The Keynote for Vmworld 2014 started with Ben Fahti, the new CTO of VMware, reviewing the major announcement of the Keynote from Day One. Ben also stressed the liquid world concept, and how IT needs to change from "VS" to "Delivering on the power of AND." Ben quickly introduces Sanjay Poonen, SVP of vCloud management, to discuss the new announcements in more detail.
Sanjay begins with a review of the current Horizon EUC offerings and then provides a quick history on the key acquisitions that the new Horizon Suite is comprised of today:
- Airwatch
for integrated VDI/App publishing
- Desktone
for DaaS
- Cloud
Volumes for cloud-based deployment of published applications
He also reviews the major development initiatives from key partnership with NVidia and Google:
- NVidia - virtual GPU integration for High-end
graphics (3D) capabilities using PCoIP
- Google - Integrated
Chromebook for enhanced VDI specific for View
Sanjay introduces Kevin Ichhpurani, SVP of SAP and chats about the SAP/VMware partnership around the development of integrated SAP appstore functionality that tie directly into Horizon's workspace portal.
Kit Colbert, CTO of Mobility for VMware, takes the stage for a quick demo of Airwatch and Cloud Volumes. Demo features a medical imaging application, showcasing the 3D graphics capabilities of Horizon as well as the centralized provisioning of applications from the CloudVolumes console. Secure Content Locker is shown, including the ability to annotate documents from any device.
Kit goes on to discuss Project
Fargo, which is a new container-based delivery model for rapid provisioning of apps and desktops in a highly portable fashion - and 30x faster than it's opensource competitors. He also describes Project
Meteor - essentially a JIT Desktop environment– utilizing CloudVolumes to deploy live VM and push streamed applications at blistering speeds.
Sanjay then segues from EUC to the foundational infrastructure components, SDDC. He introduces Raghu Raghuram, SVP of SDDC for VMware. Raghu introduces vSphere 6 Beta and some very compelling and exciting new functionality.
VMware FT - now has support for up to 4 vCPUs (beta for vSphere 6).
Virtual Volumes - VVOLs has development support of over 30 storage manufacturers and is in beta for vSphere 6. At launch, there will not be integration for SRM.
V-Motion - You can now v-motion across vCenter clusters, allowing you to v-motion workloads from one datacenter site to another. Additionally, Long Distance v-motion is supported, with NSX integrated capabilities for the network underlay.
Raghu also announces some improvements to the vCenter web client, mainly around performance and usability. This will be part of the vSphere 6.0 release as well.
Raghu discusses the 3 deployment models for infrastructure, similar to Pat's review during the day one keynote. He provides more detail around the VMware EVO line, specifically EVO:RAIL and EVO:RACK.
EVO:RAIL
- vendor partners include: Fujitsu, Dell, netOne, Inspur
- 15 minutes to setup via a new simplified interface (reminiscent of VMware Go?)
- VMware SW components include ESX, VCNS, VSAN, and Log Insight
- a single appliance includes 4 independent nodes capable of serving up to 100 VMS, or 250 VDI, or 50,000 Exchange mailboxes
- The appliances can be stacked 4 high, providing an at-scale cluster of 16 nodes
- it is vCenter compatible, assuming you don't want to use the simplified GUI
EVO:RACK
- currently in tech preview
- SW components include the full VMware vCloud Suite, vRealize, and NSX
- Datacenter class ( 20% of the Vmworld hands-on labs running on
EVO:RACK)
- Open Compute Project (OPC) compliant
After the EVO discussion, Raghu jumps into the integration work that VMware has been developing in OpenStack. VMware joined the OpenStack coalition 15 months ago and has developed an OpenStack Framework that is currently available in beta. "VMware Integrated OpenStack" is base on an Open
Policy Framework via Congress (VMware contributed code for Congress
development).
Raghu proclaims
that VMware is the best deployment platform for OpenStack. He also discusses the integration efforts between VMware and some of the most popular OpenStack distributions, including Canonical,
HP Helion, Mirantis, Suse.
All of this OpenStack venture is really in support of Native Cloud Applications, which is the next topic of discussion from Raghu. He reviews the history of container technology - from Solaris' efforts to current mainstays like Docker. He emphasizes VMware's commitment to open standards and discusses that VM delivery approach to container technology. While Pivotal standardized on a different container technology he announces that the next version of Pivotal will have full support of Docker. Additionally, he highlights VMware's development efforts around integration with Google's Kubernetes container management platform. After a quick demo, he also announces support for both Docker and Kubernetes in Cloud Foundry (next release).
Looking forward to Day Three and diving into the technologies in more detail.Labels: FT, vmotion, vmworld 2014