Another VMworld virtual year in the books. Much like last year, VMworld 2021 was also virtually hosted. Since it was virtual again, the local VMUG community along with Pure Storage hosted a VMworld watch party at The D Hotel in downtown Las Vegas.
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VMUG VMworld 2021 Watch Party
The entire event turn out was a little smaller than I expected but it was in the middle of a work day and there was a big global gaming convention G2E going on at the same time. Despite that, it was still a blast to go and mingle with the local VMUG members instead of watching VMworld sessions at home for a day.
VMworld 2021 Limited Edition Backpack
Another cool thing that came out of the VMUG watch party was the swag. In my previous post I wrote about the VMworld 2021 Limited Edition Backpack and to my surprise, they gave it out to all the individuals that attended the watch party!
This way I don't have to scour the bay or any other marketplace outlet to find the bag since typically the only way to obtain it, is being entered in a sort of lottery system after completing the required tasks.
I'll write up another bag review, similar to the 2020 Limited Edition bag review I did last year. 🙂
Product Announcements
As for the actual announcements and content VMworld shared this year, there was a lot covered in regards to the new Multi-Cloud era we are moving into. Below are some of the more notable product announcements that were mentioned.
Tanzu Community Edition
This was actually announced a day before VMworld started. It's a community supported, open source distro of VMware Tanzu that you can run in minutes from a local workstation. It's a pretty sweet way of dipping your toes into Tanzu without having to actually purchase the product. This way you can try out VMware's distribution of the Kubernetes platform and learn with with no strings attached!
Tanzu Services for VMC on AWS
This is now GA'd. For companies looking to leverage VMC on AWS and utilize Tanzu as their enterprise grade K8S platform, this service will help to accelerate application modernization bundled with Tanzu Mission Control Essentials which will enable visibility, security and management across Kubernetes clusters.
Dell Apex Cloud Services with VMware Cloud
A new collaboration effort between Dell and VMware where they combined Dell's Apex services with VMware Cloud. In this subscription model, all the infrastructure is managed by Dell eliminating the infrastructure management by a company's internal teams. It's very similar to an existing service called VMware Cloud on Dell EMC with the difference being VMware manages the infrastructure rather than Dell.
VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts
Similar to the above mentioned VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. This partnership between VMware and Amazon brings the VMware SDDC as an on-premises service which contains vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T and vCenter. All of this is managed by VMware sitting on a performance optimized rack that is rolled into your datacenter. This option provides customers the ability to utilize AWS cloud services on-premises while consuming VMware like you are used to. Another perfect solution for customers that need data localization. Pretty sweet right?
Project Cascade
VMware is all in on Kubernetes and with this new project, VMware will enable developers and DevOps to have a true open multi-cloud infrastructure. Project Cascade is a consumption service powered by Kubernetes and provides a common declarative interface for both IaaS and Containers across any VMware cloud.
Project Capitola
The best way I can describe Project Capitola is essentially vSAN for memory. It'll basically aggregate all different types of memory like DRAM, PMEM, NVMe and possibly other memory technologies in the future that aren't even out today. This will group everything together and allow you to consume it out of a logical pool. It'll be available for both on-premises data centers and the cloud supported by most memory vendors. This announcement is pretty existing when you start to think about leveraging more memory outside of your fully populated DIMMs.
I mean...imagine full datacenter racks filled only with servers populated with mixed memory components serving as a memory rack! People will be talking about a DAM (Direct Attached Memory) connected to their servers in a few years time. 😀
Project Ensemble
This project aims to provide a unified control plane delivering them under one operational view across the vRealize Cloud Management services. It basically helps to streamline your company's multi-cloud operations and migration planning efforts. Here are a few other bullets regarding features that are in tech preview:
- Business insights for curated use cases will help identify and guide users through identifying and resolving problems that impact their applications in any cloud
- A unified configuration and change history will allow users to view what has changed, rewind in time to the point of change, and completely reassemble snapshots of topologies
- Global search across all vRealize services will provide access to all relevant information in a single UI
- In-context switching to vRealize services for deeper investigation and analysis
Project Arctic
The next evolution of vSphere will help companies in their brownfield path to the cloud and set the Hybrid Cloud as the "default" operating model. You can also connect all your vCenters under one cloud-based vCenter Server that gives you insight into all your locations making vSphere cloud-aware! Also, VMware will now be responsible for maintaining your vCenters which will result into a different subscription based licensing. More info on this here.
VMworld On-Demand Sessions
Looks like you'll still be able to view the On-Demand sessions through Oct 14th. Afterwards, it'll likely be archived and available on the VMworld On-Demand Video Library.
*Update 10/18/21*
William Lam recently provided all the breakout session URLs on his GitHub page.
Conclusion
Virtual session/meeting burnout is real, but a lot of planning and work went into this 2021 show and I hope everyone was able to enjoy the event and learn something new. I just really hope VMworld is back in-person for 2022.
