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Search Welcome to vSphere-land! your ultimate VMware information destination Home Shop vLaunchpad Planet vSphere-land vLinks! vSphere Links General/VI3 Links Top 10 Lists News vInfo Config Maximums Free Tools HA Advanced Options History of VMware vBookShelf vGlossary Release/Build Info About About Me Contact Me My Book My Published Work Advertising Opportunities Oct 12 2020 My thoughts and observations on VMworld 2020 Categories: News by esiebert7625 Another VMworld has passed, this year it was a month later than usual and also completely virtual. The week before VMworld I wrote about how it didn’t feel like VMworld at all and seemed to be lacking all the excitement that usually leads up to the event. Having now experienced this virtual VMworld I can report that I was fairly disappointed and it felt more like an extended webinar than an actual event. Lets go into the details in my usual format. The Location Usually you have the whole SF vs Las Vegas debate with some liking one location over another. This year that didn’t matter as it was virtual so lets focus on the platform they used to deliver VMworld. Overall I thought the “design” or whatever platform they used was very bland and seemed more like I was browsing a website instead of attending a virtual event. The whole event was just a series of web pages not very well connected together and left the attendee confused on where to start and how to navigate the event. The main page shown below just had some links to other pages for specific content. This didn’t have an event feel at all to it, in contrast if you are familiar with virtual VMUGs they structure the event web page to look like an actual event using the vFairs platform as shown below. With the virtual VMUG events you felt more like you were attending an event with the same familiar layout that you expect at events and you distinctly knew how to navigate and find different areas. With VMworld this year I had no clue where to start and find various content, eventually I figured it out but it felt very dis-connected and un-welcoming. One big thing which is the reason many attend these events is the networking with other people and meeting up with old friends. That’s an experience that is almost impossible to duplicate virtually but I thought VMware could make a decent effort at it given the large number of social networks that exist today. Sadly they didn’t, if you look at the main webpage it says “Connect with fellow attendees with the mobile app”. I didn’t even bother downloading the mobile app as that is something I would only use if I was actually attending the physical event to help me stay organized with my schedule and look at maps to find where to go. Sitting at home attending the event on my PC I don’t want to have to use a mobile app, a PC provides a much better experience, I’m guessing the majority of the people attending VMworld used a PC instead of a mobile device. As VMworld provided no mechanism to socialize with other attendees on the event website their was no way for many thousands of users to connect with each other from their homes on their PC. Overall it felt like VMware didn’t put much effort into the platform for the event. I understand they did not have a huge amount of time to invest as it was probably around April when it was decided they need a plan B and even with the event being in Sept this year they only had 5 months to execute that plan. But I would wager to say there are better platforms for virtual events and you would think a technology and cloud company would have an edge on developing a decent platform for the event. I’m guessing maybe they purposely didn’t put in too much effort as they anticipate this is a one off thing and they won’t have to do a virtual event ever again. How many people attended VMworld? This year the event was free for everyone to attend so you would expect attendance to be way higher than the usual 20-25k attendees. I know from internal reports as a sponsor that they were 54,000+ companies registered a week before the event. I heard that there were over 150,000 people that signed up for the event which is a significantly larger audience than they have had at physical events. This is great as it gives more people exposure to all the sessions and goof for sponsors as they have a larger audience to interact with. It would sure be nice if VMware considered offering a virtual option and a physical option to attend the event going forward. What was announced at VMworld? As expected VMware’s focus at VMworld was largely on containers and clouds and the announcements centered around that. vSphere 7.0 Update 1 was announced before the event and is now generally available. The big ticket item is that the native Kubernetes integration that was introduced in vSphere 7.0 is now generally available in vSphere without requiring VC. This enables BYO networking (vDS), NSX is no longer required, it also enables BYO storage – vSAN & vVols provide the best solution (SPBM) but you can also use traditional VMFS/NFS storage and BYO load balancer (HAProxy). In addition a new feature called vCenter Connect allows you to manage vCenter running on any cloud platforms from a single interface. VMware also increased cluster scale from 64 hosts to 96 hosts and also enable a truly monster VM with up to 768 vCPU and 24TB vRAM. This was achieved by tuning ESXi scheduler and co-scheduling logic for large VMs, removing bottlenecks in vCPU sleep/wakeup paths and reducing memory overhead . VCF 4.1 was also announced before the event and included a new feature called vSAN Data Persistence aimed at supporting containers and also support for remote clusters to extend VCF to edge and remote locations while still be centrally managed. However the big thing in VCF 4.1 is vVols now supported as Principal Storage in VCF Workload Domains. This also adds support for iSCSI storage (but only for vVols) as up until now only FC was supported. VCF does support traditional VMFS/NFS but it is not optimal as it only supports tag based capabilities (VASA 1.0) and not the full SPBM management (VASA 2.0/3.0). Probably the biggest announce was the introduction of Project Monterey , last year they announced Project Pacific which was focused on native Kubernetes integration which is already GA, this year it’s Project Monterey which is focused on using new hardware capabilities to enhance VCF. Project Monterey is a redesign of VCF to take advantage of these new disruptive hardware capabilities by moving functionality that used to run on the core CPU complex to the SmartNIC CPU complex. What is a SmartNIC you say? A SmartNIC is a beefed up NIC with a general-purpose CPU, out-of-band management, and virtualized device functionality that provides acceleration and offload functions minimizing CPU interruption to support I/O functions (accelerated network and storage operations run in parallel with CPU processing). So basically it’s like having a second mini server in your host, however what’s unique about it is that it is an ARM based processor so ESXi had to be adapted to run on ARM (we’ve seen demos of that the last couple VMworlds). So it enables you to run a second instance of ESXi on the SmartNIC which can be managed separately or as a single logical instance. It also has bare metal support as well so you could potentially run Windows or Linux on it. Some use cases for this are offloading network and security functions to free up more CPU cycles on the host and better handle network intensive workloads. It can also accelerate storage function such as encryption, compression and erasure coding (vSAN use case) and also offering bare metal as a service with vSphere. To enable this VMware is partnering with DPU vendors Pensando, Intel (Mellanox BlueField-2) and Nvidia and server partners HPE, Dell and Lenovo. If you want to learn more about this check out blog post and also this session HCP3004 with Kit Colbert, note this is a tech preview ...