And that’s Wednesday already. Days are flying by, with barely any time in between all the appointments it’s easy to lose track of time. Today consisted of a few things: some sessions, some NDA sessions, VMWorld Fest and a visit to the Exchange floor where all the vendor stands are located.
Wednesday Keynote
Just like yesterday, the first session to kick off the day was the keynote in the general session area. Ray O’Farrel, Robin Matlock and guest Bear Grylls were speaking at the keynote today.
Unlike last year the second keynote is more in-depth about the announcements made in the first keynote by Pat Gelsinger, this means that all the content for this keynote session is pretty much covered by my other session blogs. Although it’s always nice to see some actual real world use-cases.
Bear Grylls finished with a great positive and moving talk, some might call it a reality check that we’re all just humans. The idea of being motivated to conquer your limits is a great message, using the introduced method of the four F’s. Failure, Fear, Fire and Faith. Bottom line, don’t fear the unknown or new things, feel confident and up your self esteem.
Specific Project Pacific
During this session of Project Pacific, which was actually marked as a deep dive, I finally got some serious info as to how Project Pacific will work. The idea of having a native Kubernetes implementation sounds great but I really couldn’t imagine how this would be possible. Turns out I was overthinking it, alot! One other good thing to know is visibility and management of Kubernetes clusters in the vSphere client is now added.
CRX runtime layer on ESXi, those are the magic words. Bringing a workload or the so called Supervisor Cluster as close to the hypervisor as possible. CRX is basically what they call a hybrid between a container and a VM, it’s an extremely thin OS image that interfaces between the workload and the hypervisor and supposedly boots sub-second.
Now you might have heard there are two ways of running Project Pacific, you are correct. Next to the Supervisor Cluster there is the so called Guest Cluster, which can be deployed on a normal VM base. The Guest Cluster differs from the Supervisor Cluster in a few more ways like being separated from vSphere management and allowing developers full control of their Kubernetes.
Now there is one last thing though, which might be a big showstopper for possible customers. Project Pacific does NOT run without NSX! Supervisor Clusters plumb with NSX networking, in the future Guest Clusters will be customizable to fit your own needs, but you will always need NSX for Project Pacific.
Living on the Edge (IoT)
I visited this session purely out of personal interest, my house is full of IoT devices with very specific functions. Although last year there was a sneak peak and a session on IoT already I never really thought about linking VMware with IoT. The session gave a nice overview about VMware Pulse IoT Center and how it functions.
VMware Pulse IoT Center is the main interface, just like vSphere H5 Client is for your vSphere environment. It allows you to manage and add IoT devices and runs as the control center for these managed devices. Communication is set up with a Pulse client on the edge device, this can be directly in the OS of a camera or through an aggregate device connecting to RS232, just to give some examples. Unlike other products, with IoT there is often no way of bi-directional communication due to NAT or firewalls. Because of this limitation the Pulse client is programmed to contact Pulse IoT Center on specific intervals which can be configured (default is five minutes). The device with the Pulse client is called a gateway in terms of Pulse IoT Center.
Because I run a lot of IoT at home, after the session I asked the question if there are any integrations with existing timescale databases like InfluxDB. The answer was no, not yet, however Pulse IoT Center does already run MongoDB and InfluxDB in the background which will most likely be opened up through an API in the future.
NSX Security and Containers
At the end of the day I was in a closed session about NSX Security and containers, to avoid writing double content, I included non-NDA information in the Project Pacific session part of the blog.
VMworld Fest
At the end of the day, VMworld Fest kicked off. After the announcer announced (apparently that’s what an announcer does) the start, loads of people started moving towards the General Sessions hall which was converted to a party venue.
Upon arrival everyone was in line for a burger that wasn’t a burger (it was pulled pork) or was trying to get some sushi at the other bar. The poor vegetarian snacks in the middle were mostly left untouched.
The night started with a cover band called RPJ who played some classic songs all my generation is supposed to know. They had some nice interaction with the people in front of the stage too.
After RPJ there were two female DJ’s which I couldn’t find the name of. They set up a more zero’s and tens genre of music to get some people moving, I busted a few dance moves here and there.
Last but not least, the main act, Stereophonics. to be honest I didn’t know them at all or what to expect. Not really my type of music unfortunately. Some time later the volume kept going up, which hurt my ears, after which I decided to go back to the house and write the blog.
End of Day 3
Right so that was day 3 of VMworld, again lots of impressions and good information, had some fun at the VMworld Fest. By now my feet and legs are becoming a bit heavy, “time for sleeps and blog you tomorrow”!