This will be our last go at VMworld in San Francisco for a couple of years, as VMworld heads to Las Vegas next year. I think the change of venue will be a good thing as the conference continues to grow. This year we had over 23,000 attendees and getting the chance to catch up with friends is always a wonderful benefit.
This year hybrid cloud was the star of the show, and how to build out our software-defined data center (SDDC). I’ve always felt this was the holy grail, fully automated and orchestrated data center. Many of the announcements from today are getting us closer to that vision.
BTW – Did you see that Cross-Cloud vMotion? Well guess what, you were one of the first!
I’ll share some of the major announcements below that has the community talking.
VMware Unified Hybrid Cloud Platform
VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform enables customers to create one consistent environment based on VMware vSphere across the private and public cloud to securely build, run and deliver any traditional or cloud-native application. Starting with hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) as a building block, VMware EVO SDDC delivers a complete SDDC by delivering, compute, networking and storage from the hypervisor on a scale-out x86 server platform.
VMware EVO SDDC also adds network virtualization and automation capabilities. The solution integrates the following VMware products;
- VMware vSphere
- VMware NSX
- VMware Virtual SAN
Along with the operations and management capabilities via VMware vRealize Operations and VMware vRealize Log Insight.
There is a new EVO SDDC Manager which manages everything within that stack, including the hardware, from top to bottom reducing deployment of these large scale systems from days to hours. It intelligently automates the common tasks associated with server deployment as well as with on-going management and operations. I am eager to see this in action.
VMware Integrated OpenStack 2
Based on OpenStack Kilo, making it current with upstream OpenStack code, and will include an industry-first seamless upgrade capability that will address one of the largest deployment and operational challenges for OpenStack clouds. It’s expected to be available before the end of Q3 2015. Some items to highlight from the release;
- Seamless OpenStack Upgrade: VMware Integrated OpenStack 2.0 will introduce an Industry-first seamless upgrade capability between OpenStack releases. Customers will now be able to upgrade from V1.0 (Icehouse) to V2.0 (Kilo), and even roll back if anything goes wrong.
- LBaaS: Load Balancing as a service will be available supported through VMware NSX.
- Advanced vSphere Integration: VMware Integrated OpenStack 2.0 will expose vSphere Windows Guest Customization. VMware admins will be able to specify various attributes such as ability to generate new SIDs, assign admin passwords for the VM, manage compute names etc
VMware revealed a technology preview of Project Skyscraper, a new set of innovative hybrid cloud capabilities for vSphere. These new capabilities will enable customers to extend their data center to the public cloud and seamlessly operate across boundaries while providing enterprise-level security and business continuity. We had the chance to see the very public live workload migration through Cross-Cloud vMotion and a Content Sync across a private cloud and vCloud Air – that was cool.
VMware vSphere Integrated Containers
As a technology preview, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will enable IT teams to support any application, including containerized applications, on a common infrastructure. VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will easily integrate with other container ecosystem solutions. It was interesting to see how VMs and containers are the “same”. Lets see how this evolves.
VMware Photon Platform
VMware Photon Platform is a new infrastructure stack optimized for containers and cloud-native apps. Showcased as a technology preview, the VMware Photon Platform is designed for DevOps teams planning to build out large pools of commodity computing capacity that solely run cloud-native applications.
It’s composed of two main components: Photon Machine, a lightweight “microvisor” based on ESX with Photon OS built-in, and Photon Controller, a distributed high-scale control plane that includes Project Lightwave.
The VMware Photon Platform, which will include future integrations with VMware NSX, VMware Virtual SAN and VMware vRealize Suite.
Let me know what you thought of the announcements and if there was something that you think is a game changer. Reach out to me on Twitter and thanks for reading.