General Session
The General Session started of with Sanjay Poonen delivering some numbers regarding savings you as a company can realize when you implement VMware’s software offerings such as vSAN or NSX into your IT environments. After this he briefly mentioned a new project called Skyline, a proactive support service which automatically collects, aggregates and analyzes product usage to identify problems and help VMware GSS.
After this he had a couple of companies on stage to talk about the changes that VMware has brought to their IT departments and how the software revolutionized traditional IT offerings for them. Most of these changes focussed on using VMware’s rather new service called VeloCloud SD-WAN and Workspace One to reduce a lot of operational costs managing complex and expensive WAN connections or a large number of digital workspaces.
After this Martha Lane Fox, a british businesswoman, philantropist and public servant went on stage and held a very inspiring talk about how technology innovations keep coming into this world and how they affect it. She also talked about how innovations can change lifes but not necessarily always do change lifes at the moment. At one point she mentioned that a little over 50 percent of the world is connected with each other, but that the rest is not. So all the innovations that are beeing made to make lifes better in for example industrial industry and healthcare sectors aren’t available to everyone on the globe. This is something we should work on so that everybody has the same chances to get the life they would like to have. She also said:
“Whatever bit of the technology sector you’re in, it’s important to ask about the context of what you’re building,” while she continued with “Will it deepen existing inequalities or shrink them?”
Martha Lane Fox
It took some time to let these statements sink in but in the end this really got me thinking differently about the way we should work on technologic innovations and how we could provide these to everybody on the globe.
Introduction to the VMware Cloud Marketplace for Partners
The VMware Cloud Marketplace is a platform that enables Technology Alliance Partners (TAP) to offer their solutions or services to on premise or hybrid cloud environments. With the release of vRealize automation we already got a preview of what that would look like because both vRA and the VMware Cloud Marketplace share the same codebase. At this moment there are only a few technology preview partners that have had their solutions verified for the marketplace. But we can expect more partners to complete the verification process in the near future. To stay informed head over to https://cloud.vmware.com/cloud-marketplace.
Hybrid Cloud vCloud Extender from Customer to Provider
This session was also very useful to us. In our line of business we are always onboarding new customers and their environments. The process we are using to do this is very optimized and quick. We can migrate complete enviroments within a couple of hours, but it would always be nice if these couple of hours could be reduced or the setup simplified.
With this in mind vCloud Extender is a very useful tool with which you can even let your customers migrate their virtual machines to the new environment themselfes. This tool only works when vCloud Director is your target, but you do not need vCloud director on the source side. This can be a normal vCenter, you wouldn’t even need NSX in it.
If you would use this tool the customer or you would have to deploy a small appliance inside the environment and import a vCenter plugin which provides you with the interface you need if you want to use vCloud Extender.
Migration methodes are basically made up of the following two:
- Cold Migration:
- Migrate a powered-off virtual machine, just sync it and fail it over to use it in the target enviroment.
- Warm Migration:
- Sync a powered-on virtual machine and once it is synced you use a cutover moment to migrate it to the target environment.
There are possibilities to use a seed to decrease bandwidth demands. The RPO could be as low as 5 minutes, which means that the downtime for the customer is next to none.
VMware NSX for Service Providers
This session explaned some of the usecases and capabilities of VMware NSX. And how service providers can leverage the multi-tenant capabilities of vCloud director to deliver the power of NSX to their tenants.
Solution Exchange and Subject Matter Experts
The larger part of the afternoon was filled with a visitation to the Solution Exchange where we talked with numerous known and unknown vendors about their up and coming solutions. We also talked to two of VMware’s Subject Matter Experts (SME) on vCloud Director about monitoring and metering vCloud Director elements which cannot really be seen from within the portal. For example NSX vApp Edges that deliver DHCP to a vApp network. This talk was especially useful to us because we want to implement vCloud Director as a cloud management platform but we can only do this if we can meter everything that this tool creates and the resources that these elements consume. Something that is very helpful with this goal is using the vROPS Chargeback module inside the vCloud Director. We already knew about this tool, which made a comeback from the former VMware Chargeback Manager which was discontinued back in 2014.
This module inside vROPS which can be seen from within vCloud Director is basically the same but revamped to work from inside the Tenant App in vCloud Director. We talked about a couple of methods which could help our situation and give us a good feeling about placing vCloud Director in production for our customers. Once we have tested these situations we will probably post a blog about it.
The End!
The day ended with the VMworld Fest party which featured the Counterfeit Stones and The Kooks! We loved the entertainment and as far as our opinion goes, this was a blast!
Tomorrow will be the last day of VMworld, stay tuned for the last blog regarding VMworld Europe 2018.
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