VMworld 2020 - But Does it Run on VMware?
Transcript
Hey, how's it going? It's Keith Townsend from the CTO Advisor, then world 2020 much different event, than it typically has been in years past, obviously. So virtual event being worked, had over a hundred thousand people registered for the event, but you know what? The conversation on Twitter, just wasn't the same as it's been. We're still trying to figure out, this virtual event thing, I'm looking forward to seeing you in person again, hopefully when the next year or two. So what were the big announcements from VMworld 2020?
Well let's talk about, what VMworld likes to lead with in conversations. When you're thinking about the concept, does it run on VMworld? What do you think of? I still think, does it still run inside of a VM hosted by VMware vSphere? I think VMware wants to push this. com in which we played around, with each one of the major VMware cloud service providers. and talked about, well can you do any, app any cloud, VMworld will like for us, to think of the ideal of any cloud, any app as a concept, of taking something like a Tanzu and running Kubernetes, and VMware cloud services across any cloud provider, including your private data center, and what progress did they make on that?
Why? Were they decoupled Tanzu grid. 0 deployment, while VMworld now supports that, I don't know if I would suggest that you do that at scale, because VMware has very much put all of this eggs, in a VMWare cloud foundation baskets, so to speak. When you think about virtualization, Kubernetes application enablement, VMware cloud foundation is the foundation of that. So when you're thinking about using namespaces, and Kubernetes API's, Vspear abstractions, that stuff is mainly going to be supported at scale at VCF, of course VMware isn't going to abandon, any of it's enterprise licensing customers.
But if you're thinking about the end to end experience, VMware cloud foundation is a foundation, of the any app, any cloud matter. What other major innovation, is coming out of VMworld world 2020, my most I think excitement, is coming from project monitoring, outside of just a cool name that makes me, want to visit the coast of California, Monterey is VMware's end game, from when Chris Wolf showed us a couple of years ago, of ESXI ARM running on SmartNICs, back then, you know we kind of thought, yeah, this makes sense from VMware's telco play perspective, you could take ESXI deploy VM's, out to the telco edge, virtualize the network functions, that a telco could use using ESXI.
So a telco right ARM based app, and he can run that app across multiple customers, on the same physical network HeartWare, what VMware gave us was something a little bit different. I don't want to say a little bit different. It was quite different. If you look at nitro system over at AWS, you can see why VMware went down this route. They extended the control plane and services, of VMworld cloud foundation to the SmartNIC. As you may know, we're seeing the rise of the DPU or the FPGA, the data processing unit decentralized compute, taking specialized asics that are programmable, that allows you to do a complex task, repeatedly over and over at a high speed.
So optimized compute, we see this all the time with GPU's and AI and machine learning. We're now seeing this, in general workloads or general data center workloads, VMware being able to offload NSX-T functions, vSAN functions, and even observability functions, off to the DPU use in these SmartNICs, and then lightening the load of your x86. requiring you to have either, less x86 compute or optimizing, that x86 compute to drive additional efficiency. What does this mean, for the future of the data center, and the present of most customers?
Well, for the future of the data centers, pretty exciting VMware finance model or licensing Model, really wasn't telco friendly. And if you've heard Pat Gelsinger, over the past two or three years, he believes the telcos the most lucrative, most, (takes deep breath) powerful growth engine for VMware moving forward, but you're not going to get there, by licensing multiple cores of ESXI, on host sitting inside of the telco network, VMware needed a better model for this. Over on the blog,. I kind of wrote this scenarios, if you're a telco provider you want to put 5G, as far out to the edge as possible, a couple of hundred of SX points, over or radios and access points.
And until let's say a stadium, to handle a search doing a sporting event, well you can actually use that capacity, to do more than that. What if you could sublease, the capacity of something that size of an Intel nook, but has the power of a SmartNIC, you could resales capacity, compute capacity to a game developer, that game developer could write a game, for, let's say a fantasy sports football, and base it off a location , and create clusters of players within the stadium. That's completely secure, from the 5G network infrastructure, at least logically, this is the vision of where VMware, can take this type of service with their telco business.
What about the regular data center? You're not going to build a 5G app, and ARM based code, et cetera. You're in a process of just, you know, keeping the lights on, and making sure SAP can move to SAP HANA, et cetera. Well, you kind of get the benefit, of FPGA's will file change in your application architecture, because VMware is moving stuff like either ratio coding, encryption at rest, all of that to the SmartNIC, your data center becomes faster and more efficient, at least in theory.
And for what we've seen with AWS is not natural, without you changing your applications, this is the province of infrastructure, and infrastructure technology, being able to improve the application. By basically being invisible. So I'm pretty excited about project Monterey. It is a really great innovation. It is the approach to VMware Vsphere amd VMworld, cloud foundation that I hadn't thought, those are kind of the two major, big picture things, that I wanted to share with you out of VMworld. Is there something that you think I missed?
Was there something that really caught your eye, as you're going over the content from VMworld 2020, and you are saying Keith, you're missing this innovation, in end user computing and security. The SaltStack acquisition is really interesting, and that's going to empower Tanzu, in ways that we're not aware of yet today, if being worked can execute, share those ideas and thoughts with me, in the comment section below or on Twitter @CTO advisor, let's get a little conversation going around, VMworld 2020, talk to you next CTO dose.
