VMworld 2018 US: My thoughts

It’s has been almost a week since VMworld 2018 US. And I have to say, what a week!

I’ve spoken to so many people. Old friend made some new friend, and spoke to a lot of vendors on the Solution Exchange.

In my opinion, this VMworld was great! Not because of all the new exciting things that were announced. 

But more because most of the announcement where about product upgrades and feature improvements.

I like the fact, VMware is taking his time, to make his product more mature (not that they aren’t mature already, but you get my point).

Let me recap the most important thing, that struck me.

vSphere 6.7 U1 (with vSAN 6.7 U1)

Update 1 for vSphere 6.7 has the following main vSAN (according to me) features:

• Simplified operations
  With vSphere 6.7 U1 VMware implemented a quick start for clustering. This enables you, too quickly configure a cluster with HA, DRS and vSAN.
  
• ESXi, Drivers and firmwares available in VUM
• Custom ISO for OEM specific builds
  This is enables vendors to provide custom ISO for vSAN and with hardware agents/drives embedded.
  
• Dell HBA330 updates (de facto standard for DELL systems)
• EMM pre-check simulation (determine succes/failure with no data movement)
• New PowerCLI commands
• Improved TRIM/UNMAP integration
• Ability to nest vSAN Fault Domains
  This is really handy in a LAB environment to test configurations using Fault Domains.
  
• Improved vSAN health checks
  vSAN health check will now support multiple driver versions. So if you have driver version 11.x installed, vSAN will report the best 11.x driver version. Not the 12.x version because this is the latest version
  
• New unicast network performance tests

HTML5 client is now THE Client

As of vSphere 6.7, the HTML5 (H5) client is the native client VMware will continue to support. So good bye to the ‘old’ flash client.

As alway’s you will probably need the flash client for some products, but for your day-2-day operation, the H5 client can do everything and most important of all, the H5 client is fast, clear and really nice to work with.

Upgrade support from vSphere 6.5 U2 to vSphere 6.7 U1 !

Nice to see that upgrade from vSphere 6.5 U2 is now supported, this was holding a lot of customers back for upgrading to U2.

vMotion support for NVIDIA vGPU

Although you still have a little glitch, depending on the profile you’re using, you now can vMotion a virtual machine with a NVIDIA vGPU. This is a use step forwards, and it will be a matter of time until the glitch will no longer occur. 

For a complete list of features included in vSphere 6.7 U1, look here: vSphere 6.7 U1 Blog

vSphere Platinum Edition

This is a new version of VMware vSphere which has App Defence integrated in the VMkernel.

For me, VMware was not really clear why they provide a new flavour for VMware vSphere. I can imagine that you want a more secure, hardened by default VMware version for you applications, but must App Defence be so integrated in the VMkernel? Was the previous method of adding App Defence like NSX not good enough anymore?

And what about the compatibility with other VMware products? Will this be the same as the other VMware vSphere 6.7 flavours? I asked these questions at the VMware booth on the SOL, but didn’t got a satisfying answer. So I guess, time will tell?

Some more info can be found here: VMware Blog

Amazon RDS on vSphere

VMware had cooperated with AWS to enable Amazone RDS on vSphere. This is a nice alternative to Oracle and MS SQL, if your application supports it of course 🙂

And if you run Amazone RDS on premise, it’s easier to migrate to the cloud. 

Project Dimension

This project is focused on delivering the same type of services like VMware on AWS, but on premises. This means that VMware will take care of maning your infrastructure, patching, maintenance and troubleshoot issues the Virtual Infrastructure in your datacenter!

Project Dimension will to primary components:

1. VMware Cloud Foundation
   You al know this of course 🙂
   
2. Hybrid Cloud Controle Plane
   This is a SaaS service like VMware is using on VMware in AWS. Enabling VMware support to maintain all Project Dimension infrastructures.
   

Here a short video of Project Dimension

VMware ESXi 64-bit Arm

Yes, you read it correctly! During the keynote Pat Gelsigner show an ESXi kernel running on ARM64? Why you ask? Just one word: IOT

As more and more workloads get migrated to the cloud, companies are realising that not every workload can run in the cloud. Manly because not every devices or datacenter has a decent internet connection to the cloud. Think of Boats, airplanes, and other deserted places where you need services.  

So again, Why ARM? One of the main advantage of ARM is the that the ARM CPU uses less power than an Intel CPU. This makes the ARM CPU very interesting for IOT.

So to recap VMworld 2018 US: Epic!