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VMware Cloud on Azure? Really?

Chan 1 Comment

I work for a global channel partner of Microsoft, VMware & AWS  and one of the teammates recently asked me the question whether VMware Cloud on Azure (similar solution to VMware Cloud on AWS) would be a reality? It turned out that this was on the back of a statement from VMware CEO Pat where he supposedly mentioned “We have interest from our customers to expand our relationships with Google, Microsoft and others” & “We have announced some incremental expansions of those agreements“, which seems to have been represented in a CNBC article as that VMware cloud is coming to  Azure (Insinuating the reality of vSphere on Azure bare metal servers).

I’d sent my response back to the teammate outlining what I think of it and the reasoning for my thought process but I thought it would be good to get the thoughts of the wider community also as its a very relevant question for many, especially if you work in the channel, work for the said vendors or if you are a customer currently using the said technologies or planning on to moving to VMware Cloud on AWS.

Some context first,

I’ve been following the whole VMWare Cloud on Azure discussion since it first broke out last year and ever since VMware Cloud on AWS (VMWonAWS) was announced, there were some noise from Microsoft, specifically Corey Sanders (Corporate vice president of Azure) about their own plans to build a VMWonAWS like solution inside Azure data centers. Initially it looked like it was just a publicity stunt from MSFT to steal the thunder from AWS during the announcement of VMConAWS but later on, details emerged that, unlike VMWonAWS, this was not a jointly engineered solution between VMware & Microsoft, but a standalone vSphere solution running on FlexPod (NetApp storage and Cisco UCS servers) managed by a VMware vCAN partner who happened to host their solution in the same Azure DC, with L3 connectivity to Azure Resource Manager. Unlike VMWonAWS, there were no back door connectivity to the core Azure services, but only public API integration via internet. It was also not supposed to run vSphere on native Azure bare metal servers unlike how it is when it comes to VMWonAWS.

All the details around these were available on 2 main blog posts, one from Corey @ MSFT (here) and another from Ajay Patel (SVP, cloud products at VMware) here but the contents on these 2 articles have since been changed to either something completely different or the original details were completely removed. Before Corey’s post was modified number of times, he mentioned that they started working initially with the vCAN partner but later on, engaged VMware directly for discussions around potential tighter integration and at the same time, Ajay’s post (prior to being removed) also corroborated with the same. But none of that info is there anymore and while the 2 companies are likely talking behind the scene for some collaboration no doubt, I am not sure whether its safe for anyone to assume they are working on a VMWonAWS like solution when it comes to Azure.  VMWonAWS is a genuinely integrated solution due to months and months of joint engineering and while VMware may have incentives to do something similar with Azure, it’s difficult to see the commercial or the PR benefit of such a joint solution to Microsoft as that would ruin their exiting messaging around AzureStack which is supposed to be their only & preferred Hybrid Cloud solution.

My thoughts!

In my view, what Pat Gelsinger was saying above when he says (“we have interest from our customers to expand our relationship with Microsoft and others”) likely means something totally different to building a VMware Cloud on Azure in a way that runs vSphere stack on native Azure hardware. VMware’s vision has always been Any Cloud, Any App, Any device which they announced at VMWorld 2016 (read the summary http://chansblog.com/vmworld-2016-us-key-annoucements-day-1/) and the aspiration (based in my understanding at least) was to be the glue between all cloud platforms and on-premises which is a great one. So when it comes to Azure, the only known plans (which are probably what Pat was alluding to below) were the 2 things as per below,

  • To use NSX to bridge on-premises (& other cloud platforms) to Azure by extending network adjacency right in to the Azure edge, in a similar way to how you can stretch networks to VMWonAWS. NSX-T version 2.2.0 which GA’d on Wednesday the 6th of June can now support creating VMware virtual networks in Azure and being able to manage those networks within your NSX data center inventory. All the details can be found here. What Pat was probably doing was setting the scene for this announcement but it was not news, as that was on the roadmap for a long time since VMworld 2016. This probably should not be taken as VMware on Azure bare metal is a reality, at least at this stage.
  • In addition to that, the VMware Cloud Services (VCS – A SaaS platform announced in VMworld 2017 – more details here) will have more integration with native AWS, native Azure and GCP which is also what Pat is hinting here when he says more integration with Azure, but that too was always on the roadmap.

At least that’s my take on VMware’s plans and their future strategy. Things can change in a flash as the IT market is full of changes these days with so many competitors as well as co-petitors. But I just cant see, at least in the immediate future, there being a genuine VMware Cloud on Azure solution that runs vSphere on bare metal Azure hardware, that is similar to VMWonAWS, despite what that article from CNBC seems to insinuate.

What do you all think? Any insiders with additional knowledge or anyone with a different theory? Keen to get people’s thoughts!

Chan

VMworld 2017 US – VMware Strategy & My Thoughts

Chan 2 Comments

This is a quick post to summerise all the key announcements from VMworld 2017 US event and share my thoughts and insights of the strategy and the direction of VMware, the way I see it.

Key Announcements

A number of announcements were made during the week on products and solutions and below is a high level list of those to recap.

  • Announced the launch of the VMware Cloud Services which consists of 2 main components
    • VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC)
      • Consist of VMware vSphere + vSAN + NSX
      • Running on AWS data centers (bare metal)
      • A complete Public Cloud platform consisting of VMware Software Defined Data Center components
      • Available as a
    • A complete Hybrid-Cloud infrastructure security, management & monitoring & Automation solution made available through a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform
      • Work natively with VMware Cloud on AWS
      • Also work with legacy, on-premises VMware data center
      • Also work with native AWS, Azure and Google public cloud platforms
  • Next generation of network virtualisation solution based NSX-T (aka NSX Multi hypervisor)
    • Version 2.0 announced
    • Supports vSphere & KVM
    • Likely going to be strategically more important to VMware than the NSX-v (vSphere specific NSX that is commongly used today by vSphere customers). Think What ESXi was for VMware when ESX was still around, during early days!

 

 

  • Next version of vRealize Network Insight (version 3.5) released
    • Various cloud platform integrations
    • Additional on-premises 3rd party integrations (Check Point FW, HP OneView, Brocade MLX)
    • Support for additional NSX component integration (IPFIX, Edge dashboard, NSX-v DFW PCI dashboard)

 

  • VMware AppDefense
    • A brand new application security solution that is available via VMware Cloud Services subscription

 

  • VMware Pivotal Container Services (PKS) as a joint collaboration between VMware, Pivotal & Google (Kubernetes)
    • Kubernetes support across the full VMware stack including NSX & vSAN
    • Support for Sever-Less solution capabilities using Functions as a Service (Similar to AWS Lambda or Azure Functions)
    • Enabling persistent storage for stateful applications via the vSphere Cloud Provider, which provides access to vSphere storage powered by vSAN or traditional SAN and NAS storage,
    • Automation and governance via vRealize Automation and provisioning of service provider clouds with vCloud Director,
    • Monitoring and troubleshooting of virtual infrastructure via VMware vRealize Operations
    • Metrics monitoring of containerized applications via Wavefront.

 

  • Workspace One enhancements and updates
    • Single UEM platform for Windows, MacOS, Chrome OS, IOS and Android
    • Integration with unique 3rd party endpoint platform API’s
    • Offer cloud based peer-to-peer SW distribution to deploy large apps at scale
    • Support for managing Chrome devices
    • Provides customers the ability to enforce & manage O365 security policies and DLP alongside all of their applications and devices
    • Workspace One intelligence to provide Insights and automation to enhance user experience (GA Q4 FY18)
  • VMware Integrated OpenStack 4.0 announced
    • OpenStack Ocata integration
    • Additional features include
      • Containerized apps alongside traditional apps in production on OpenStack
      • vRealize Automation integration to enable OpenStack users to use vRealize Automation-based policies and to consume OpenStack components within vRealize Automation blueprints
      • Increased scale and isolation for OpenStack clouds enabled through new multi-VMware vCenter support
    • New pricing & Packaging tier (not free anymore)
  • VMware Skyline
    • A new proactive support offering aligned to global support services
    • Available to Premier support customers (North America initially)
    • Requires an appliance deployment on premise
    • Quicker time to incident resolution

Cross Cloud Architecture Strategy & My Thoughts

VMware announced the Cross Cloud Architecture (CCA) back in VMworld 2016 where they set the vision for VMware to provide the capability to customers to run & manage any application, on any cloud using any device. This was ambitious and was seen as the first step towards VMware recognising that running vSphere on premise should no longer be VMware’s main focus and they want to provide customers with choice.

This choice of platform options were to be,

  • Continue to run vSphere on premise if that is what you want to do
  • OR, let customers run the same vSphere based SDDC stack on the cloud which can be spun up in minutes in a fully automated way (IaaS)
  • OR, run the same workload that used to run on a VMware SDDC platform on a native public cloud platform such as AWS or Azure or Google cloud or IBM Cloud

During that VMworld, VMware also demoed the capability of NSX to bridge all these various private and public cloud platforms through the clever use of NSX to extend networks across all of those platforms. Well, VMworld 2017 has shown additional steps VMware have taken to make this cross cloud architecture even more of a reality. VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) now lets you spin up a complete VMware based Software Defined Data Center running vSphere on vSAN connected by NSX through a simple web page, much similar to how Azure and AWS native infrastructure platforms allows you to provision VM based infrastructure on demand. Based on some initial articles, this could even be cheaper than running vSphere on-premise which is great news for customers. In addition to this price advantage, when you factor in the rest of Total Cost of Ownership factors such as maintaining on premise skill to set up and manage the infrastructure platforms that are no longer needed, the VMC platform is likely going to be extremely interesting to most customers. And most importantly, most customers will NOT need to go through costly re-architecting of their monolithic application estate to fit a native cloud IaaS platform which simplifies cloud migration of their monolithic application stack. And if that is not enough, you also can carry on managing & securing that workload using the same VMware management and security toolset, even on the cloud too.

When you then consider the announcement of VMware Cloud Services (VCS) offering as a SaaS solution, it now enables integrating a complete VMware hybrid cloud management toolset in to various platforms and workloads, irrespective of where they reside. VCS enables the discovery, monitoring, management and securing of those workloads across different platforms, all through a single pane of glass which is a pretty powerful message that no other public cloud provider can claim to provide in such a heterogeneous manner. This holistic management and security platform allows customers to provision, manage and secure any workload (Monolithic or Microservices based) on any platform (vSphere on premise, VMC on AWS, native AWS, native Azure, Native Google cloud) to be accessed on any device (workstation, laptop, Pad or a mobile). That to me is a true Cross Cloud vision becoming a reality and my guess is once the platform matures and capabilities increase, this is going to be very popular amongst almost all customers.

In addition to this CCA capabilities, VMware obviously appear to be shifting their focus from the infrastructure layer (read “virtual machine”) to the actual application layer, focusing more on enabling application transformation and application security which is great to see. As many have already, VMware too are embracing the concept of containers, not only as a better application architecture but also as the best way to decouple the application from the underlying infrastructure and using containers as a shipping mechanism to enable moving applications across to public cloud (& back). The announcement of various integrations within their infrastructure stack to Docker ecosystem such as Kubernetes testifies to this and would likely be welcomed by customers. I’d expect such integration to continue to improve across all of VMware’s SDDC infrastructure stack. With VMware solutions, you can now deploy container based applications on on-premise vSphere using VIC or Photon or even VMC or a native public cloud platform, store them on vSAN with volume plugins on premise or on cloud, extend the network to the container instance via NSX (on premise or on cloud), extend visibility in to container instance via vRNI and vROPS (on premise or cloud) and also automate provisioning or most importantly, migration of these container apps across on-premise or public cloud platforms as you see fit.

NSX cloud for example will let you extend all the unique capabilities of software defined networking such as micro-segmentation, security groups and overlay network extensions to not just within private data centers but also to native public cloud platforms such as AWS & Azure (roadmap) which enriches the capabilities of a public cloud platform and increases the security available within the network.

My Thoughts

All in all, it was a great VMworld where VMware have genuinely showcased their Hybrid Cloud and Cross Cloud Architecture strategy. As a technologist that have been working with VMware for a while, it was pretty obvious that a software centric organisation like VMware, similar to the likes of Microsoft was always gonna embrace changes, especially changes driven by software such as the public cloud. However most people, especially sales people in the industry I work in as well as some of the customers were starting to worry about the future of VMware and their relevance in the increasingly Cloudy world ahead. This VMworld has showcased to all of those how VMware has got a very good working strategy to embrace that software defined cloud adoption and empower customers by giving them the choice to do the same, without any tie in to a specific cloud platform. The soaring, all time high VMware share price is a testament that analysts and industry experts agree with this too.

If I was a customer, I would want nothing more!

Keen to get your thoughts, please submit via comments below

Other Minor VMworld 2017 (Vegas) Announcements

  • New VMware & HPe partnership for DaaS
    • Include Workspace ONE to HPe DaaS
    • Include Unified Endpoint Management through Airwatch
  • Dell EMC to offer data protection to VMC (VMware Cloud on AWS)
    • Include Data Domain & Data protection app suite
    • Self-service capability
  • VCF related announcements
    • CenturyLink, Fujitsu & Rackspace to offer VCF + Services
    • New HCI and CI platforms (VxRack SDDC, HDS UCP-RS, Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX, QCT QxStack
    • New VCF HW partners
      • Cisco
      • HDS
      • Fujitsu
      • Lenovo
  • vCloud Director v9 announced
    • GA Q3 FY18
  • New vSphere scale-out edition
    • Aimed at Big data and HPC workloads
    • Attractive price point
    • Big data specific features and resource optimisation within vSphere
    • Includes vDS
  • VMware Validated Design (VVD) 4.1 released
    • Include a new optional consolidated DC architecture for small deployments
  • New VMware and Fujitsu partnerships
    • Fujitsu Cloud Services to delivery VMware Cloud Services
  • DXC Technology partnership
    • Managed Cloud service with VMC
    • Workload portability between VMC, DXC DCs and customer’s own DCs
  • Re-announced VMware Pulse IoT Center  with further integration to VMware solutions stack to manage IoT components

 

Cheers

Chan

VMworld 2017 – vSAN New Announcements & Updates

Chan 1 Comment

During VMworld 2017 Vegas, a number of vSAN related product announcements will have been made and I was privy to some of those a little earlier than the rest of the general public, due being a vSAN vExpert. I’ve summerised those below. The embargo on disclosing the details lifts at 3pm PST which is when this blog post is sheduled to go live automatically. So enjoy! 🙂

vSAN Customer Adoption

As some of you may know, popularity of vSAN has been growing for a while now as a preferred alternative to legacy SAN vendors when it comes to storing vSphere workloads. The below stats somewhat confirms this growth. I too can testify to this personally as I’ve seen a similar increase to the number of our own customers that consider vSAN as the default choice for storage now.

Key new Announcements

New vSAN based HCI Acceleration kit availability

This is a new ready node program being announced with some OEM HW vendors to provide distributed data center services for data centers to keep edge computing platforms. Consider this to be somewhat in between vSAN RoBo solution and the full blown main data center vSAN solution. Highlights of the offering are as follows

  • 3 x Single socket servers
  • Include vSphere STD + vSAN STD (vCenter is excluded)
  • Launch HW partners limited to Fujitsu, Lenovo, Dell & Super Micro only
  • 25% default discount on list price (on both HW & SW)
  • $25K starting price

           

 

  • My thoughts: Potentially a good move an interesting option for those customers who have a main DC elsewhere or are primarily cloud based (included VMware Cloud on AWS). The practicality of vSAN RoBo was always hampered by the fact that its limited to 25 VMs on 2 nodes. This should slightly increase that market adoption, however the key decision would be the pricing. Noticeably HPe are absent from the initial launch but I’m guessing they will eventually sign up. Note you have to have an existing vCenter license elsewhere as its not included by default.

vSAN Native Snapshots Announced

Tech preview of the native vSAN data protection capabilities through snapshots have been announced and will likely be generally available in FY18. vSAN native snapshots will have the following characteristics.

  • Snapshots are all policy driven
  • 5 mins RPO
  • 100 snapshots per VM
  • Support data efficiency services such as dedupe as well as protection services such as encryption
  • Archival of snapshots will be available to secondary object or NAS storage (no specific vendor support required) or even Cloud (S3?)
  • Replication of snapshots will be available to a DR site.

  • My thoughts: This was a hot request and something that was long time coming. Most vSAN solutions need a 3rd party data center back up product today and often, SAN vendors used to provide this type of snapshot based backup solution from the array (NetApp Snap Manager suite for example) that vSAN couldn’t match. Well, it can now, and since its done at the SW layer, its array independent and you can replicate or archive that anywhere, even on cloud and this would be more than sufficient for lots of customers with a smaller or a point use case to not bother buying backup licenses elsewhere to protect that vSphere workload. This is likely going to be popular. I will be testing this out in our lab as soon as the beta code is available to ensure the snaps don’t have a performance penalty.

 

vSAN on VMware Cloud on AWS Announced

Well, this is not massively new but vSAN is a key part of VMware Cloud on AWS and the vSAN storage layer provide all the on premise vSAN goodness while also providing DR to VMware Cloud capability (using snap replication) and orchestration via SRM.

 

vSAN Storage Platform for Containers Announced

Similar to the NSX-T annoucement with K8 (Kubernetes) support, vSAN also provide persistent storage presentation to both K8 as well as Docker container instances in order to run stateful containers.

 
This capability came from the vmware OpenSource project code named project Hatchway and its freely available via GitHub https://vmware.github.io/hatchway/ now.

  • My thoughts: I really like this one and the approach VMware are taking with the product set to be more and more microservices (container based application) friendly. This capability came from an opensource VMware project called Project hatchway and will likely be popular with many. This code was supposed to be available on GitHub as this is an opensource project but I have not been able to see anything within the VMware repo’s on GitHub yet.

 

So, all in all, not very many large or significant announcements for vSAN from VMworld 2017 Vegas (yet), but this is to be expected as the latest version of vSAN 6.6.1 was only recently released with a ton of updates. The key take aways for me is that the popularity of vSAN is obviously growing (well I knew this already anyways) and the current and future announcements are going to be making vSAN a fully fledged SAN / NAS replacement for vSphere storage with more and more native security, efficiency and availability services which is great for the customers.

Cheers

Chan

 

VMworld 2017 – Network & Security Announcements

Chan 1 Comment

As an NSX vExpert, I was privy to an early access preview of some of the NSX updates that are due to be announced during VMworld 2017 Vegas – This is a summary of all those announcements and, while I prepped the post before VMworld announcements were made to general public, by the time this post is published and you read this, it will be all public knowledge.

Growing NSX market

    

  • NSX customer momentum is very good, with around 2600+ new NSX customers in Q2 which is twice that year ago.
  • Typical customer sectors are from all around, Service providers, healthcare, Finance, Technology, Public sector…etc
  • Typical use cases belong to Security (Micro-Segmentation, EUC & DMZ anywhere), Automation and App continuity (DR, Cross cloud)

Since I work for a VMware partner (reseller), I can relate to these points first hand as I see the same kind of customers and use cases being explored by our own customers so these appear to be valid, credible market observations.

Network & Security New Announcements (VMworld 2017)

Given below are some of the key NSX related announcements that will be / have been annouced today at VMworld 2017 Vegas.

  • NSX-T 2.0 release
    • On-premise network virtualisation for non-vSphere workloads
    • Cloud Native App framework (K8 integration)
    • Cloud integration (Native AWS platform)
  • VMware Cloud Services
    • Number of new SaaS solution offerings available from VMware
    • The list of initial solutions available as SaaS offering at launch include
      • Discovery
      • Cost insights
      • Wavefront
      • Network insight
      • NSX Cloud & VMware Cloud on AWS
        • Well, this is not news, but been pre-announced already
      • VMware AppDefense
        • A brand new data center endpoint security product
      • Workspace One (Cloud)
  • vRealize Network Insight 3.5
    • vRNI finally expanding to cloud and additional on-premise 3rd party integrations

NSX-T 2.0 release (For secure networking in the cloud)

So this is VMware’s next big bet. Simply because it is NSX-T that will enable the future of VMware’s cross cloud capabilities by being compatible with all other none vSphere platforms including public cloud platforms to extend the NSX networking constructs in to those environments. Given below are the highlights of NSX-T 2.0 announced today.

  • On-premise automation and networking & Security (Support for KVM)
    • Multi-Domain networking
    • Automation with OpenStack
    • Micro-Segmentation
  • Cloud Native Application Frameworks
    • VMs and containers
    • CNI plugin integration for Kubernetes
    • Micro-Segmentation for containers / Microservices via NST-T 2.0 (roadmap)
    • Monitoring & analytics for containers / Microservices via NST-T 2.0 (roadmap)
  • Public Cloud Integration
    • On-prem, Remote, Public & Hybrid DCs
    • Native AWS with VMware secure networking – Extends out NSX security constructs to legacy AWS network

NSX-T integration with Container as a Service (Kubernetes for example) and Platform as a Service (AWS native networking) components a NSX container plugin and the architecture is shown below.

  

 

VMware Cloud Services (VCS)

This is a much anticipated annoucement where NSX secure networking capabilities will be offerred as a hosted service (PaaS) from VMware – Known as “VMware Cloud Services portal”. This will integrated with various platforms such as your on-premise private cloud environment or even public cloud platforms such as native AWS (available now) or Azure (roadmap) by automatically deploying the NSX-T components required on each cloud platform (NSX manager, NSX controllers & Cloud Services Manager appliance…etc). This is TOTALLY COOL and unlike any other solution available from anyone else.

As a whole, VCS will provide the following capabilities on day 1, as a SaaS / PaaS offering.

 

Key capabilities this PaaS provide include the below, across the full Hybrid-Cloud stack.

  • Discovery
  • Networking Insights
  • Cost management / insight
  • Secure Networking (via NSX Cloud)

The beauty of this offering is this will provide all the NSX natice capabilities such as distributed routing, Micro segmentation, Distributed switching, data encryption and deep visibility in to networking traffic will all be extended out to any part of the hybrid cloud platform. Ths enables you to manage and monitor as well as define & enforce new controls through a single set of security policies, defined on a single pane of glass, via Cloud Services portal. For example, the ditributed  firewall policies that block App servers from talking direct to DB servers, once defined, will apply to the VMs whether they are on premise on vSphere or moved to KVM or even when they reside on AWS (VMware cloud or native AWS platform). All of this becomes possible through the integration of NSX-T with cloud platforms that enables additional services using network overlay. In the case of public cloud, this will provide all these additional capabilities that are not natively available on the cloud platform which is awesome.!

I cannot wait for VCS to have Azure integration also which I believe is in the roadmap.

I will be doing a detailed post on VCS soon.

VMware Cloud on AWS

  

Well, this is NOT news anymore as this was annouced last year during VMworld 2016 and since then technical previews and public beta of the platform has already been available. So I’m not going to cover this in detail as there are plenty of overview posts out there.

However the main announcement today on this front is it is NOW (FINALLY) GENERALLY AVAILABLE for customers to subscribe to. Yey!! The minimum subscription is based on 4 nodes (vSAN requirements).

 

VMware App Defence

A brand new offering that is being annouced today that will extend the security layer to the applications. This is pretty cool too and I’m not going to cover the details here. instead, I will be producing a dedicated post to cover this one later on this week.

Summary

All of these annoucements are the implementation milestones of the VMware Cross Cloud Architecture (CCA) initiative that VMware annouced during last year’s VMworld where VMware will enable the workload mobility between on-premise and all other various public cloud platforms, primarily through the use of NSX to extend the network fabric acorss all platforms. Customers can build these components out themselves or they can simply consume them via a hosted PaaS. I am very excited for all my customers as these capabilities will help you harness the best of each cloud platform and new technology innovations such as containers without loosing the end to end visibility, management capabilities and security of your multi-cloud infrastructure platform.

Cheers

Chan

Heading to VMworld 2017 in Vegas

Chan Leave a comment

For the 2nd year running, I’ve been extremely lucky to be able to attend the VMware’s premier technology roadshow, VMworld in the city that never sleeps. This is my 6th consecutive VMworld where I’ve attended the 2012-2015 events at Barcelona and the 2016 event in Vegas. Similar to the last year, I’ve been extremely lucky to be selected and be invited by VMware as an official VMworld blogger due to my vExpert status to attend the event free of charge. (Also well done to my fellow Insight teammate & vExpert Kyle Jenner for being picked to attend VMworld 2017 Europe as an official blogger too). Obviously we are both very lucky to have an employer who value our attendance at such industry events and is happy to foot the bill for other expenses such as logistics which is also appreciated. So thanks VMware & Insight UK.

I attended the VMworld 2016 also in Vegas and to be honest, that was probably not the best event to attend that year in hindsight as all the new announcements were reserved for the European edition a month after. However this year, the word on the street is that VMworld US will carry majority of the new announcements so I am very excited to find out about them before anyone else.!

VMworld 2017 Itineraries

Most people attending VMworld or any similar tech conference overseas would typically travel few days earlier or stay behind few days after the event to explore things around. Unfortunately for me and my in-explicable dedication to playing league cricket between April-September, I am only able to travel out on Sunday the 27th after the game on Saturday. Similarly I have to get back immediately after the event in time for the following Saturday’s game. Silly you might think! I’d tend to agree too.

  • Travel out: Sunday the 27th of August from Manchester to Las Vegas (Thomas Cook – direct flight)
  • Accommodation: Delano Las Vegas (next door to event venue which is Mandalay Bay Hotel)
  • Travel back: Thursday the 31st of August from Las Vegas to Manchester (Thomas Cook – direct flight)

 

Session planning

one of the most important thing one planning on attending VMworld should do (if you wanna genuinely learn something at the event that is), to plan your break out sessions that you want to attend in advance using the schedule builder. This year, I was very luck to be able to get this booked in almost as soon as the schedule builder went live. However even then, some of the popular sessions were fully booked which shows how popular this event is.

Given below is a list of my planned sessions

  • Sunday the 27th of August
    • 4-4:30pm – How to Use CloudFormations in vRealize Automation to Build Hybrid Applications That Span and Reside On-Premises & on VMware Cloud on AWS and AWS Cloud [MMC1464QU]

 

  • Monday the 28th of August
    • 9am-10:30am – General session (you can find me at the specialist blogger seats right at the front of the hall)
    • 12:30-1:30pm – Accelerate the Hybrid Cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS [LHC3159SU]
    • 2:30-3:30pm – Addressing your General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Challenges with Security and Compliance Automation Based on VMware Cloud Foundation [GRC3386BUS]
    • 3:30-4:30pm – Big Data for the 99% (of Enterprises) [FUT2634PU]
    • 5:30-6:30pm – VMC Hybrid Cloud Architectural Deep Dive: Networking and Storage Best Practices [LHC3375BUS]

 

  • Tuesday the 29th of August
    • 9am-10:30am – General session (you can find me at the specialist blogger seats right at the front of the hall)
    • 1-2pm – A Two-Day VMware vRealize Operations Manager Customer Success Workshop in 60 Minutes [MGT2768GU]
    • 2-3pm – AWS Native Services Integration with VMware Cloud on AWS: Technical Deep Dive [LHC3376BUS]
    • 3-6:30pm – VMware NSX Community Leaders (vExperts) Summit at Luxor hotel
    • 7-10pm – vExpert Reception – VMworld U.S. 2017 at Pinball Hall of Fame
    • 10pm-12am – Rubrik VMworld Party (Featuring none other than Ice Cube) at Marquee @ Cosmopolitan

 

  • Wednesday the 30th of August
    • 10-11am – Automating vSAN Deployments at Any Scale [STO1119GU]
    • 11-12am – Creating Your VMware Cloud on AWS Data Center: VMware Cloud on AWS Fundamentals [LHC1547BU]
    • 12:30-1:30pm – 3 Ways to Use VMware’s New Cloud Services for Operations to Efficiently Run Workloads Across AWS, Azure and vSphere: VMware and Customer Technical Session [MMC3074BU]
    • 3:30-4:30pm – Intriguing Integrations with VMware Cloud on AWS, EC2, S3, Lambda, and More [LHC2281BU]
    • 7-10pm – VMworld Customer Appreciation Party

 

  • Thursday the 31st of August
    • 10:30-11:30am – NSX and VMware Cloud on AWS: Deep Dive [LHC2103BU]

 

I have left some time in between sessions for blogging activities, various meetings, networking sessions and hall crawl which are also equally important as attending breakout sessions (If anything those are more important as the breakout session content will always be available online afterwards)

Thoughts & Predictions

VMworld is always a good event to attend and going by past experience, its a great event for finding out about new VMware initiatives and announcements as well as all the related partner ecosystem solutions, from the established big boys as well as relatively new or up and coming start-up’s that work with VMware technologies to offer new ways to solve todays business problems. I don’t see this year’s event being any different and my guess would be a lot of focus would be given to VMware’s Cross cloud architecture (announced last year) and everything related to that this year. Such things could include the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS and potentially some NSX related announcements that can facilitate this cross cloud architecture for the customers. We will have to wait and see obviously.

I will be aiming to get a daily summary blog out summarising key announcements from the day and any new or exciting solutions I come across. You can follow me on Twitter also for some live commentary throughout the day.

If you are a VMware customer or a partner, I would highly encourage you to attend VMworld at least once. It is a great event for learning new things, but also most importantly, its a great place to meet and gain access to back end VMware engineering staff that average people never get to see or interact with. This is very valuable if you are a techie. Also if you are a business person, you can network with key VMware executives and product managers to understand the future strategy of their product lines and also, collectively that of VMware.