VMworld 2013 San Francisco: Day 2
VMWORLD 2013 SAN FRANCISCO: DAY 2
In Day 2, the focused moved to details of the big announcements from Day 1, including NSX, vSAN, and a bit on automation.
Carl Eschenbach, President and COO, VMware
Carl started with the observation of “More attendees than expected this year, 22,500 attendees rounded up to 23K, making this the largest IT Infrastructure event of the year”. Wikipedia reports that the 2009 Oracle OpenWorld had 37,000 attendees, but let’s not quibble.
He recapped yesterday’s announcements: vSphere 5.5 & vCloud Suite 5.5, NSX Network Virtualization, and vCloud Hybrid Services, Cloud Foundry on vSphere — through partnership with Pivotal — and Virtual SAN.
3 Imperatives for IT Infrastructure:
Virtualization extends to ALL of IT
- IT management gives way to automation
- Compatible hybrid cloud will be ubiquitous
- Done with the Software-Defined Data Center as the Architectural Foundation.
To show IT as a Service in action…
He demoed vCloud Automation Center (formerly acquired Dynamic Ops technology), showing costs for different cloud options — Private Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Windows Azure.
…showing self-service, transparent pricing, governance, automation.
Then he demoed vCloud Application Director that showed the provisioning of a multi-tiered application.
Then followed a discussion of NSX network virtualization with its APIs to L2 switches, L3 Routers, Firewalls and Load Balancers. vSphere Web Client showed these workflows.
Switching with NSX moves the switching intelligence into the hypervisor layer. Routing with NSX is similar, and eliminates “hair pinning” of a packet, moving the routing intelligence into the hypervisor layer. VMware claims that studies show that 70% of traffic in a data center happens between VM. Ditto network security and fire walling.
A video was shown of of WestJet, the Canadian airline, discussed how they use NSX for their network virtualization.
Going further vMotion moved a VM from one vLAN to another vLAN with NSX visible in the vSphere Web Client.
Summarizing, Carl pointed out that NSX delivers:
- Speed and efficiency
- Same operating model as compute virtualization
- Extends value of existing network infrastructure
Switching gears to application dependencies of storage, Carl insisted his customers have requirements around: time to market, predictable performance, certain SLAs, and managed costs. VMware Virtual SAN moves Direct Attach Storage (from a host), including Flash storage, to be used in virtualized environments. This allows setting the data storage policy and having it move with the VM.
In summary, VMware Virtual SAN delivers:
- Simple provisioning at time of VM provisioning
- Storage that scales with compute
- Leverage and extend existing direct attached storage
Announcement that this technology is available for public beta at:
Shifting to mobile end users, the demo moved to vCloud Automation Center which goes to VMware View to provision a desktop, including storage tier, gold of course. Horizon Workspace shows provisioning of SaaS apps to an iPad, and logging in to the desktop from the tablet.
Discussed efficient operations and Policy-Based Automation with vCenter Operations Manager. With a popular application running, auto scaling, which was previously provisioned, is automatically remediated.
vCloud Automation Operations Delivers
- Policy-driven, automated, proactive response
- Intelligent analytics
- Visibility into application health for app owner
Administrators can also take hands-on, or guided remediation, to improve storage I/O per second to increase the SLA for storage from one tier to another, silver to gold.
This delivers:
- Broad ecosystem that improves accuracy
- Specific recommendations to speed up troubleshooting
- Policy-driven IT and financial governance
vCenter Log Insight does Big Data analytics to help examine storage scalability. This shows the trade-offs between cost and scale. Carl announces 5 free licenses of vCenter Log Insight by following the Twitter account @VMLogInsight
Finally, Hybrid Cloud was captured in a discussion of seamless extension of the Data Center from the private to the public cloud. Demoed vSphere Web Client in v5.5: vCloud Hybrid Services is now visible there. Public templates are visible, additionally private ones can be continuously synchronized across private and public clouds.
Carl closed the keynote in the same way as Pat did yesterday, by talking about how the audience were champions. “Champions drive change, so go drive change, and defy convention!”
Thanks for coming along,
