by Fredrik Ranelöv, on Oct 26, 2021 2:00:00 PM
I've never seen so much news during VMworld! It began to seem comical that every speaker at the opening "General Session" and subsequent keynotes used the line "We are proud to announce."
By the way, one of the most excellent General Sessions I've ever seen in terms of tempo, delivery, and rhetoric!
From October 15, you will be able to find all content on-demand here.
So what's new?
The headline news may very well be characterized as VMware's ambition to become a comprehensive cloud service provider. "Enterprise sovereignty - preserve freedom of choice while retaining control."
VMware wants to become a virtualization layer across all public clouds, providing a unified customer experience and load movement. "From Edge to Core" - that's what HPE claims. So the concept isn't exactly brand-new itself, though VMware has motivated its developers to come up with solutions to support this.
A ship comes loaded with containers.
According to VMware, by 2030, 76% of all loads will be container-based, and that mindset permeates every aspect of their strategy. I believe that most of the sessions I saw now would rather discuss containers than VM:s, or maybe it was just my perception.
Of course, I see the advantages of container-based solutions, and I've stayed updated over the past years. However, the truth is that today I have NO client who runs their Kubernetes platform in production or has inquired about using VMware Tanzu to run it in VMware! In any case, VMware offers a well-established ecosystem for those who want to be at the forefront.
Ransomware protection
Not surprisingly, ransomware protection was a major topic of discussion. With solutions for DR, among other things, ransomware has become a hot topic. There are now at least three distinct options. I'm sure they'll combine them in the near future.
I'm not sure if anyone missed Carbon Black was bought by VMware last year? The work of integrating it into VMware's ecosystem has now been going on for a year and feels like a good choice, not only for end-point protection but also for other security solutions. With the comprehensive catalog of solutions, "From Edge to Core," I honestly haven't had time to take a closer look at these.
Other news
Before I get too wordy, I want to bring up two other "hot topics" from last week.
SD-card/USB-boot deprecated
VMware no longer supports SD cards and internal USB drives as boot devices. I haven't used it in years; however, it was handy (as long as it worked) and cheap. There are now several excellent alternatives in addition to inexpensive SSDs, but I'd like to highlight the HPE NS204i NVMe Boot Device. A cheap (800ish EURO) PCIe card with two 480GB M.2 disks in RAID1 with built-in RAID controllers!
There are alternatives for those who, unfortunately, don't use HPE Proliant / Apollo / Synergy, but that can be looked up on the internet.
vSphere 7.0 U3
There have been a lot of updates published in U3, and I'll most likely wait before upgrading my production environments. Is it a demonstration of experience or an indication of age and timidity?
Read VMware's Bob Plankers blog about the news and see whether there's something you must have - then go for it!
Finally, I'd like to suggest the VMware Security Advisories mailing list. If you need to quickly patch a hole in your favorite VMware product, this is the list for you.
This time the review was brief. However, please feel free to leave a comment or email me if you have any questions.
This is a guest blog from Fredrik Ranelöv @ Cuebid.
Fredrik works as a Chief Datacenter Architect in Sweden, with a strong focus on virtualization and storage.