021: VMware drops vMageddon 6.0

Introductions

Just for this once we will let Nigel have his very own Docker commercial in this introduction. Only because this week it is in fact a news item. Nigel is an author on Pluralsight and just released this week a docker deep dive course. 

[11:43] VMware partners with Google 

The Public Cloud joins the Enterprise Datacenter. Is VMware trying to become the broker no matter what cloud you are sitting in? And what about Google, do they even care about the datacenter or are they just in it for driverless cars and curing world hunger?

[23:50] VMware PEX week announcements

Announcing the announcement to announce something that cannot be announced yet ... What’s new in vSphere6? 

• Long Distance, Cross-vCenter & Cross vSwitch VMotion
• Content Library; easy to find location to put your templates or ISO files
• Virtual Volumes (VVOLS) is this the next VAAI where all storage players will have to adopt or lose ground? Or has everyone already lost excitement because it took over 2 years to bring to market?
• vSphere 6 adds support for NFS4.1. We do challenge the value of it in the market if it doesn’t even support VAAI or the new Virtual Volumes, leaving the lack of pNFS even aside for a minute. What it will bring is a lot less chatter due to the fact that NFS4 is stateful and NFS3 was stateless.
• Fault Tolerance (FT) now supports multi-vCPU which makes it finally viable for snapshots and backups as well!
• VSAN6.0 … or was it 2.0? Although we don’t like the skipping 5 product versions, we do like a lot of what’s in there. Support for All-Flash, Rack-aware failure domains, … Something Nigel liked was they changed the underlying disk format and apparently they are able to do that in a rolling upgrade (unlike XtremIO). And of course, who doesn’t like blinking lights?
• VMware Integrated Openstack (VIO) is the final part of the announcement we cover. Although it is ‘free’ for the Enterprise Plus customers to play around with, Gabriel doesn’t believe it’s of any use.

[1:01:46] Other ...

Over the top of the hour there are a couple of topics we didn’t manage to cover but were in our agenda:

• EMC announced VSPEX:BLUE, their interpretation of an EVO:RAIL solution
• EMC also announced a new VCE product with built-in NSX
• VMware picks up Immidio to complete their EUC portfolio
• Nigel and Hans will be speaking, with Enrico Signoretti, Chris Evans, Martin Glasborrow and Stephen Foskett at the first episode of a new concept event called TECH.UNPLUGGED in London on April 22nd. The event is free so join us there!