VMworld 2014, Day 1

This morning was the opening Keynote with Pat Gelsinger and the gang and while there were some announcements (more on that later) the key take away is that the time is upon us IT folk to be brave. It is a time to cast aside concerns about cloud and your job as it currently is done because your role will be automated and start giving all your money for VMWare. No need to concern yourself with hardware, that can all be white boxed, but only think about things such as networking and storage as just small components of the greater Hyper-Converged compute nodes regardless of location. I tended to look upon this with great skepticism as I don’t think we’re quite ready or should be ready to put the network guys out to pasture, replaced with new shiny Virtualization Admins who know what an IP address is and most of the time understand what a VLAN does for you.

But intermingled with the Mierda of Info Tech talk there were some new announcements, the biggest of which was that of a new product line, EVO, who purpose to be be the hyperconverged boxes you are looking for, putting Vmware into direct competition with the likes of Nutanix and what sounds like their own partnership VCE vBlock. In the case of the former the EVO:Rail is the ready for primetime product, with actual hardware available here to look and see through any of their partners on the product. The idea is that within a single 2U enclosure you have a series of mixed flash and spinning disks, 4 blades each containing 2 6 core CPUs, 192 GB of RAM, and 2 10 Gbps uplinks augmented by a 1 Gbps link for IPMI and remote management. All of this is powered by a vSphere Enterprise Plus level environment utilizing VSAN and distributed vSwitch masked out with a shiny new HTML5 based web client like interface. I have high hopes this means the end is near for the flash based vSphere Web Client.

The second announcement of the EVO line is EVO:Rack which is coming soon, but it is essentially a roll in rack based solution with everything you need to start up or exand your data center. If that sound familiar to you you’ve probably seen systems such as vBlock and FlexPod.  In all the take away regarding the EVO product line is get your system up and running and start deploying VMs in an exceptionally small window of time. I will say  was a bit disappointed when I actually met with the Dell folks regarding their version of the EVO:Rail product in that it provides an effective 13 TB of available datastore space and the system provides no ability to add external datastores at all.

Back into Vmware’s bread and butter in the software space there was a good deal of announcement of new versions and rebranding of their product line including vSphere 6 being in beta which we already knew, the the vCloud Hybrid product being rebranded as vCloud Air, and vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) was renamed vRealize, both of which with a few noticable upgrades.

In the training space we now have a Vmware certification track for us network folks centered around the NSX product. These certifications include the now available VCP-NV and the soon to be released VCIX (Vmware Certified Internetworking Expert) and VCDX-NV.  Interestingly they are providing horizontal opt outs for those of us already network certified by for a short period time allowing CCNAs and CCNPs to take the exam without a course requirements. If you are a current VCP you will also be able to take the exam without course requirements.