VMworld 2015 Roundup: Day 2

As always, Monday at VMworld 2015 is the first General Session and the proper start to the week. How'd it go? Let's find out.

PernixPro Breakfast

PernixData held a breakfast for PernixPro's and PernixPrime's at the ThirstyBear (disclosure: I'm a PernixPro). It was a nice, relaxed environment where people were brought together to mingle and chat over a modestly warm meal. Many of the executives and familiar PernixData faces were on hand and completely approachable as always, including CTO Satyam Vaghani, Chief Technologist and all-around nice guy Frank Denneman, and Directory of Engineering Kaustubh Patil.

Thanks PernixData for a great kick off to the day!

General Session

The opening general session at VMworld 2015 started with a a short video.

First out from behind the curtain was Carl Eschenbach, VMware President and Chief Operating Officer. He let us know that this year hit a record setting 23,000+ attendees with an additional 50,000 watching the general session live online. Highlighted was the VMware Foundation, which is again running a charitable event this year (stop by at Moscone North, just outside the General Session theater to take part).

We were also treated to some high level buzz phrases like: "Run, Build, Deliver, Secure" & "One Cloud, Any App, Any Device". Quite aspirational and light on detail, but that's typical of a Monday General Session. Carl introduced a customer, DirectTV/AT&T, and had a marketsation™ about their adoption and use of NSX and other VMware tech.

We were then introduced Bill Fathers, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware. Bill discussed hybrid cloud, which would allow apps to span both private and public clouds. He quickly passed the stage to Raghu Raghuram, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Software-Defined Data Center Division who came out looking very relaxed and ready to go. Raghu furthered Bill's message by talking about unified hybrid cloud, where a hybrid networking layer is needed to bridge clouds.

EVO:SDDC was introduced, the initiative formerly known as EVO:RACK and course adjusted. EVO:SDDC seeks to become a comprehensive air control tower for your data center. It's made up of the vRealize Suite, NSX 6.2, VSAN 6.1, vSphere 6 and a new EVO:SDDC Manager. We were then treated to a quick demo where a template was imported into a private cloud content library and then synched to vCloud Air. Not bad.

In tech preview under the interesting name Project Skyscraper, Cross Cloud vMotion was the next demo, where a VM was moved from one cloud to another. Good to see, but evolutionary not revolutionary. It was briefly mentioned that VMware's identity management product will be introduced tomorrow, likely during the General Session.

VirtuStream, acquired earlier this year by EMC, was brought out to discuss their approach to providing cloud services. This involved defining an atom unit which they called a micro VM (µVM) which has a fixed set of limited resources (small CPU, RAM, etc.). Customer workloads are then spread across a number of these micro VMs. The environment is then scrutinized to eek out every last drop of performance possible. Interesting, but unless they're proposing to deliver this on-premises, I wasn't sure how customers benefit from them having tighter margins.

VMware Vice President and CTO of Cloud-Native Apps, Kit Colbert took the stage next. He introduced us to vSphere Integrated Containers which, to oversimplify I'm sure, embeds the container OS and platform into the hypervisor. The Photon Platform was then introduced, which is used to deliver this solution. It includes a Photon Controller, which will soon be open sourced, and a Photon Machine, which is a "microvisor" which includes the latest Photon OS (now in tech preview). This looks promising and in this case I mean that literally as well, as the UI demo'd looks like it took some notes from the EVO:RAIL interface. It was very clean and intuitive.

With that, the masses were excused from the theatre to chase the rest of their week.

DevOps: Keynote

Kit Colbert delivers the DevOps & VMworld keynote

I decided to take advantage of the DevOps @ VMworld mini-event, new this year. Not ten minutes from the end of the general session and Kit Colbert joined us in the DevOps area of the Hang Space to deliver the keynote.

Kit pointed out the value of DevOps, citing the 2015 report from PuppetLabs. The run down: DevOps delivers 60x fewer failures, 168x faster recovery, 20x more deploys and 200x shorter lead times on average. He then covered the definition(s) of DevOps, leading us to a favourite quote of his which DevOps should aspire to deliver against:

I want to release the smallest amount of code, using the smallest number of people, with the least amount of ceremony possible, as frequently as possible.

Kit hit on many facets and concerns of DevOps and did a thorough job:

• Agile,

• continuous integration,

• continuous deployment,

• continuous delivery,

• application architectures,

• application platforms,

• microservices,

• 12 factor apps,

• platform as a service (PaaS),

• immutable infrastructure,

• and Toyota & Kanban.

Nailed it.

DevOps: Fireside Chat with Luke Kanies, Puppet Labs

Fireside Chat with Luke Kanies, PuppetLabs

Investing in infrastructure was the topic and Luke Kanies, founder of Puppet Labs and Puneet Agarwal, True Ventures carried an interesting conversation. They touched on the investment opportunities still available with infrastructure concerns (software has to run somewhere) and open source (there still has to be a product or service to have a business investors are interested in).

One key takeaway from Luke: Pay attention to your customers. They give feedback with the dollars they spend. Ignore non-customers who offer you "advice". Great chat.

DevOps: Puppet with vSphere Workshop

Biggest disappointment of the day and so I'll keep it short. This workshop was meant to guide participants through an installation of Puppet on their laptops, which we were asked to bring. A complimentary USB stick was handed out that had "everything" on it that we'd need. Only it didn't. We were told that we were expected to already have Vagrant installed on our machines and actively able to deploy VMs, whether to VMware Workstation/Fusion or Oracle VirtualBox. Unfortunately I think maybe only 2 out of the 40-50 of us actually had our laptops in this state. The presenter couldn't wait given the one hour deadline, so... enough said.

EVO:RAIL Challenge

Similar to the challenge last year and the online challenge, attendees are challenged to essentially build a new EVO:RAIL v2 from scratch and deploy a VM in record time. I tried my hand at it and came in at 21 minutes and change. That's pretty good for having a four node cluster configured, online and deploying VMs against.

Evening

I swung by the PernixData party and VMTurbo parties and chatted with lots of good people, both familiar and new. Thanks to both of these companies for putting on these events! As always, if you see me out and about, stop and say hello.

The Question You're Wanting to Ask

Yes, my legs are still sore from yesterday's 5k fun run. I'd do it again. Join me tomorrow.