June 8, 2019 at 22:06VMware EMPOWER 2019 - the main announcements and conclusions from the conference
The IT-GRAD team visited the conference and shares observations.
VMware EMPOWER is an annual conference for company partners. Initially, it was part of VMworld - a larger event - but since last year the meeting has been held as an independent event (due to the large number of participants). Speakers from Intel, Microsoft, CloudHealth, VeloCloud and, of course, VMware itself speak at EMPOWER.
Participants share their experience in working with cloud technologies and touch upon marketing issues - experts discuss approaches to communicating with customers and tools aimed at helping businesses develop their services.
This year, VMware speakers spoke about three areas in which the company plans to continue developing its solution pool.
Optimization of digital work environments
The structure of corporate networks is becoming more complicated - companies are switching to a hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, and their employees are increasingly working remotely using mobile devices. To meet the new conditions, VMware headed for the solution of tasks related to centralized administration. In particular, it was about managing a digital work environment for clients of IaaS providers.
The corporation talked about the capabilities of the Workspace ONE platform - it allows you to manage client applications, licenses and end-user device security policies in one interface. Also, with its help, you can run virtual desktops in the cloud and manage the life cycle of applications, regardless of the operating system and device used.
At the conference, we had the opportunity to study the features of Workspace ONE on test stands. You can also do this online at VMware Hands-On Lab .
Machine Learning Course
Automation of business processes in data centers is a priority of VMware. The company expects that in the next few years, its solutions based on machine learning will help data centers reduce the load on their administrators by 80%. Sysadmins will determine the policies and logic of the data center systems, and intelligent algorithms will monitor their implementation.
VMware has already implemented intelligent features in a wide range of its products: NSX-T, vRealize Operations & Log Insight, Wavefront Analytics, Apteligent, Skyline, etc. AI systems analyze logs, infrastructure performance, balance server load and perform technical support work.
The corporation is implementing smart algorithms in the vSAN 6.7 system. This is a storage virtualization tool for hypervisors. With the next platform update, the company plans to expand the pool of tasks that AI systems will deal with. Among them are monitoring the state of disk infrastructure and reporting problems to administrators.
The speakers also talked about the solution for monitoring the Pulse 2 IoT infrastructure. It makes it possible to manage smart devices and their clusters using the RESTful API. According to the developers, the system is capable of supporting the operation of one hundred million smart devices.
The official VMware blog has an example of how Pulse works in conjunction with the Raspberry Pi 3B +. A single-board computer is responsible for monitoring temperature, humidity, pressure and other environmental parameters. Similar solutions can be used in data centers to maintain the microclimate in the engine room.
Work in untrusted networks
At the conference, VMware introduced the updated NSX-T platform (instead of the existing NSX-V) for working in untrusted wide area networks (WAN / LTE). It includes traffic encapsulation protocols, support for multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
The platform also received a new level of abstraction of network devices - with its help, you can restore the infrastructure in one minute when changing physical equipment and even with the complete destruction of the data center.
/ photo Andrei Stratu Unsplash
Also discussed was the VeloCloud SD-WAN product, which the IT giant acquired last year . The solution is designed to protect network connections through unstable networks.
It works as follows: smart routers are installed along the perimeter of segments (for example, a data center or branch of an organization). They automatically balance the load and monitor the channels available at the outputs of each segment (fiber, twisted pair or LTE). SD-WAN infrastructure allows on-the-fly mixing of traffic tunneling protocols.
This approach makes the network more productive and flexible. Guido Roberto Frabotti, lead engineer for SD-WAN at VMware, said the system will let you forget about a phenomenon like jitter.
In general, we had an exceptionally positive impression of the conference and the technological developments presented by VMware. The conference speakers paid much attention to the tasks and solutions related to security and data recovery, work in global networks and centralized management.
New VMware products will increase the stability of the processes occurring in the IT infrastructure and optimize the work of VMware partner companies. We plan to further develop the infrastructure of our IaaS provider based on the corporate hypervisor.
We will continue to talk about the latest VMware, and a detailed report on each of the days of the EMPOWER 2019 conference is already in our blog on Habré: