Bjoern Brundert

VMworld 2014 – Summary, Notes and Links

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no-limits

VMworld 2014 is in full swing. After an amazing Day 1 and many announcements made in the General Session, Day 2’s keynote had even more technical details and demos about the announcements.

Day 1 Keynote:

Day 2 Keynote:

I just want to put my personal summary, notes and links out here. I’ll continue to work on this as well.

So, what was announced and why is VMworld so exciting so far?

First of all: The VMware EVO product family. It’s VMware’s entrance in the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure market. You can read more about EVO:RAIL (the 4 node/16 hosts, 15-minute-setup solution with many partners) and EVO:RACK (in tech preview) at:

Announcement of vRealize Suite as a comprehensive Cloud Management Platform (CMP) for Hybrid Cloud Environments. It also includes the renaming of multiple products:

  • vCloud Automation Center to be renamed to vRealize Automation
  • vCenter Operations Management Suite to be renamed vRealize Operations
  • IT Business Management to be renamed vRealize Business

If you want to learn more, check out:

Interviews with VMware Executives during VMworld:

Containers: there has been a lot of interest and discussion around Docker and Containers in general. As part of the general sessions, VMware involvement in this space has been explained in more detail:

Announcement of VMware Workspace Suite

VMware joins Open Compute Project as Gold Member.

VMware Integrated OpenStack. There were some exciting news around VMware’s Integrated OpenStack product. The overall goal is to provide OpenStack APIs to developers, have a reliable and production-grade OpenStack, simplify OpenStack deployment and operation as well as a single support contact. You can find out more at:

 

Edit Aug 27: added Horizon Workspace Suite announcements
Edit Aug 28: added Keynote videos

Network Functions Virtualization

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Virtualization and Cloud Computing (IaaS) have been around for quite some time now. Many industries have introduced a “Virtualization-first” or even a “Cloud-first” policy for new applications in their datacenters. IT departments and their customers have seen significant benefits over the past five or even ten years.

At the same time, there are areas where hardware-centric deployments are still dominant. But even these industries are seeing major changes. One great example are Telco providers world-wide.

As a result, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has established an Industry Specification Group which is focussing on a very interesting topic called Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

Here is what ETSI is saying about NFV:

Telecoms networks contain an increasing variety of proprietary hardware appliances. To launch a new network service often requires yet another appliance and finding the space and power to accommodate these boxes is becoming increasingly difficult, in addition to the complexity of integrating and deploying these appliances in a network. Moreover, hardware-based appliances rapidly reach end of life: hardware lifecycles are becoming shorter as innovation accelerates, reducing the return on investment of deploying new services and constraining innovation in an increasingly network-centric world.

Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) aims to address these problems by evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types onto industry standard high volume servers, switches and storage. It involves implementing network functions in software that can run on a range of industry standard server hardware, and that can be moved to, or instantiated in, various locations in the network as required, without the need to install new equipment.

So it’s all about time to market, agility and cost savings through standardization and reduction of operational complexity. It’s about bringing the benefits of virtualization and Infrastructure-/Platform-as-a-Service to Telco environments. ETSI has also published several NFV Use Cases that can be found in GS NFV 001.

For now, I’d like to share a few links and resources. I’ll post more about this topic in the near future.

– VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger at Mobile World Congress 2014 (Video).

– Blogpost by Ben Fathi (VMware CTO, follow him on Twitter) about NFV – Transforming the Operational Model of the Network.

– VMware’s Principal Engineer Bruce Davie (follow him on Twitter) on NFV and Network Virtualization in 2014.

– VMware’s Solution Exchange that has a special area focussed on Network Functions Virtualization.

– There is a great whitepaper by Lightreading available.

– Blog: “VMware guiding telecom industry on journey towards network function virtualization and software-defined networking”.

Tweets of the week – CW46 2013

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“The Phoenix Project” – book recommendation

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Just a couple of weeks ago, I received a recommendation for the book “The Phoenix Project” (Amazon.com Link) that I want to reshare here today. It’s “A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win” and I really enjoyed reading this book. It tells the story of Bill, an IT manager inside the fictional company Parts Unlimited. Their challenges pretty much overlap with many topics addressed in VMware Cloud Operations.

On a regular Tuesday morning, Bill receives a call from the VP of HR and suddenly finds himself in the office of Parts Unlimited CEO Steve. Steve talks him into becoming the new VP of IT Operations, reporting directly to him. But this is not part of the usual promotion process. Bill is becoming VP after the previous CIO and VP of IT Operations were fired just hours ago. In a phase where Parts Unlimited is facing major competitive threats – and lots of IT issues. Besides numerous major outages, they have just two weeks until the release of their long-awaited Phoenix project. A project that CEO Steve expects to “close the gap with the competition”. Customers, shareholders and all employees of Parts Unlimited are waiting for this release. And it has to be a success, otherwise the company might even go out of business. Now, Steve expects Bill to run operations and launch Phoenix. But (of course) this project is already two years delayed and has cost more than $20 million. No pressure, Bill…

And so the story begins. Over time, Bill, Steve and many others are starting to realize where IT Operations and Development have room for improvement. But the business starts also to realize how many projects actually rely on IT.

With lots of great examples, the authors give practical insights on how a successful transition towards a more business-oriented IT delivery can be realized. Because in the end, IT is all about helping the business win.

Related links, I’d like to recommend as well:

VMworld 2013 in Barcelona – a few hints

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Mobile App

Logistics

  • Tipp: agree on a meeting point within your team for meeting e.g. after General Sessions on Tuesday/Wednesday, for lunch break, after the last session, departure to the airport, etc.
  • VMworld Frequently Asked Questions: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/europe/faqs
  • Shuttle Service from and to the Airport (see FAQs):
    • Sunday, 13 October – 16:00 – 20:00 – Airport to venue
    • Monday, 14 October – 10:00 – 20:00 – Airport to venue
    • Thursday, 17 October – 12:00 – 18:00 – Venue to airport

VMworld Sessions

Just for TAM Customers: VMworld TAM Services Events

VMworld Social Media

VMworld Gatherings and Parties