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VMworld 2017 Las Vegas – Day 2 General Session Summary

Today I managed to get a blogger/press table at the general session on time, skipping breakfast was the key, and not like yesterday when I got my place 5 min after the general session started:)

Pat Gelsinger started with inviting Michael Dell on to the stage and they answered pre-prepared questions from the audience. You had a chance to submit the questions after General Session Day 1.

The first question was about customer support quality and the response was that VMware constantly is working with support improvements and that the area gets a lot of attention. Skyline is a new initiative where VMware will try to take support to the next level by reaching out to customers before they have problems. I need to look into this a bit more before making any statement about it. Not sure if it is a traditional call home system or based on anything else.

Next topic was AI, machine learning, big data and new requirements for next generation cloud. These topics are broader than just IT says Michael Dell and explained that Dell focus a lot on the data which is the major building block for AI and machine learning. Pat says, back in 1984 when he was architecting the 486 they could have used it for AI but the missing pieces was lack of compute power and storage (the actual data).

Rob Mee, CEO or Pivotal, was invited up on the stage together with Pat and Michael to talk about what Pivotal has accomplished. VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS), which I blogged about here, was announced. It is built with Kubernetes, NSX, vRealize Automation & Wavefront and comes out of the box with integration to Google Cloud. Pat Gelsinger (VMware), Michael Dell (Dell/EMC of course), Rob Mee (CEO Pivotal) and Sam Ramji (Google Cloud) made the VMware PKS announcement together on the stage and Sam was actually wearing t-shirt and jeans, respect!!!!
Pivotal & VMware were also announced as Platinum Members of the Cloud Native Foundation.

Elastic Sky Pizza was the fictitious company included in the pre-recorded demos and in the demos we saw a company with all kinds of problems (stability, capacity, security, shitty applications and much more) and also some future looking ingredients….

The following components were included in the demo:

  • VMware Cloud Foundation – To stabilize the environment
  • VMware AppDefense – To secure the applications within the environment
  • VMware vRealize Operartions and vRealize Network Insight – To help with migration planning
  • VMware Cloud on AWS – To expand the environment capacity
  • VMware vRealize Automation – To do the migration
  • VMware PKS – To deploy their containerised from-end application
  • Automation Service (Tech preview) – To manage multi cloud deployments including catalog (also includes a marketplace) containing blueprints that can be deployed to any cloud.
  • NSX Cloud – To secure the public cloud parts of the environment.

VMware Cloud Services – Built in the cloud and for the cloud

The concept of “Consistent Infrastructure As Code” was introduced and offers consistent management and operations across public and private clouds. In the end we should look at all clouds as just one cloud. No operation drift between them no matter what type of applications you provide for your business.

For troubleshooting we saw Wavefront and Workspace ONE.

Wavefront is a tool to perform root cause analysis of applications that deviates from normal behaviour. It uses real-time and long-term metrics to provide the alerting and analytics parts.

Workspace ONE can be used to understand the application problem(s) from the end user perspective. The demo identified the problem which was electronic signature from third party

Workspace ONE mobile workflow was used to get the code change request to fix the above problem approved.

Internet of Things (IoT) was covered and more specifically VMware Pulse IoT Center (built on vROPS & Airwatch and NSX can be added as an add-on). There are two parts of IoT:

  • Management of the devices and the things.
  • Business intelligence we want to mine from those things.

VMware Pulse IoT will focus on managing the things and devices.

A screenshot of VMware Pulse IoT Center

Functions as a sevices (FaaS) or server less computing (based on vSphere & vROPS) – Taking traditional public cloud services on-premises. Perform analytics, getting alerts & execute automated actions are just a few ares where FaaS can and most likely will play a big role in the future.

Three primary use cases described by VMware during the keynote:

  • Latency – Decrease the latency between devices and even between a device and a human.
  • Data locality – Bring the function (e.g. analytics) from the cloud to the on-premises data instead of the opposite.
  • Privacy – Total control on how the functions executes, audit trail and so on.

Watch the general session below if you missed it and pay attention to the quote of the day:

Today is the slowest day in technology for the rest of your life

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