VMworld – day 2

The second day of VMworld started with another keynote and i must say this was more or less the best keynote ever, apart from the demonstration of the vMotion technology.
I know it was pretty much the same as the second keynote during VMworld 2013 in San Francisco but i did not attend the SF event.
A very interactive keynote that discussed one problem, lowering the service time to market, that many service providers both internal and external are facing today. This includes not only a virtual machine but the entire infrastructure needed by that service e.g. compute, network services, storage, documentation, monitoring, backup.
Carl Eschenbach, Kit Colbert and Joe Baugley did a really good job on stage. The keynote included the entire chain when requesting, creating, operating and using a service e.g.:

• Self Service
• Transparent pricing
• Gouvernance
• Automation

These areas covers the providers area via the gouvernance and automation part, the CFO part of the side via the transparent pricing and off course the end user perspective via the self service part. These demonstrations included vCloud Automation Center, vCloud Operations Manager and the vSphere Web Client.
A really nice feature of the vSphere Web Client is the seamless integration with the vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). Just imagine being able to use the same virtual machine vSphere template for both your internal cloud and your external cloud, amazing.

Off course NSX was also included in the keynote and NSX brings switching, routing, firewalling and load balancing inside the hypervisor and even though i’m not a networking person and do not have any experiences with NSX, apart from the VMworld labs, i really like the concept of:.

• Automating the network.
• Keeping the traffic as close to the sources as possible.

Up until now we have not been able to any routing and switching at the hypervisor level.
We have had to send traffic from one VM1 (located on one network) to VM2 (located on another network) via the physical network layer even if they are located on the same ESXi host. When using NSX this is no longer necessary.
In my opinion, the NSX platform will dramatically change the way we design and operate our networks and this starts today or actually when VMware makes NSX GA – can’t wait.

The VSAN beta is now public available so if you are interested and can find the time i  advise you to visit the vsan beta site.

After the keynote session i continued with the NSX hands on labs and i also joined the following sessions:

• Designing Your Next Generation Datacenter for Network Virtualization
• Storage DRS: Deep Dive and Best Practices to Suit Your Storage Environments
• vCenter Deep Dive.

I must say that the sessions are keep getting better for each year. I picked up quite a few things regarding SDRS that i wasn’t aware about and the vCenter deep dive stated that Single Sign On (SSO) will actually work the way we want it to do. I still got a few questions about the SSO that needs to be answered but i’ll keep you posted about that later on.

I finished my day joining the VMware party which was held in the keynote area. I really do not know what people expect from such a party but i must say that i enjoyed it.