No Barcelona this year, no trade fair where over 10,000 people gather, no lively discussions with peers and partners and no Catalan delights. Did you also miss the live version of VMworld that much? I did!
Missed VMworld?
Did you also miss VMworld a lot this year? Sure, the event took place in digital form last week, but watching and listening to everything digitally does have its drawbacks. All topics were neatly displayed on a good functioning website and the quality was high, but just being in Barcelona and really sitting down for a good time in a different environment was not there this year. The context switch between the already mostly digital working from home was simply missing. In addition, the interaction with colleagues, partners and users from the VMware community was a big miss. All logical, but let's hope it's a one-off.
VMware HCX
Does this mean there was nothing interesting? Certainly not! Surely, there were a few components named that I found very interesting. For example, there is the VMware HCX product; a very simple way to link VMware Clouds together. Between different software versions, between different locations and different VMware management layers: both vCenter and Cloud Director are supported. And when I mean link, in this case it also means extend: networks are easily extended through SD-WAN, making it easy to move a virtual machine via a live migration.
I can see the strength of this concept in two pathways: extending capacity from an existing cluster to an external (data centre) cluster. Think e.g. of replacing hardware in part of the infrastructure and then linking it into a cloud service through an extension. A great way to do a phased replacement via a hybrid Cloud The other path is a migration path, you can use the HCX technology stack to move workloads to e.g. a Fundaments Cloud. Currently, there are already tools for this in the form of Cloud Availability and therefore I think the power of HCX comes into play more in a public Cloud transformation, where, for example, a set of applications needs to be migrated to e.g. an AWS. A lift and shift action in which an existing environment is seamlessly moved as the first step of the transformation can then be achieved very easily with HCX. With this move, a large part of the transformation is then already realised; the next step is then to convert an application to a cloud native variant.
Project Monterey: SmartNIC
Another cool concept is that of the SmartNIC. This network interface allows the entire ESXi stack to be run on a network card, which allows all kinds of functionality to be presented via this interface to the host in which this SmartNIC sits. Think of using disk capacity from an ESXi cluster with vSAN, but also hosting a container on a host with a GPU card can be done with this concept. It therefore opens a way to very granularly add functionality to existing environments, which are based on physical hardware, for example. This is crucial to achieve integrations in a world of applications and services that are no longer solely CPU-based.
SmartNICs are part of what VMware calls project Monterey. This project ensures that from an application world based on virtual machines and containers (driven with Tanzu), even further integration is achieved into a world of sensors and IOT without compromising on security in communications.
Evolution of existing products
Besides these two topics, a lot of evolution of existing products was announced; quite a number of things to read and watch again. This does highlight an advantage the format used in VMworld 2020: practically all sessions can be watched back on demand: that's really an improvement if you ask me.
