General session and keynote
Lasers, lights, and fog aside, there were some interesting announcements made at the opening keynote.
- VMware acquires Desktone, and will offer DaaS in their vCHS offering.
- vCHS spreading to the European datacenter region with a new location opening soon in the UK
- VMware NSX officially launched now as a result of the collaboration of work between VMware and their acquisition of Nicira a while back. Number of Virtual Ports now exceeding number of Physical according to their slide. Not surprisingly, Cisco did not feature as a partner on the list of logos in the slide deck. (As pointed out to me by colleague Curtis Brown)
Sessions summary
Here is a list of sessions I managed to attend on Tuesday:
- General session as per above
- vSphere UI Platform Best Practises: Putting the Web Client SDK into Action
- Deep dive into vSphere Log Management with vCenter Log Insight
- Automating the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC): How do I get started?
- William Lam’s “Not Supported” vBrownBag session at the community lounge
The session on the Web Client SDK was interesting for me, as I have recently started looking into what would be involved with web client plugin development. Some good advice was given out, and we got to see the road map ahead, where predictably, Flex is being cast out as Adobe are dropping support, and HTML5 will be taking its place with the vSphere web client. VMware plan to release “HTML Bridge” as private beta in November, which will help bridge the gap, and allow developers to start implementing their UI fully in HTML, or via a combination of Flex and HTML for the time being. The middle tier and back end systems for plugins will still be developed as they have been, so nothing is planned to change here.
The vCenter Log Insight session was well presented by Simon Flanders, and was interesting enough to get a good idea as to what the product does. It does seem fairly straight forward to use though, so I am not sure I would have called it a deep dive myself, apart from the delve into the architecture of the product, which was quite interesting to see how logs were dealt with in a circular fashion, or when archiving was implemented.
Automating the SDDC: How do I get started – this session was nicely presented, and provided me with a little bit of interesting detail on vCAC and vCO, however the PowerCLI content was very high level – as the title of the session would indicate, so this content was less relevant for me. I am however looking forward to the PowerCLI deep dive session on Thursday which should be far more applicable!
Lastly, I attended William Lam’s session “Not supported” session at the vBrownBag area, which was also live streamed. Two interesting things came up here which will be really useful for my role at Xtravirt:
- VCSIM “2.0” released with vSphere 5.5. This is the vCenter Simulator, and the new iteration allows for configurations to be saved and restored, along with some new customisation functionality. Immensely useful for a development environment! Previously, the older VCSIM did not allow for some of this functionality, therefore was of less use to me
- VMware Tools has been implemented for virtual ESXi hosts by a member of the VMware enginneering team – William showed us a quick look at this – it is available as a VIB and can be incorporated into ESXi image builds. Great news for those wanting tighter integration and ease of use in managing nested or virtual ESXi hosts.
With things closing off, I headed back to the hotel for a quick 30 minute break, and then set off for dinner in the city with colleagues Ather Beg and Curtis Brown. We chose the same location as the vExpert / VCDX reception so that we could cross over straight to that after our meal and meet colleagues Gregg Robertson, Darren Woollard and Michael Poore. Here I met up with tons of contacts I knew via Twitter, but had never met in person before, including but not limited to: Erik Bussink, Andrew Mauro, Lee Dilworth.