VMworld 2014 – Impressions from Barcelona

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VMworld 2014 in Barcelona was a blast! I’d like to share some impressions, photos and tweets from the show here.

VMworld_2014_BCN

VMworld TAM Day

It was now my fourth year as part of the VMworld TAM Day planning and Social Media team. For those of you that are not aware of the Technical Account Manager Service or TAM Day: TAM Day is a pre-VMworld event for TAM customers only. Like in previous years, we had many VMware Executives at the event that shared the company vision, presented current focus areas and spent time with customers after the official program. For the rest of the day we had prominent speakers covering both technical and business related breakout sessions. One of the highlights was the “Birds of a Feather Lunch” where VMware Product Managers, Engineers, Consultants and other Subject Matter Experts host tables for questions and discussions with customers. Some of my impressions:

VMworld General Session

VMworld impressions

My session before the start:

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Operational Considerations for Network Functions Virtualization – Part 1

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Just a few weeks back I had the pleasure to present at VMworld 2014 in San Francisco. My session “OPT2029 – Considerations for Operational Efficiency in Telco Cloud Deployments” covered various aspects around Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure and it’s impact on existing operational models.

Why is NFV important after all? Well, let’s take a look at ETSI’s summary of the key benefits for Network Operators and their customers:

  • Reduced operator CAPEX and OPEX through reduced equipment costs and reduced power consumption
  • Reduced time-to-market to deploy new network services
  • Improved return on investment from new services
  • Greater flexibility to scale up, scale down or evolve services
  • Openness to the virtual appliance market and pure software entrants
  • Opportunities to trial and deploy new innovative services at lower risk

Now, I’d like to start with a quick overview picture around Network Functions Virtualization that I created from ETSI’s NFV overview documents:

ETSI NFV

As you can see, NFV is split up into various parts:

  • NFVI or Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure
  • VNF or Virtual Network Function(s)
  • NFV M&O or Management and Orchestration
  • Service, VNF and Infrastructure Description
  • OSS / BSS

In this post, I’d like to focus on considerations around introducing NFVI:

ETSI NFVI

One very important thing is that you will only see most of the NFVI benefits come to live if you concentrate on as few NFV Infrastructures as possible. Each NFVI not only means fragmentation of resources but also operational complexity as each “silo” will have specifics that need to be operated in a separate way. Even though the underlying resources will most likely be consumed via API, the actual infrastructure requires operational procedures. So for the following parts, I will focus on a shared NFVI environment, not fragmented NFVIs:

Fragmented NFVI

As with most IT-related infrastructures, terminology and methodology from ITIL comes very handy to describe and differentiate the necessary processes for Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition and of course Service Operation. My experience with Service Operation in a virtual environment is very similar to VMware’s Cloud Operations methodology and publications around Operations Transformation. Some of the ITIL functions need to be much closer aligned than in traditional operations, e.g. Demand, Capacity, Performance, Incident, Problem and Configuration Management.

Also, in a completely shared environment, there will be a logical separation between “Tenants” and “Provider” or in our case VNF and NFVI. But this implies a new central function for taking care of NFVI holistically: a NFVI Center Of Excellence. This NFVI COE will be covered in the next part of this series.

New VMware Hands-On Labs available!

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I just came across the VMware Hands-On Labs website and was excited to see many great new labs available there. Check them out!

For starters:

A new group, focussed on IT outcomes:

SDDC Labs:

End-User Computing

VMware EVO:RAIL Demo

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My colleague Duncan Epping (Twitter/Blog) just uploaded a video recorded by EVO:RAIL lead engineer Dave Shanley to demo the setup and usage of VMware EVO:RAIL.

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:

Edits:
Sept 2: added more links to the additional materials section

VMworld 2014 US – Selected session videos on Youtube

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That was fast! The VMworld team already uploaded a set of great videos to Youtube. Below, you can find a list of all videos that I have found so far.

Cross-linking my previous post here as well: VMworld 2014 – Summary, Notes and Links

Management Track

Hybrid Cloud Track

End-User Computing Track