAN Management Pack for vRealize Operations, allowing both vCenter and vRealize Operations to natively and automatically analyze health and performance.
VMware announced EVO SDDC Manager. This tool enables IT to rapidly create a software-defined data center built on NSX, VSAN, vSphere 6, and vRealize. EVO is built to scale to a whole data center, beginning with eight nodes. Its presentation claimed 1,000 server VMs per 42U rack. EVO SDDC Manager has some other features as well, including the concept of “workload domains,” where you can sequester certain types of workloads to certain types of hardware and certain locations, behind specialized NSX firewall rules as well. EVO SDDC Manager also automates the lifecycle operations of IT infrastructure, managing patching, deployment, and decommissioning of hardware, as we’ve all come to expect from a hyperconverged platform.
VMware Integrated Containers support was also announced. This is a two-pronged approach by VMware to address the needs of IT in the face of DevOps, by allowing IT to start wrapping operational and security controls around developers who run container technologies like Docker, CoreOS, Kubernetes, Mesosphere, and Cloud Foundry. The first prong is an add-on to a vSphere 6 environment that allows containers to run as individual virtual machines, wrapped in a security model and resource controls, and deployed very quickly with VMware Instant Clone. Since each container is a separate VM using a lightweight Linux distribution called Photon OS, which is similar to Red Hat Atomic, a security compromise or resource issue will be diagnosable and confined to the particular container and application. This is something that other container technologies don’t have.

After the second of the general sessions I headed over to the "Hang Space" for some time to catchup on my notes, re-charge my gear, play some Mrs. Packman and take the EVO Rail challenge. The space was really nice and I enjoyed my time there.

For lunch I went to the VMUG Leader lunch and was delighted to meet some very influential leaders at VMware. (see above picture)

Day three. There was no key note today so I went to my sessions.
The first was "Infrastructure Security Panel Discussion", then onto "vSphere Ask the Experts Panel", followed by "When Money Talks vRealize Business" and finally "Insight Into vSphere 6 vMotion".

For the most part the sessions were good but I felt that the customer led presentations were very watered down. I spoke with others at the event and they agreed.

Day four and its my final session on a "Technical Deep Dive Into Horizon Air". This was a very interesting and one of my favorite sessions I attended. With live demonstrations.