VMworld arrived in Las Vegas for the first time in many years this year. The mood was also visibly shifted, beyond the change in location. Last year saw the introduction of the DevOps focus in the lounge and a lot more experimentation as VMware looked towards their future in containers, network virtualization, and other layers in the overall IT portfolio. vCloud Air had been struggling in some ways over recent months, and this event was going to be a state of the union for existing VMware platforms and those that may be new announcements.
What’s New?
The VMware Cloud Foundation product line is something that opened the day 1 keynote. The tone was clear around the challenges of private cloud operation, and the relatively slow adoption of what many would call “next generation” IT products, among the traditional enterprise and mid-market customer base. This was a realization that many technologists have come to in the last couple of years, so it was interesting to see the openness with which it was being talked about in the keynote.
VMware Cloud Foundation is meant to create a more consumable and operationally simple private cloud platform with reference architectures and better guidance. This will be packaged along with the VMware Validated Designs (VVD) that provides an HCL for different platform pieces in the VMware ecosystem. Reference implementations and reference architectures are very popular among the industry, because it opens the door for IT admins to know they aren’t walking the path alone, or in an untested way.
VIO (VMware Integrated OpenStack) has gotten some more updates, including a bump up to the most recent Mitaka release of OpenStack. Lots of other updates around ease of deployment and resiliency made it into the newest edition, which will be available for download by the end of year according to the VMware blog.
VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) gained more attention as we saw lots of work happening around the migration from existing vCenter deployments to the appliance format. It isn’t difficult to see that VMware is laying the groundwork to standardize on the appliance methodology. This will make other updates in the future simpler if they know that all of the installs are on a common base platform. Some features are still absent from the vCenter Server Appliance, but watch for those differences to become smaller and potentially to disappear as we see the next iteration of vSphere released.
Lots of customer stories around other parts of the storage and networking business units were on display, and it is easy to see that VMware is pushing to solidify the overall coverage from end-to-end in the data center and hopefully in the cloud. There is a lot of hot competition across all of the technology community, and across every layer of the IT stack. There is no doubt that VMware is going to be feeling a bit more heat from competitors over the coming years, but they seem to positioning to defend on all fronts.
What’s Next?
VMworld in Barcelona is around the corner, and so are many announcements in some other areas of the VMware product portfolio. The open source Photon Controller and Photon OS will most likely see some updates and announcements at the European event, as well as some more news in the VDI ecosystems potentially. This was a year with many announcements about the alignment of technologies inside VMware.
Could we see the elusive next version of vSphere? We all watched with baited breath last year at the keynote, waiting for the big announcement of the next generation of vSphere, only to walk away with some other ecosystem updates instead. This year left us at the same point with the overall announcements seeming to point to solving resiliency and standardization challenges. Cloud was a strong focus of many of the sessions and keynotes. There will be a lot of work happening for VMware admins as they plan to catch up with what is happening in the public cloud space, and with containers, network virtualization, OpenStack, and more. It’s an exciting and challenging time for all of us.
VMworld Session Replays and VMworld 2017
Couldn’t make it to VMworld this year? No problem. All of the recorded sessions are available online, all you have to do is register at the VMworld site. If you’re itching to see the sessions you didn’t get to at VMworld, no worries, simply use your VMworld credentials from when you registered for the conference. William Lam has made some great scripts to help you download and review the content using PowerShell and some publicly hosted JSON files at his Github site: https://github.com/lamw/vmworld2016-session-urls
You can see the top 10 sessions of each day hosted at the VMworld site without a login as well by going here: http://www.vmworld.com/en/sessions/top-10-us.html
For those eager to pre-register for VMworld US in 2017, you can also sign up for the news as it becomes available. Las Vegas will be the destination again in 2017, so make sure to sign up at the pre-registration site to hear all about what else you can expect to see as we get through the European edition in October.
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