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VMworld 2017 Europe Conference. Day 1



I continue my story about the most interesting at the VMworld 2017 Europe conference (the first part of the conference story ).

The first day began with a general session under the inspiring title: Good Technologists Solve Problems. Great Innovators Create Opportunities . VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger (Pat Gelsinger) talked about how technology is changing the world around us. He gave an example of how quickly people can adapt to everything new. For example, the initial fear of unmanned vehicles is replaced by interest: “But how does it work inside?”, Which leads to the emergence of new needs: “Why can't this thing go faster?”. As a result, IT is becoming the main source of growth for companies. And if 100 years ago a person had to be able to do three things: read, write and count, now it looks more like “read, write code and count”.

VMware provides solutions that ensure the operation of any application in any cloud (private or public) with the ability to access from any device. One such solution is VMware HCX, which provides a link between on-premise infrastructure and public cloud services (like IBM Cloud or OVH) and allows real-time transfer of virtual machines back and forth without downtime (zero-downtime migration).
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However, not all customers are ready to rush into the public cloud. Many practice a hybrid approach when part of the infrastructure is deployed on-premise, and some - in the cloud. To improve the ability to manage such hybrid environments, VMware offers a set of products distributed through the SaaS model — VMware Cloud Services, which include solutions for monitoring, cost analysis, networking, application protection and a single point of connection to applications.

Then we are talking about the VMware Cloud on AWS public cloud. In brief: Amazon provides its own virtual data center located in all corners of the world, as well as engineering, network infrastructure and server hardware, on which the VMware SDDC product suite is installed.

VMware also recalled other recently announced products operating inside virtual environments: VMware Integrated OpenStack 4.0 (its own OpenStack distribution) and VMware AppDefense (application protection organization solution).



Exhibition


After the completion of the general session, visitors began to disperse. Some hurried to other sessions, others relaxed in the lounge-zone, others went to the Solutions Exchange partner solutions exhibition.



Every year at VMworld, more than 100 companies deploy booths to showcase all sorts of products and solutions. For example, here you can visit the stands of Dell, HPE, NetApp, IBM, Hitachi, Red Hat, Arista, Nutanix, as well as promising startups. It is especially nice that the exhibition presents IT companies with Russian roots: Kaspersky and Veeam.

Vendors, by hook or by crook, try to call visitors to their stands:



The game at the Intel booth, in which participants for a certain time needed to select a server with the optimal configuration to solve business needs:



The first to attract my attention was the VMware booth, primarily due to its gigantic size (for some reason, I remembered the saying “whoever eats a girl, he dances her”).



There were presented all areas of the company's work: from the VMware Workstation desktop hypervisors to the recently announced application protection product AppDefense, each solution had its own stand with a specialist who was ready to answer all your questions.



Special mention should be made of booths stylized for various industries where end-user computing solutions were demonstrated.



For example, Samsung smartphones supporting desktop mode (Samsung DEX) were shown for the banking sector. After installing the smartphone in the cradle, you can connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor to it and work almost as with a full-fledged desktop computer. Or, you can run the Horizon View client on it, connect to the VDI infrastructure, and gain access to published applications and virtual workstations, turning the device into a mobile thin client.



Then I visited the stand of Amazon, where you could learn more about the implementation of a joint cloud service of VMware and Amazon.



Cloud on AWS was announced at last year’s VMworld, and finally the solution was made available to end customers.



By clicking just a couple of buttons, you can deploy your virtual data center in the Amazon cloud. Each such data center includes:

All servers have a typical configuration: two 18-core processors, 512 GB of RAM, 10.7 TB of disk space on flash. It is possible to increase the computing resources of the virtual data center by adding additional nodes manually or automatically as the load increases (the so-called Elastic DRS). Cloud on AWS provides on-premise customer integration mechanisms that allow you to manage local and cloud vSphere clusters and virtual machines from a single vSphere Client (Hybrid Linked Mode) console.

VMware fully assumes support for cloud infrastructure, including configuration, patch management, and hardware maintenance.

Since the VMware cloud is located in the same data center as Amazon’s cloud services, customers benefit from the added benefits of high bandwidth, low network latency and no traffic accounting when working with EC2, S3 and other services.

VMware outlines three main use cases for Cloud on AWS:
  1. expansion of the existing virtual infrastructure or organization of a backup site to provide disaster recovery without the need to build your own data center;
  2. Consolidation of several existing data centers or complete migration to the cloud with minimal impact on existing applications and VMs;
  3. fast provision of computing resources for testing / development tasks or under cyclic loading (peaks in the sales season).

Currently, the deployment of virtual data centers is only available in one region (US West Oregon), but in the near future the list of regions will be expanded.

A new generation of ProLiant GEN10 servers was demonstrated at the HPE booth. In particular, the 1U rackmount-serrer HPE ProLiant DL360 GEN10 was introduced.



Among the innovations of GEN10

It is worth noting the gradual transition of server manufacturers to 25 Gbit / s network adapters and, accordingly, to 100 Gbit / s ports on network equipment. In addition to two and a half times the increase in bandwidth and reduction of delays compared to 10 GbE, which can be useful for modern hyper-convergent solutions and software-defined storage systems, such adapters can boast the presence of SFP28 standard connectors, which are the same size as regular SFP + and take less places than QSFP +.



The Intel booth demonstrated a hyperconvergent platform based on Intel-based servers, processors and flash drives and VMware software (vSphere and vSAN).



The seemingly inconspicuous servers each contain two Intel Xeon Gold 6152 processors, 768 GB of RAM, four Intel Optane DC P4800X drives with a capacity of 375 GB based on 3D XPoint memory and 12 “classic” NVMe flash drives of the Intel DC P4500.



The drives are made in the 2.5-inch form factor, support hot swapping and are connected directly to the PCI-E bus through special host adapters.



One such server is capable of providing performance at the level of 380 thousand IOPS with a random load of 4 Kb blocks and a read / write ratio of 70/30.



Next in line was the HCI (HyperConverged Infrastructure) zone - hyperconvergent solutions combining computing and storage resources within a single building block. In addition to partner solutions from Intel, Lenovo, and Fujitsu, the stand showed the Dell-EMC VxRail 4.0 HCI platform.



VxRail is a complete “boxed” solution, built on the basis of Dell servers and VMware vSAN software. Currently, the VxRail line includes 5 types of configurations designed to solve various tasks: from high-density G-series servers and typical 1U E-series servers (Entry level) to V-series servers supporting installation of graphics accelerators and optimized for running virtual workers stations, high-performance (P-series) or capacious (S-series) servers.



VxRail, like most other HCI solutions, is delivered to customers in a ready-to-use form. All you need is to mount the server in a rack, switch, turn on the power, go through a simple initial setup wizard - and “Voila!”, A fully functioning virtual infrastructure is ready for use.

To promote HCI and other solutions among young people, Dell EMC has released a series of comics.





The podcast Virtually Speaking Podcast ( https://soundcloud.com/virtuallyspeakingpodcast ) about virtualization and cloud technologies was recorded right at the exhibition.



At the Mellanox stand, various ConnectX network adapters and converged adapters were demonstrated, supporting 10, 25, 40, 100 Gbps and even 200 Gbps connections. Notice how the PCI-E bus requirements grow as the number and speed of ports increases.



Next to Mellanox is the Supermicro stand, where modern Twin-format servers (allowing to place two or four servers in one chassis), supporting Intel Xeon Scalable and AMD EPYC processors, were demonstrated. Supermicro servers are always popular with low-cost customers, equipment builders, and applining manufacturers, for example, the Nutanix Web Scale platform is built on these servers.



The servers have a replaceable LOM adapter (Lan-on-board), which allows you to select the necessary configuration of network ports without replacing the motherboard and without using a PCI-E expansion slot.

So, after wandering around the stands, I did not notice how the next day of the conference came to an end. Continued in the next part.

Andrei Konovalov, Head of Virtualization at Jet Infosystems

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/337932/

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