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Wednesday 16 October 2013

Wednesday General Session

Much talk about the ability of vCAC and IT Business Management and its claimed ability to expose IT costs to the business in advance of consumption. Also claims that its heterogeneous, which remains to be seen what this means.

There are echoes of the previous 5 years of promises to move IT costs from 70% run to 70% investment. Virtualization was just the first step - as many of us knew at the time, vitualization solved a small part of the problem (space, power, hardware reduction, agility, hardware refresh etc.). Now all this can be automated. 

NSX
- in addition to vitalizing the network the intention is to make server to server traffic more direct and efficient
- can move existing VMs by using motion
- someone should advise US companies about how scripted conversations are far too obvious. Maybe it works in the US, but not very cool in EMEA

VSAN
- demo of how easy it is to deploy
- adding a host to a cluster adds the storage in that host
- policies allow copies of vmdks and writes go to all copies. No ,mention of performance impact
- for DR the data is replicated off site. No mention of recovery method - needs further investigated
- in beta now, no mention of GA date

User Self Service
- IT need control through policy, security and automation
- one click user access to apps regardless of how it is delivered including XenApp in Horizon workspace

VCops
- automation of responses to predicted events based on policies, eg add VMs to a service that is maxed out
- connections into many other vendors' management tools
- can move workloads across service levels using vMotion and Storage vMotion
- health of system exposed to business through vCAC

Thoughts: after a few years of more of the same and lots of acquisitions that sat alongside rather than as part of the suite, VMware seem to have started to make significant steps into new areas and better integration- . IF it delivers on the promises and IF the licensing makes sense. OpenStack probably has a better chance than Microsoft to respond quickly.
Personally, there are still a couple of elephants in the room - adding the automation tools adds more stuff to manage, change control and maintain, and is the infrastructure really the bottleneck in most IT projects? I can see that infrastructure can be a bottleneck on doing more or less of what is already being done, but for the development of genuinely new business IP implemented on IT, infrastructure is much less likely to be a project delay.

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