Jason Collier Principle Member of Technical Staff, AMD (@bocanuts), a current GreyBeardsOnStorage co-host and I both attended VMware Explore 2022 this past week and we recorded a podcast discussing VMware’s announcements on the show floor. It turns out that Keith Townsend, TheCTOAdvisor (@thectoadvisor) had brought his Airstream &studio and was exhibiting on the show floor. Keith kindly offered the use of his studio to record the podcast.
This one is a video. Let us know what you think. I clearly need a cowboy hat and Jason said (off camera) that I’m showing more grey in my beard than before. I take that as a compliment here.
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Here’s the news as we saw it:
- vSphere 8 – has a number of new features but the ones we thought important were the GA of Project Monterey. This supports new DPUs that now run ESXi out board from the CPU. They are able to offload lot’s of the CPU networking cycles to the DPU freeing up these for other (more important) work. vSphere 8 supports 2 DPUs now, the NVIDIA (Mellanox) BlueField(-2?) DPU and the AMD (Pensando) DPU. AMD recently purchased Pensando and Jason seemed to know an awful lot about this tech. VMware also announced support for concurrent ESXi upgrades which can now allow upgrading ESXi running in DPUs while hosts and clusters continue to operate. Finally, the other item of interest was vSphere is now more API driven. I guess it’s only a matter of time before all VMware functionality is API driven to make it even more cloud-like
- vSAN 8 – also has a number of new features. The first we discussed was is a faster data path. This means more IOPS, more bandwidth and lower latency for IOs. Next, vSAN 8 now supports single tier storage pools . These will no longer require a caching layer. This should also speed up IO operations (as long as the single tier is at least as fast as the old caching layer). They also announced faster snapshots. Apparently this has been a problem in the past and they’ve done the work to speed this up considerably. Jason mentioned an AMD open source VM migration tool (from somebody else’s X86 CPUs to AMDs) that depends a lot on vSAN snapshots.
- Cloud Flex Storage – mentioned at the show but not well explained, Jason and I speculated that this was an internal storage service available on for Cloud Foundation users on AWS where customers could subscribe to storage as-a-service in much lower increments (maybe even GB/month) than standing up more vSAN hosts to increase storage.
- NetApp FsX (ONTAP) storage – along the same line, VMware announced support for NetApp’s FsX as yet another storage option for Cloud Foundation users on AWS. Supplying yet another storage-as-a-service option for this environment.
- Cloud Flex Compute – also mentioned at the show was their new Compute-As-A-Service for Cloud Foundation users on AWS. This way users could subscribe to more or less compute, on an as needed basis rather than having to spin up new ESXi hosts. I later found out this allows users to run a single VM and pay for it on a subscription basis.
- Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) – is a new VMware supplied (and supported) “development experience” for K8s on vSphere. Note, it doesn’t include any advanced Tanzu services such as Tanzu K8s Grid (TKG) so it’s a true DevOps bare bones environment.
- Tanzu K8S Operations (TKO) – another new Tanzu based service which offers operations complete control over the Tanzu services running on vSphere. Note Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) is not part of TKO.
- Aria management – VMware rebranded vRealize and CloudHealth, which now comes in 3 bundles, Aria Cost (CloudHealth+), Aria Operations and Aria Automation. Which are all built onto of Aria Graph that graphs all the nodes in your VMware clusters with all their connections so that Aria management can traverse this graph to find out what’s where. On top of Aria Graph are Aria Hub, Aria Insights, and Aria Guardrails (sort of like providing boundary’s where services can be deployed).
They also announced Ransomware Recovery [changed 7Sep22, the Eds] as a Service which builds on VMware’s DR-aaS announced last year and Tanzu now works with Red Hat OpenShift
We also discussed the show. I heard somewhere there were 10K people there, Jason heard somewhere between 6K and 9K. In any case much smaller than VMworlds prior to Covid (25kish). And of course the rebranding of the show seemed counter-intuitive at best.
The show floor was much smaller than usual, (not withstanding Keith’s Airstream RV exhibit). And there were a number of storage vendors not at the show?? There was less hardware on the show floor, this could be a Covid thing but there were just as many mini-white boards/class rooms per large exhibiter, so don’t think it was because of Covid.
But the elephant in the room was Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. At one of the analyst briefings I asked an exec about attrition. He made a couple of comments but in the end said VMware has been bought and sold before and has always come out of it in better shape. This will be no different.
That’s about all from the show.
And Thanks again to Keith and his crew, for lending us his studio to record the show. It’s been a while since I’ve seen an RV on a show floor. Keith seemed to have a ball with it…
Tell us how you like our video. If everyone is for it we could do something like this with a Zoom (in this case Zencastr) recording, Or just try this at the next joint conference. .
Jason Collier, Principle Member of Technical Staff at 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. He’s currently working with AMD on new technology and he has been a GreyBeards on Storage co-host since the beginning of 2022