Take Five With Tom Fenton
5 Technologies to Investigate at VMworld
VMworld often serves as a sneak-peek into future technologies and provides insight into VMware's direction as a company. Look out for these offerings at this year's show.
VMworld has always been all about technology; it's a time when VMware and its ecosystem can show off the latest tech, talk about future products, and discuss the best ways to utilize and maximize currently available technology. Here are the five technologies you should spend your time investigating, via sessions and the exhibit floor, at VMworld 2017.
TAKE 1
VMware and the Cloud. The cloud is the future for many datacenters, and when VMware announced "VMware Cloud on AWS" in October 2016, it was the death knell for a VMware-branded public cloud offering. This was further solidified in May 2017 when VMware announced it will be offering Desktop-as-a-Service (Daas) infrastructure on Microsoft Azure. It should be interesting to ferret out information about how VMware's identity management, management and automation products will work with public clouds and what third-party products can help with these new challenges.
TAKE 2
Containers. Containers and DevOps are the hottest topics in IT nowadays, and VMware is embracing them. If you're looking at implementing containers in your company (and if you aren't, you should be), be sure to hit the Photon and vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) sessions this year, and stop by the booths of vendors pushing container enhancements to VMware core products; I'm willing to bet there will be plenty this year.
TAKE 3
OpenStack. OpenStack systems products are continuing to grow as an important player in the cloud OS market, and VMware is embracing it with products like VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO), which allows you to deploy an OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure in your vSphere environment. If you're looking at starting up and running a private cloud in your datacenter, you need to devote some time researching how to integrate vSphere with OpenStack.
TAKE 4
Whatever Companies VMware Acquires. At past VMworld conferences, VMware has made announcements regarding the acquisitions it has made and how these acquisitions will integrate with its existing products. In the past, this has included such notables as AirWatch, Nicira (NSX) and Propero (VDI), which are now integral products in VMware's stables; in fact, they're driving the greenfield growth of the company. With the hypervisor maturing, VMware needs to reach out and grab the next big thing to stay relevant and, with a few notable exceptions (such as vSAN), it's been done through acquisitions.
TAKE 5
Dell/VMware Integrated Products. At Dell EMC World this year, a "Dell EMC VDI Complete Solutions" offering was announced. What excited me about this package was its very competitive pricing and the fact that it could be run in-house. At VMworld this year, I expect that Dell, EMC and VMware will be announcing more of this type of packaging.
About the Author
Tom Fenton has a wealth of hands-on IT experience gained over the past 30 years in a variety of technologies, with the past 20 years focusing on virtualization and storage. He previously worked as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He also previously worked at VMware in Staff and Senior level positions. He has also worked as a Senior Validation Engineer with The Taneja Group, where he headed the Validation Service Lab and was instrumental in starting up its vSphere Virtual Volumes practice. He's on X @vDoppler.