Category: VMware

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165: GreyBeard talks VMware Explore’24 wrap-up with Gina Rosenthal, Founder&CEO Digital Sunshine Solutions

I’ve known Gina Rosenthal (@gminks@mas.to), Founder&CEO, Digital Sunshine Solutions seems like forever and she’s been on the very short list for being a GBoS co-host but she’s got her own Tech Aunties Podcast now. We were both at VMware Explore last week in Vegas. Gina was working in the community hub and I was in their analyst program.

VMware (World) Explore has changed a lot since last year. I found the presentation/sessions to be just as insightful and full of users as last years, but it seems like there may have been fewer of them. Gina found the community hub sessions to be just as busy and the Code groups were also very well attended. On the other hand, the Expo was smaller than last year and there were a lot less participants (and [maybe] analysts) at the show. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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The really big news was VCF 9.0. Both a new number (for VCF) and an indicator of a major change in direction for how VMware functionality will be released in the future. As one executive told me, VCF has now become the main (release) delivery vehicle for all functionality.

In the past, VCF would generally come out with some VMware functionality downlevel to what’s generally available in the market. With VCF 9, that’s going to change now. From now on, all individual features/functions of VCF 9.0 will be at the current VMware functionality levels. Gina mentioned this is a major change for how VMware released functionality, and signals much better product integrations than available in the past.

Much of VMware distinct functionality has been integrated into VCF 9 including SDDC, Aria and other packages. They did, however, create a new class of “advanced services” that runs ontop of VCF 9. We believe these are individually charged for and some of these advanced services include:

  • Private AI Foundation – VMware VCF, with their Partner NVIDIA, using NVIDIA certified servers, can now run NVIDIA Enterprise AI suite of offerings which includes just about anything an enterprise needs to run GenAI in house or any other NVIDIA AI service for that matter. The key here is that all enterprise data stays within the enterprise AND the GenAI runs on enterprise (VCF) infrastructure. So all data remains private.
  • Container Operations – this is a bundling of all the Spring Cloud and other Tanzu container services. It’s important to note, TKG (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid) is still part of the base vSphere release, which allows any VVF (VMware vSpere Foundation) or VCF users to run K8S standalone, but with minimal VMware support services.
  • Advanced Security – include vDefend firewall/gateway, WAF, Malware prevention, etc.

There were others, but we didn’t discuss them on the podcast.

I would have to say that Private AI was of most interest to me and many other analysts at the show. In fact, I heard that it’s VMware’s (and supposedly NVIDIA’s) intent to reach functional parity with GCP Vertex and others with Private AI. This could come as soon as VCF 9.0 is released. I pressed them on this point and they held firm to that release number.

My only doubt is that VMware or NVIDIA don’t have their own LLM. Yes, they can use Meta’s LLama 3.1, OpenAI or any other LLM on the market. But running them in-house on enterprise VCF servers is another question.

The lack of an “owned” LLM should present some challenges with reaching functional parity with organizations that have one. On the other hand, Chris Walsh mentioned that they (we believe VMware internal AI services) have been able to change their LLM 3 times over the last year using Private AI Foundation.

Chris repeated more than once that VMware’s long history with DRS and HA makes VCF 9 Private AI Foundation an ideal solution for enterprises to run AI workloads. He specifically mentioned GPU HA that can take GPUs from data scientists when enterprise inferencing activities suffer GPU failures. Unclear whether any other MLops cloud or otherwise can do the same.

From a purely storage perspective I heard a lot about vVols 2.0, This is less a functional enhancement, than a new certification to make sure primary storage vendors offer full vVol support in their storage.

Gina mentioned and it came up in the Analyst sessions, that Broadcom has stopped offering discounts for charities and non-profits. This is going to hurt most of those organizations which are now forced to make a choice, pay full subscription costs or move off VMware.

The other thing of interest was that Broadcom spent some time trying to soothe over the bad feelings of VMware’s partners. There was a special session on “Doing business with Broadcom VMware for partners” but we both missed it so can’t report any details.

Finally, Gina and I, given our (lengthy) history in the IT industry and Gina’s recent attendance at IBM Share started hypothesizing on a potential linkup between Broadcom’s CA and VMware offerings.

I mentioned multiple times there wasn’t even a hint of the word “mainframe” during the analyst program. Probably spent more time discussing this than we should of, but it’s hard to take the mainframe out of IT (as most large enterprises no doubt lament).

Gina Rosenthal, Founder & CEO, Digital Sunshine Solutions

As the Founder and CEO of Digital Sunshine Solutions, Gina brings over a decade of expertise in providing marketing services to B2B technology vendors. Her strong technical background in cloud computing, SaaS, and virtualization enables her to offer specialized insights and strategies tailored to the tech industry.

She excels in communication, collaboration, and building communities. These skills to help her create product positioning, messaging, and content that educates customers and supports sales teams. Gina breaks down complex technical concepts and turn them into simple, relatable terms that connect with business goals.

She is the co-host of The Tech Aunties podcast, where she shares thoughts on the latest trends in IT, especially the buzz around AI. Her goal is to help organizations tackle the communication and organizational challenges associated with modern datacenter transitions.

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159: GreyBeards Year End 2023 Wrap Up

Jason and Keith joined Ray for our annual year end wrap up and look ahead to 2024. I planned to discuss infrastructure technical topics but was overruled. Once we started talking AI, we couldn’t stop.

It’s hard to realize that Generative AI and ChatGPT in particular, haven’t been around that long. We discussed some practical uses Keith and Jason had done with the technology.

Keith mentioned its primary skill is language expertise. He has used it to help write up proposals. He often struggles to convince CTO Advisor non-sponsors of the value they can bring and found that using GenAI has helped do this better.

Jason mentioned he uses it to create BASH, perl, and PowerShell scripts. He says it’s not perfect but can get ~80% there and with a few tweaks, is able to have something a lot faster than if he had to do it completely by hand. He also mentioned its skill in translating from one scripting language to others and how well the code it generates is documented (- that hurt).

I was the odd GreyBeard out, having not used any GenAI, proprietary or not. I’m still working to get a reinforcement learning task to work well and consistently. I figured once I mastered that, I train an LLM on my body of (text and code) work (assuming of course someone gifts me a gang of GPUs).

I agreed GenAI are good at (English) language and some coding tasks (where lot’s of source code exists, such as java, scripting, python, etc.).

However, I was on a MLops slack channel and someone asked if GenAI could help with IBM RPG II code. I answered, probably not. There’s just not a lot of RPG II code publicly accessible on the web and the structure of RPG was never line of text/commands oriented.

We had some heated discussion on where LLMs get the data to train with. Keith was fine with them using his data. I was not. Jason was neutral.

We then turned to what this means to the white collar workers who are coding and writing text. Keith made the point that this has been a concern throughout history, at least since the industrial revolution.

Machines come along, displace work that was done by hand, increase production immensely, reduce costs. Organizations benefit, but people doing those jobs need to up level their skills, to take advantage of the new capabilities.

Easy for us to say, as we, except for Jason, in his present job, are essentially entrepreneurs and anything that helps us deliver more value, faster, easier or less expensively, is a boon for our businesses.

Jason mentioned, Stephen Wolfram wrote a great blog post discussing LLM technology (see What is ChatGPT doing … and why does it work). Both Jason and Keith thought it did a great job about explaining the science and practice behind LLMs.

We moved on to a topic harder to discuss but of great relevance to our listeners, GenAI’s impact on the enterprise.

It reminds me of when Cloud became most prominent. Then “C” suites tasked their staff to adopt “the cloud” anyway they could. Today, “C” suites are tasking their staff to determine what their “AI strategy” is and when will it be implemented.

Keith mentioned that this is wrong headed. The true path forward (for the enterprise) is to focus on what are the business problems and how can (Gen)AI address (some of) them.

AI is so varied and its capabilities across so many fields, is so good nowadays ,that organizations should really look at AI as a new facility that can recognize patterns, index/analyze/transform images, summarize/understand/transform text/code, etc., in near real-time and see where in the enterprise that could help.

We talked about how enterprises can size AI infrastructure needed to perform these activities. And it’s more than just a gaggle of GPUs.

MLcommons’s MLperf benchmarks can help show the way, for some cases, but they are not exhaustive. But it’s a start.

The consensus was maybe deploy in the cloud first and when the workload is dialed in there, re-home it later. With the proviso that hardware needed is available.

Our final topic was the Broadcom VMware acquisition. Keith mentioned their recent subscription pricing announcements vastly simplified VMware licensing, that had grown way too complex over the decades.

And although everyone hates the expense of VMware solutions, they often forget the real value VMware brings to enterprise IT.

Yes hyperscalars and their clutch of coders, can roll their own hypervisor services stacks, using open source virtualization. But the enterprise has other needs for their developers. And the value of VMware virtualization services, now that 128 Core CPUs are out, is even higher.

We mentioned the need for hybrid cloud and how VCF can get you part of the way there. Keith said that dev teams really want something like “AWS software” services running on GCP or Azure.

Keith mentioned that IBM Cloud is the closest he’s seen so far to doing what Dev wants in a hybrid cloud.

We all thought when DNN’s came out and became trainable, and reinforcement learning started working well, that AI had turned a real corner. Turns out, that was just a start. GenAI has taken DNNs to a whole other level and Deepmind and others are doing the same with reinforcement learning.

This time AI may actually help advance mankind, if it doesn’t kill us first. On the latter topic you may want to checkout my RayOnStorage AGI series of blog posts (latest … AGI part-8)

Jason Collier, Principal Member Of Technical Staff at AMD, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Business Group

Jason Collier (@bocanuts) is a long time friend, technical guru and innovator who has over 25 years of experience as a serial entrepreneur in technology.

He was founder and CTO of Scale Computing and has been an innovator in the field of hyperconvergence and an expert in virtualization, data storage, networking, cloud computing, data centers, and edge computing for years.

He’s on LinkedIN. He’s currently working with AMD on new technology and he has been a GreyBeards on Storage co-host since the beginning of 2022

Keith Townsend, President of The CTO Advisor a Futurum Group Company

Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) is a IT thought leader who has written articles for many industry publications, interviewed many industry heavyweights, worked with Silicon Valley startups, and engineered cloud infrastructure for large government organizations.

Keith is the co-founder of The CTO Advisor, blogs at Virtualized Geek, and can be found on LinkedIN.

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154: GreyBeards annual VMware Explore wrap-up podcast

Thanks, once again to The CTO Advisor|Keith Townsend, (@CTOadvisor) for letting us record the podcast in his studio. VMware Explore this year was better than last year. The show seemed larger. the show floor busier, the Hub better and the Hands-On Lab much larger than I ever remember before. The show seems to be growing, but still not at the pre-pandemic levels, but the trend is good.

The engineers have been busy at VMware this past year. Announced at the show include Private AI Foundation, a way for enterprises to train open source LLMs on corporate data kept private, a significant re-direct to VMware Edge environments moving from the push model updates to push model updates, and vSAN Max, NSX+, Tanzu App Engine, and more. And we heard that Brocade is clearing more hurdles to the acquisition. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Private AI plays to VMware’s strengths and its control over on-prem processing. Customers need a safe space and secured data to train corporate ChatBots curated on corporations knowledge base. VMware rolled this out two ways,

  • Reference architecture approach based on Ray cluster management, KubeFlow, PyTorch, VectorDB, GPU Scaling (NVLink/NVswitch), vSAN fast path (RDMA, GPUdirect), and deep learning VMs. There was no discussion of tie ins to the Data Persistence (object) storage.
  • Proprietary NVIDIA approach based on NVIDIA workbench, TensorRT, NeMO, NVIDIA GPU & Network Operator

By having both approaches VMware provides alternatives for those wanting a non-proprietary solution. And with with AI/MLOps moving so fast, the open source may be better able to keep up.

The tie in with NVIDIA is a natural extension of what VMware have been doing with GPUs and DPUs, etc.

Also, VMware announced a technological partnership with Hugging Face. We were somewhat concerned with all the focus on LLM and GenAI but the agreement with Hugging Face goes beyond just LLMs.

VMware Edge solutions are pivoting. Apparently, VMware is moving from the vSphere pull model of code updates in the field which seems to handle 64 server, multi-cluster environments without problem to more of a YAML-GitHub push model of IoT device updates that seems better able to manage fleets of 1K to 100K devices in the field.

With the new model one creates a GitHub repo and a YAML file describing the code update to be done and all your IoT devices just get’s updated to the new level.

Once again the Brocade acquisition is on everyone’s mind. As I got to the show, one analyst asked if this was going to be the last VMware Explore. I highly doubt that, but Brocade will make lots of changes once the transaction closes. One thing mentioned at the show was that Brocade will make an immediate, additional $1B investment in R&D. The deal had provisionally passed the UK regulatory body and was on track to close near the end of October.

Other news from the show:

  • The Tanzu brand is broadening. Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) still exists but they have added a new App Engine is to take the VMware management approach to K8s clusters, other cloud infrastructure and the rest of the IT world. Tanzu Intelligent Services also now supports policy guardrails, cost control, management insight and migration services for other environments.
  • vSAN Max, which supports disaggregation (separation) of storage and compute is available. vSAN Max becomes a full fledged, standalone storage system that just happens to run on top of vSphere. Disaggregated (vSAN Max) storage and (regular vSAN) HCI can co-exist as different mounted datastores and vSAN Max supports PB of storage.
  • Workspace One is updated to provide enhanced digital experience monitoring that adds coverage of what Workspace One users are actually experiencing.
  • NSX+ continues to roll out. VMware mentioned that the number one continuing problem with hybrid cloud/multi-cloud setup is getting the networking right. NSX+ will reduce this complexity by becoming a management/configuration overlay over any and all cloud/on-prem networking for your environment(s).
  • VMware chatbots for Tanzu, Workspace One and NSX+ are now in tech preview and will supply intelligent assistants for these solutions. Based on LLM/GenAI and trained on VMware’s extensive corporate knowledge base, the chatbots will help admins focus on the signal over the noise and will provide recommendations on how to resolve issues. .

Jason Collier, Principal Member of Technical Staff, AMD

Jason Collier (@bocanuts) is a long time friend, technical guru and innovator who has over 25 years of experience as a serial entrepreneur in technology. Jason currently works at AMD focused on emerging technology for IT, IoT and anywhere else in the world and across the universe that needs compute, storage or networking resources.

He was Chief Evangelist, CTO & Co-Founder of Scale Computing and has been an innovator in the field of hyper-convergence and an expert in virtualization, data storage, networking, cloud computing, data centers, and edge computing for years.

He has also been another co-founder, director of research, VP of technical operations and director of operations at other companies over his long career prior to AMD and Scale.

He’s on LinkedIN.

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141: GreyBeards annual 2022 wrap-up podcast

Well it has been another year and time for our annual year end wrap up. Since Covid hit, every year has certainly been interesting. This year we have seen the start of back in person conferences which was a welcome change from the covid lockdown. We are very glad to start seeing everybody again.

From the tech standpoint, the big news this year was CXL. As everyone should recall, CXL is a new-ish PCIe hardware and protocol that supports larger memory sitting out on a PCIe bus and in the future shared memory between servers. All this is to enable a new wave of memory based computing. We spent probably half our time discussing CXL and it’s impact on IT.

The other major topic was the Cloud Native ecosystem. In the past all we talked about was K8s but nowadays the ecosystem that surrounds it is almost as important as K8s itself. The final topic was a bit of a shock earlier this year and yes it was the Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Jason and I spend our Explore podcast talking about it (see our 137: VMware Explore wrap-up). Keith has high hopes that the EU will shut it down but the jury’s still out on that one. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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As for CXL, it turns out that AMD have just released full support for CXL hardware and protocols with their latest round of CPU chips. But the new AMD CPUs only support DDR5 memory, (something about there’s only so much logic one can fit on a chip…) which means all those DDR4 DIMs out in the wild need somewhere to land. CXL could supply a new lease on life for DDR4 DIMs.

And it’s not just about shared memory or increased memory sizes, CXL can also provide a tiered memory hierarchy, with gobs of flash behind memory DIMs (see: 136: FMS2022 wrap up …) So, now its no longer a TB or ten of server memory but potentially 100s of TBs. What this means for SAP HANNA, AWS Aurora and other heavy-memory solutions has yet to play out.

Cloud Native won. We see this in the increasing adoption of containers and K8s in the enterprise, cloud and just about anywhere IT happens these days. But the ecosystem surrounding K8s is chaos.

Over time, many of these ecosystem solutions will die off, be purchased, or consolidated but in the mean time, it’s entirely too confusing. Red Hat’s OpenShift is one answer and VMware’s Tanzu is another. And of course all the clouds have their own K8s packaged solution. But just to cover their bets, everyone also supports native K8s and just about every software package that works with it. So, K8s’s ecosystem is in a state of flux and may take time to become a stable set of tools useable by the enterprise IT.

Finally, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has everyone up in arms. Customers are concerned the R&D juggernaut that VMware has been, since its very beginning, will be jettisoned in favor of profits. And HCI vendors that always felt Dell EMC had an unfair advantage will all look at Broadcom in a similar light.

Keith says there’s a major difference in how USA regulators view an acquisition and how EU regulators view one. According to Keith, EU views acquisitions in how they help or hurt the customer. USA regulators view acquisitions on show they help or hurt the competition. Will have to wait and see how this all plays for Broadcom-VMware.

On the other hand, speaking of competition, Nutanix seems to be feeling the heat as well. Rumors are it’s up for sale. Who will want it and how the regulators view both of these acquisitions may be as interesting story for 2023

2023 looks to be another year of transition for enterprise IT. The cloud players all seem to be coming around to the view that they can’t be all things to all (IT) people. And the enterprise vendors are finally seeing some modicum of staying power in the face of a relentless push to the cloud. How this plays out over the next few years will be of major interest to everybody.

Happy New Year from the GreyBeards!

Keith Townsend, The CTO Advisor

Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) is a IT thought leader who has written articles for many industry publications, interviewed many industry heavyweights, worked with Silicon Valley startups, and engineered cloud infrastructure for large government organizations. Keith is the co-founder of The CTO Advisor, blogs at Virtualized Geek, and can be found on LinkedIN.

Jason Collier, Principal Member of Technical Staff, AMD

Jason Collier (@bocanuts) is a long time friend, technical guru and innovator who has over 25 years of experience as a serial entrepreneur in technology. He was founder and CTO of Scale Computing and has been an innovator in the field of hyperconvergence and an expert in virtualization, data storage, networking, cloud computing, data centers, and edge computing for years. He’s on LinkedIN.

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140: Greybeards talk data orchestration with Matt Leib, Product Marketing Manager for IBM Spectrum Fusion

As our listeners should know, Matt Leib (@MBleib) was a GreyBeards co-host But since then, Matt has joined IBM to become Product Marketing Manager on IBM Spectrum Fusion, a data orchestration solution for Red Hat OpenShift environments. Matt’s been in and around the storage and data management industry for many years which is why we tapped him for GreyBeards co-host duties.

IBM Fusion, in its previous incarnation, came as an OpenShift software defined storage or as an OpenShift (H)CI solution. But recently, Fusion has taken on more of a data orchestration role for OpenShift stateful containerized applications. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Fusion can run in any OpenShift deployment whether (currently AWS, Azure, & IBM) clouds, under VMware (wherever it runs), or on (x86 or IBM Z) bare metal. It supplies NFS file or S3 compatible object storage for container applications running under OpenShift. But it does more than just storage.

Beyond storage, Fusion includes backup/recovery, site to site DR and global (file & object) data access. It’s almost like someone opened up the IBM Spectrum software pantry and took out the best available functionality and cooked it up in to an OpenShift solution. IBM’s Spectrum Fusion current website (linked to above (Dec.’22)) still refers only to the software defined storage and (H)CI solution, but today’s Fusion includes all of the functions identified above.

All Fusion facilities run as containers under OpenShift. Customers can elect to run all Fusion services or pick and chose which ones they want for their environment. IBM Fusion supports an API, an API backed GUI, and CLI for its storage & data management as well as REST access. Fusion is fully compatible with Red Hat Ansible.

IBM Fusion is intended to be storage agnostic. Which means it can support its data management services for any NFS file storage as well as anyone’s S3 compatible, object storage.

Now that Red Hat software defined CEPH and ODF are under IBM product management, CEPH and ODF options will become available under Fusion. And CEPH offers block as well as file and object. We’ve talked about CEPH before, packaged in a hardware appliance, see our SoftIron podcast.

One intriguing part of the Fusion solution is its global data access. With global access, any OpenShift application can access data from any Fusion data store, across clouds, across on prem installations, or just about anywhere OpenShift is running. Matt mentioned that compute could be on AWS OpenShift, Fusion’s data control plane could be running on prem OpenShift and the data storage could be running on Azure OpenShift. All this would be glued together by Fusion global access, so that AWS compute had access to data on Azure.

There’s some sophisticated caching magic to make global access happen seamlessly and with decent levels of performance, but customers no longer have to copy whole file systems over from one cloud to another in order to move compute or data. IBM Fusion would need to run in all those locations for global access.

Keith asked if it was directly available in the AWS marketplace. Matt said not yet but you can deploy OpenShift out of the marketplace and then deploy IBM Fusion onto that.

It took us sometime to get our heads wrapped around what Fusion has to offer and throughout it all, Keith and I had a bit of fun with Matt.

Matthew Leib, Product Marketing Manager, IBM Spectrum Fusion

Matt has spent years in IT, from Engineering, to Architecture, from PreSales to analyst work, and finally to Product Marketing at IBM.

He’s spent years trying to achieve both credibility in the space, as a podcaster, blogger, and community member.

In his spare time, he’s a dad, dog owner, and amateur guitar player..