VMworld 2016 - The coming Dell-pocolypse and cutting edge technology

I have been home from Las Vegas for a few days where I was fortunate to attend my 6th VMworld conference. While my feet still bear mute witness to the miles I put on them running from session to session the conference was, as always, the best week I spend every year professionally. Getting the chance to learn from and network with over 20,000 fellow technologists and explore the depths of the VMware ecosystem is exciting, energizing, and in a few cases awe inspiring. Here are a few thoughts and observations that jumped out at me this week....

Key points and major takeaways

#1: It's not about to become DellWare. Going into this VMworld, a number of conversations I had were not technology focused but rather on the macro business environment VMware finds itself in today. Last year Dell announced that they were going to acquire not only EMC but VMware as well. A number of people, myself included to be honest, have been watching with some trepidation as top notch talent left VMware shortly after the announcement (Eisenbach, Casado and several others). I had actually wondered out loud a few times if this would be one of the last VMworld conferences that I would attend. I was afraid that Dell would see an opportunity to forge a closed ecosystem between VMware and their hardware platforms and much of the cutting edge innovation present in the VMware partners would shrivel up and die. This was addressed in the closing moments of CEO Pat Gelsinger's keynote address on day 1.

Reaffirming a commitment to an open ecosystem and stressing the importance that space plays in maintaining a vigorous, innovative culture Mr. Dell and Mr. Gelsinger sought to assure everyone that VMware will remain a place where multiple hardware vendors can operate and cooperate.

Later that same day Mr. Dell announced that the closure of the EMC acquisition will take place later this week.

Videos of the general session keynote addresses can be found here - you can watch the conversation between Gelsinger and Dell at the 1:13 mark on Monday's general session.

#2: VMware talks about the existence of the other Public Cloud providers. For the longest time the biggest standing joke in the keynote addresses at VMworld was how synonymous Public Cloud was with vCloud Air. Any time an executive at VMware would speak about the Cloud it meant only vCloud Air or its partners. Down on the Solution Exchange floor you would see real innovation happening with integrations growing with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. This year, however, that was far from the case. Front and center as part of its technical showcase was tight security and deployment integrations with AWS, Azure, and Google showcased in the announcement of VMware's Cross Cloud Services (watch here at the 42 minute mark). Even more compelling was the ability to extend NSX (VMware's software defined networking security product) up to Public Cloud deployments in AWS and Azure, allowing a comprehensive policy-driven security profile to follow workloads as they are deployed.

This Cross-Cloud platform, when viewed with the expanded VMware Cloud Foundation targets coming online (IBM SoftLayer being the first one announced this week) represents a strong lineup of capabilities that will enable the Enterprise to define its path forward toward Public Cloud with options that enable hybrid operations natively.

#3: Containers, Containers, Containers. Building on the initial rollout of VMware Integrated Containers and their Photon Platform the Cloud Native Apps team really stepped up their game. Last year's release felt like a first cut at the technology - this year the VIC support feels much more fully realized and fleshed out.

Watch Kit Colbert, CTO of VMware's Cloud Platform Business, discuss the innovations and added feature sets here at the 34 minute mark of the Tuesday General Session.

This year VIC brings online a container registry and a management portal - tools needed to make this an Enterprise class software development tool.

#4: vRealize Network Insights - a demo that simply blew me away. Very rarely Do I find myself in the middle of a lab in the HOL (Hands on Labs - a great way to get practical real world experience with this technology) taking furious notes on how a piece of technology would be immediately helpful. Having just spent weeks attempting to troubleshoot an Active Directory deployment to AWS this tool would have saved us significant time and effort.

Earlier this year VMware acquired a company called Arkin and they have rebranded it as vRealize Network Insights. At its core it allows very deep analysis of traffic that flows between virtual machines in a VMware environment or from a VM to an IP address elsewhere on the network. The guys at Arkin took it one step further, however.

Above is a sample of a network map vRealize Network Insights rendered. If you watch this video (about half-way through) you can see how it draws this communication path in the app – a very nice and elegant representation. But that is not the piece that blew me away. The bottom of the picture above you will see two green boxes – in the demo I did those represent a physical PAN firewall and an Arista switch. As Network Insights walks through the connection, it identifies the device, logs into it with credentials you set, and in the case of the firewall polls the firewall rules for those that affect your VM’s / IP addresses and presents them to you in the same pane of glass. vRealize Network Insights can poll switch fabrics for ACL issues as well. No more jumping into multiple windows or pestering your network engineers for a configuration dump - this tool does it all for you!

The power of mapping this out and displaying the firewall rules that affect traffic in the same pane of glass is a beautiful thing. In a later release they plan to add the ability to poll Public Cloud targets like AWS and Azure and display security groups that affect traffic flow as well. It was this capability that really excited me when I used the lab.

Next stop - Barcelona!

It will be interesting to look at the announcements that come out of VMworld Europe next month in Barcelona - that will mark the first VMworld of the Dell era. If the Las Vegas conference is any indication, the messaging out of Spain will be one of consistency and innovation. Given what we heard and saw last week it's a believable one.