I usually release a blog post every Wednesday, but I opted to delay by one day this week because not only are we in the middle of VMworld 2020 - but today is also the first day of Blogtober, which I wanted to participate in for the first time. If you want more information about Blogtober, check out Matt Heldstab’s blog.
Some Thoughts on VMworld 2020 (So Far)
VMworld is a lot different this year, but the graphic design is still tight
Generally, VMworld is one of my favorite weeks of the year. In fact, in many ways it may take the top spot. I get the opportunity to see tons of friends from all over the world, learn about some of the incredible new technologies reshaping enterprise IT, and participate in the vCommunity including – of course – VMUG.
I thought it would be timely to provide some thoughts on some of the happenings and announcements at VMworld 2020 from my perspective.
The Event
This year has been tough. It’s no fault of the VMware team that put the event together – they are in uncharted territory after all - but there is a stark difference between being virtual for the event and previous in-person VMworlds. The content has been just as good as ever, the speakers are as knowledgeable as ever - but clearly partaking in a conference from my bedroom “office” is not nearly as enjoyable as being there. I’d even say it may not be as educational because I’m not sure that I’ve been able to learn nearly as much without the peer-to-peer contact. I found the agenda to be a little difficult to navigate, but honestly I’m not sure I can think of a better way to do it. I’m glad that VMworld wasn’t outright cancelled for 2020, but I really hope 2021 is in person (come on, science!).
The Community
This is going to sound self-congratulatory, but I think that the community aspects of VMworld 2020 were actually the highlight. Between the VMUG Virtual Lounge, the VMUG member party, and the Orbital Jigsaw Discord server – there were multiple legitimate opportunities to connect with other attendees, swap stories and argue about who has the best mechanical keyboard. I’m especially proud of the VMUG member party, which we did in our unique VMUG Virtual world – it felt like hanging with your friends in a video game. Someone called it GTA VMUG, and that may be a pretty apt description. All in all, huge kudos to the entire vCommunity for pulling out all the stops to make everyone feel welcome and connected.
The Announcements
I’ll break into the thoughts on specific announcements below, but let me first say that I finally have to accept that the VMware portfolio is now large and diverse enough that I can’t follow it all anymore. This is actually fantastic news – it means that VMware is now in the same league as Microsoft or Oracle in that they have so many offerings in so many specialty areas that having any depth across the entire portfolio is effectively impossible. We’ve seen people specialize in different offerings for some time, but I can’t help but think that this will only accelerate going forward. Accordingly, I don’t think anyone can be a “VMware Expert” anymore and it’s unfair to ask anyone to be. I’m sure I’m late to this particular conclusion, but I’m on-board now and I don’t see my opinion on this changing anytime soon.
5G
5G didn’t exactly take center stage that I could see, but it was the in the background of a lot of announcements – especially as several different offerings were billed as being “ready for the 5G revolution.” I’m not sold on 5G. While I don’t think I have time in this post to really get into why; essentially, I think the real benefits to 5G come only if you have a super-dense deployment of 5G radios. I don’t see that building happening anytime soon except for those folks who live in the core of major cities. I know there are lower-bandwidth frequencies in 5G, but they aren’t as compelling from where I sit. This is a topic for another post for sure.
Intrinsic Security
This was the area of the main announcements that I was most excited by. I said this a bunch of times at VMworld 2019 when the acquisition of Carbon Black was announced that integrating security policy enforcement into the entire VMware stack would be transformative for security. I think my quote at the time was that every CIO goes to bed at night worried about security in spite of all of the products in the marketplace. VMware is really well positioned to upend this because between vSphere, VCF, NSX, and Workspace One - they have a potential footprint in a huge percentage of an organization’s infrastructure and therefore have visibility to much of the operation.
I still see some risks here in convincing CISOs who are intentionally incredibly risk-averse. The prevailing best practice that I’m aware of is that you shouldn’t source all (or functionally all) of your security software from one vendor – because if that vendor gets compromised or there is a defect in the protection you can be exposed. The challenge with that model is that you end up needing to manage a ton of discrete solutions that requires substantially more effort and labor and keep current with multiple release cycles, etc.
The vision that VMware is pushing is admirable – the idea that you can have security enforcement across a multi-cloud environment opens up possibilities for flexible computing that don’t exist today. Currently, in order to get consistent policy enforcement most organizations are forced to trombone traffic back and forth to the datacenter, which increases latency and cost and impacts performance in pretty severe ways. I want to get some hands-on time playing around with VMware’s SASE platform to see if it can really distribute security services close to where they are needed. If it really works out, this can dramatically shift how CISOs and architects are designing data centers.
Project Monterey
In all honesty, I didn’t get this at first and consequently wasn’t excited about it. I actually happened to be in Sydney, Australia when Chris Wolf demonstrated running ESXi on a NIC (at a VMUG, naturally) for the first time. Seeing it live, I certainly thought it was neat but didn’t understand why a business would actually want to do this; I didn’t see a practical application. I think the picture got a lot clearer for me this week. The value proposition that I can see is that all of that intrinsic security that I’m so bullish on takes compute to run. That policy inspection and enforcement requires system resources – especially if you want to have this in a large scale out architecture.
By offloading the security to the NIC, you protect and preserve the compute resources on the host system so you don’t need to oversize your hosts in order to compensate for the overhead of the security enforcement. I see a lot of potential here – similar to how we were all using TOE cards in the past in order to save CPU cycles on our storage traffic overhead. I need to spend more time reading about this, but if this pans out I can see real flexibility getting added here - and frankly some simplicity in sizing.
AI
I’ll admit that there’s a lot about the VMware partnership with Nvidia that I don’t fully understand and need to know more about, but accessing Nvidia Cloud GPU resources from VMware workloads is only goodness. Working in higher education, building a high-performance computing cluster with significant GPU resources can be incredibly complex and costly. The expense of setting it up creates a high barrier to get started.
If this announcement means I can build a cluster on vSphere quickly and easily without the expense of building a huge GPU array – I’m interested. VMware didn’t announce any timeline for this, but if it can lower the costs of getting started with AI, it can be transformative for smaller or younger companies. I wish there was more concrete information around this because it could possibly be the biggest impact to some companies when and if it comes to fruition.
Summary
Overall, while there’s some really interesting stuff coming out of VMworld 2020 I feel like the announcements are primarily geared towards professionals or organizations struggling with security and AI/ML in a multi-cloud world - which effectively means the biggest of the big companies. I don’t know many smaller organizations struggling with those particular pain points.
So, what if you are a vSphere admin in a small business? Frankly, I’m not sure there was much for you to really sink your teeth into this year in terms of new announcements. The good news for you is that you probably haven’t fully adopted vSphere 7 yet and update 1 just dropped, so you can definitely get some great content to help you keep the ball moving forward.
VMworld isn’t over yet, but the best news may be that you can keep watching the sessions well after the event is over, and there are so many sessions that if you want to dive deeper on any announcements you have plenty of time to do it.
