Where do you see hyper-convergence fitting?

I am sitting on the flight back home from VMworld and listening to podcasts from the conference. Seems the biggest deal was EVO:RAIL/RACK coming out. At first when I heard about Nutanix two years ago, I didn’t see them being an enterprise ready but man has the area grown.

Enter in Simplivity, I met with the local reps about 4 or so months ago and got to see what they are doing in this hyper-convergence market (like Nutanix and now EVO) and got to say I was impressed. One because they used Dell servers, which is a big partner of ours, but importantly all the functionality they have built in to their product. I had Nutanix sponsor our OKC VMUG last month and next Simplivity on October 24th, so it will good to see the differences. I highly recommend you to research them both so I don’t show bias here.

But why would you go the hyper-convergence route in your data
center? For me lately, I have been tasked to architect building blocks for both server and VDI environments. I totally see these three (Nutanix/Simplivity/EVO:RACK) be the path for VDI. One, each bring their own storage solutions so I can keep the IOPs off our primary storage (cause man Oracle is crazy needy!). And two, they make it easy to say “you need 100 VDIs, you need one of these..” and grow accordingly.

This doesn’t mean they suck at server VMs but I don’t need additional storage for those right now. Most of us already have that, but if you are building new look at them. Save rack space, power, cooling, and network ports by going this way in your virtualization environment. Each have limitations and functionality that the other don’t have but don’t want to start a vendor war.

Now my question, would you switch?

VMworld 2014 – Year of the EUC? A new Suite? Hyper-Convergence?

This has been my 6th straight VMworld (Thank you OUHSC for sending me each time!) and following each year we hear about new products or how one product will be replaced with another as the “go to” as in vCD to vCAC movement.  This year was slightly different.  There weren’t really any “new” products but a new suite of existing products, a new way of getting a hyper-convergence from partners with VMware and finally it seems like we can finally say it was the year of EUC (not really just VDI).

• New Suite: vRealize http://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-suite/

I’m still trying to figure this one out.  About 2 years ago, VMware came out with the vCloud Suite that included all of their products needed to make a private cloud.  The following year they came out with a product called Log Insight that was inspired to replace Splunk or other syslog products.  But they didn’t include it in the vCloud Suite which I felt it would have made it an even better sell.  At OU Shared Services, we bought the enterprise edition so we could easily build VMs with vCD (you can see my presentation at VMworld 2013 to find out more) as the ease of per proc license instead of a-la-carte style with per block of VMs.  So where am I going, the vRealize Suite is labeled as “..cloud management platform purpose-built for the hybrid cloud. It provides a comprehensive management stack for IT services on vSphere and other hypervisors, physical infrastructure and external clouds, all with a unified management experience..” Didn’t that sound like vCloud Suite? The catch is that this suite would take the other further into the hybrid-cloud be it off-prem or non-VMware infrastructures.  To which I say “dang you VMware!”  But we have seen VMware make changes before after announcing here so I will hold my breath of frustration until after VMworld Barcelona.

• Year of the EUC! http://www.vmware.com/products/horizon-view/

It’s been joked about every year that it was the year of the VDI but it never really seemed to be.  VDI is very hard to get going with some lacking features.  In VMware’s case it was that they didn’t have a good virtual app stance for those that didn’t need full virtual desktops.  VMware Horizon 6 fixed that with RDSH support.  I’ve been playing with this in our lab since release (Thanks vExpert program for licenses!) and really love how easy it is to provision applications in the exact same interface for VDI’s.  During one session they even talked about in the next update they will have printer support that some called out in the weeks leading up to VMworld.  So VMware is definitely engaged in EUC and not playing around.  Air Watch is getting some good looks but I’m not big into the EMM/MDM/whatever they want to be called in the market so I need to follow up more on them.

• Hyper-Convergence – Project Marvin! http://www.vmware.com/products/evorail/

The biggest announcement, I would say, is EVO: RAIL (and futures RACK).  There was a big burst on Twitter about a picture someone took inside of HQ.  It had the caption “Project Marvin” with a little Android looking bot.  This kicked off speculation on what was going on and many speculated that VMware was getting in the hardware business to attract those looking at Nutanix and Simplivity.  But it’s a half truth.  VMware just made a new product called EVO:RACK that includes the Enterprise Plus license, a vCenter license and VSAN that you buy in 4 node blocks of a 2U “Appliance” from partners like Dell/EMC(what!)Fujitsu/SuperMicro.  I am sure more will come but that’s the initial list.  Still servers but makes it easier for those to deploy a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) in their environment.  Heard two different reports of either VMware is the single point of contact for all problems but then heard you contact the partner support and VMware will be the Tier 3 support.  The big take off is that it only takes 13 minutes to deploy these after racking and stacking due to the new HTML interface that configures and setups everything on the nodes.

 

Today is the last day, it was great hanging out with the community and I look forward to future announcements!