The Virtual, virtual datacentre demo

Virtual, Virtual Datacentre – Future of Cloud Management?????

At VMworld last week, we had a demo of the Virtual, Virtual Datacentre during the General Session on day 1.

The demo was presented by Alan Renouf and Pat Gelsinger.

The introduction was pitched as a possible future of cloud management and may mean that IT people will never have to interact with a real person ever again.

Bear in mind that this was created as a concept in a Hackathon (lots of people working together to produce a software project), and was completed in a day and a half.

With the VR headset in place Pat entered the Virtual Datacentre and was presented with a virtual representation of a VMware datacentre.

He could approach the four hosts and see the hardware running the VMs, also he could pick up the VMs and was presented with information relating to the operating system, CPU, Memory, disk, and network information of the VM, also the resources were colour related, Green equals good, red equals bad.

With the VM in hand it could be migrated by simply placing onto a different host, or deleted by simply placing them into the bin.

The best part of the demo for me was the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS), I this part of the demo, Pat picked up a VM and threw it at the cloud, and the VM migrated with no operating or VM downtime.

Pat then entered the cloud and was asked to look at the cluster, the cluster had some red, and this was due to lack of resources on the cluster.

Brian the virtual support chap popped up and gave some suggestions.

Pat enable a new host using AWS elastic DRS, this has the functionality to spin up a new ESXi host and migrate VMs to it, in order to alleviate the overloaded cluster.

Alan then said that the code would be available via their GitHub site

To watch the demo, scroll through to 48 minutes of the VMware General session, youtube video.

Enjoy.

Free webcasts from VMware Education

Everybody loves free stuff?

VMware Education services have provided a nice site, with free webcasts.

One of the notable ones for me is the:

Learn Tips and Tricks On How You Can Earn A VMware Certification

Earning a VMware certification is a notable accomplishment that requires hard work and serious study. Taking the right approach in your preparation will help you increase your chances to pass the exam on the first try. Join, Paul Sorensen for tips, tricks and resources that will save you time and effort as you study, practice and prepare, including several steps that you should never miss as you get ready to take your next exam.

However follow the link to the VMware Education site and have a look, you may find something of some use.

Some interesting stats for VMware VCAP certification

As I've mentioned, I'm a VCI or VMware Certified Instructor, and for me VMware is my prime technology area, I've worked with the product and with VMware now since approx 2001,

I then started on my certification path in 2005 with the VCP.

Since then VMware have released a numcer of certifications and one of those is the VMware Certified Advanced Professional.

I sometimes get asked "How many VCAPs are there?" So as of 2007 here's a nice link to a document created by Jill Liles of VMware Education services, thanks to her for this.

Around the world with VCAPs

Hope this is of some use and may inspire you to pursue some additional VMware education, if so, hope to see you in Newcastle upon Tyne on a VMware course.

VMware Education Paths

As I've mentioned in a few of the posts over the last few days, and got to spend a great deal of time with the superb VMware Education Team.

Here they are.

Now down to the reason for this post, the team have produced a fantastic road map for VMware Education.

To get a copy of the road map visit the VMware Education Site 

The roadmap covers the 4 main education paths. Datacenter, Networking, Desktop and Mobility, and Cloud Automation.

Finally for anyone embarking or already on their certification journey. Good Luck.

I also got to take part. I really don't like having my photo taken😀

VMworld over for another year

That's it for another year, VMworld 2017 Barcelona was an excellent forum for not only VMware products, but also showcased a number of vendors, the obvious one being Dell/EMC.

It was great catching up with old friends and ex-colleagues , but also making new friends.

If you get the chance next year, go, go to the VMware Education booth as well, they are an extremely friendly bunch.

I'm currently sat in the airport at Barcelona, my flights delayed, home tomorrow by the looks of it.

General Session 2 VMworld Barcelona 2017

VMworld 2017 Day 2 General Session

The presentation started with a Q&A session with Pat, Sanjay and Ray.

The first question was related to VMware and the Cloud. The answer came back with VMware’s vision of cross cloud mobility, we saw over the day a seamless vMotion from a Private Cloud running VMware Cloud Foundation to AWS and back again, zero downtime to the VM.

There was also mentions of the VMware VDI Horizon on Azure.

VMware on IBM , VMware on OVF and VMware containers with Google Cloud. 

VMware’s goal is to allow seamless hybrid cloud on any or multiple cloud providers.

The next question was on Licensing, the answer was that with Dell/EMC and VMware that this is an ongoing quest and to watch out for future developments.

For the doers, the next question was about the HTMLv5 Client and the answer was that in the very near future a fully functional HTML5 client will be available.

The next question was about Pivotal container services, the answer being that the goal is to have a truly containerised app, that will run anywhere and on any cloud and to allow these apps to be created and maintained in an agile manner.

Pat described the pendulum effect of centralised and decentralised IT, and they are now seeing a distributed cloud with IoT, we now have edge devices such as traffic signals collecting data and needing to be secure, with devices collecting data and then reporting back to a virtual representation of that device, for troubleshooting and improving the device, one of the booths was showing how GE are collecting data from jet engines.

With Dell/EMC/VMware now under one umbrella, the advent of VXRail allows a single box to run all the services, with VMware Cloud Foundation a private/public cloud can be built quickly.

Second part of General Session

This section was really a sales pitch, even as a VMware VCI and VCPx4, I didn’t realize that VMware now have over 200 apps.

The video showed something I’m used to, someone comes along and says “would you do x?” I say yep, they then say “Great we need it next week and really you should have been working on it months ago”

The point is VMware via VMware Clound Foundation and VMware Cloud services it allows for a truly Agile environment.

Pulse IOT allows management of Edge and IoT devices.

Wavefront allows SaaS based self service analysis.

Appsense learns about what is good and then profiles what is good and then reports on what is bad.

VMware’s vision of security is stop trying to capture what is good, but instead capture what is good, analyse and then fix what is bad.

Conclusion

What I’ve learned so far is that VMware are no longer just an Infrastructure company, they are fast becoming a cloud company, an Enterprise mobility company, with Dell/EMC a hyper-converged company.

Their cloud services are allowing companies to leverage multiple public cloud providers and allowing companies to have a seamless automated hybrid cloud.

The future is hybrid, not all cloud, just look at cars.

General session VMworld 2017 barcelona

VMworld General Session Keynote 2017

The session started with VMware telling us about their Inclusion policy, VMware have been at the fore front of promoting Women in IT and why not, the queues for restrooms just go to show that not enough women work in IT, it’s the only place the queues are longer for the gents than they are for the Ladies.

Fortunately, QA seem to also be making headways looking at the QAA apprenticeship schemes split of male vs female.

Pat Gelsinger then took the stage. The big push this year is Enterprise mobility.

With that in mind Airwatch and Workspace One will be big products, this allows for the “Run any Application, one any device, on any Cloud.

With more and more BYOD or mobile devices being consumed by users, VMware feel that IT is now being utilised in different ways to the past, consumers now want data available 24/7 in a way that is accessible easily and securely.

AirWatch is no longer a way to manage purely security of mobile devices, it can now compete with the likes of Microsoft SCCM to give a truly enterprise mobile device management solution.

Workspace One delivers applications to any device, users have a dashboard and they pick their app.

Workspace One allows any app to connect to any device and as such HP are embedding the AirWatch agent into their devices.This also includes VMware Identity management which allows a complete SSO solution which can integrate with Microsoft AD.

The VMware Cloud Foundation solution now includes everything needed for a Private cloud solution, this includes vSphere, VSAN and NSX. 

With VMC on AWS a VMware based hybrid cloud can now be implemented on VMware solutions running in AWS datacentres.

The two main growth areas for VMware are no longer vSphere, but now include VMware NSX (network virtualisation) and VSAN (Software Defined Storage.

We also saw the future of Cloud management which was virtual virtual datacentres, for this demo Pat was given a VR headset, with this he entered the Virtual datacentre, he could see the hosts and see data relating to the hosts, he could interact with the VMs, pick them up, throw them away, or by throwing them at a cloud, VMotion the VM to AWS and then enter the cloud and see the resources.

With Elastic DRS a new host was provisioned and VMs placed automatically onto the new host.

Security was also a keynote, with Appsense changing how security is viewed. The way is to capture the good, and then detect any deviations and then finally respond with automated policies, such as Shutdown a VM.

NSX gives us encryption and VSAN gives us encryption.

Another thought provoking part of the talk was that cloud centralises our data centres, the future will become Edge devices, this will give us distributed clouds which will allow IoT devices to communicate with the cloud, but still be able to process locally, think of a car, you really want the system to process locally, but receive updates etc automatically when required.

As I watch sessions I’ll pass on the information as quickly as I possibly can.