VMworld Barcelona 2016 - Part 2

So today VMworld kicked off, I can't believe it's been a year since I was sat in this hall listening to last years announcments!!! The hall was packed, the drummer was playing, it must be time for the VMworld keynote to get started!! 

Pat Gelsinger took to the stage reflecting on where we have been in the IT industry but more importantly where we are going. The future direction until at least 2030 is a hybrid infrastructure, in fact VMware predicts it is going to take this long to get 50% of workloads into the public cloud. I would love to see these statistics further subdivided by the size of customer and the sector they sit in. Today's announcements focused on what I will call the traditional infrastructure, that being compute, storage and networking. We saw Pat Gelsinger announce vSphere 6.5, notably, there was a single slide on this, gone are the days where a whole keynote would be spent on this. VSAN 6.5 was also announced, this further builds on 6.2 that was largely seen to be the first enterprise-ready release. I'm not going to breakdown what was new in these releases here, check out the links below form more information. https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/10/introducing-vsphere-6-5.html

 http://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2016/10/18/vmware-virtual-san-6-5-whats-new/

The majority of the keynote was taken up with information regarding the newly announced Amazon Web Services (AWS) partnership. We saw a demonstration of the user interface, we rolled out a brand new vSphere infrastructure straight from the vSphere AWS portal, we could see a choice of T-Shirt size solutions starting at 4 hosts upwards, we also saw the option to choose our commitment length from hourly to a year to 3 years, with a promise of discounts the longer you choose to commit. VMware cloud on AWS includes vCenter server appliance  connected to your on premises vCenter using enhanced linked mode, ESXi and VSAN, along with NSX for security and connectivity. We saw how you could connect your on premise DC to the cloud use AWS Direct Connect and NSX. There was also a demonstration of vMotion migrating a workload from an on premises DC into AWS and the mention of a new technology elastic DRS available only in the AWS, this is able to use the power of DRS but also is able to spin up or down new hosts when demand requires.

There was also demonstrations of VMware cross cloud services ​billed as the management layer on top of the public cloud. Tomorrow we have been promised more from the end user computing and the cloud native apps teams! 

Here is my doodle from the keynote​

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Watch the recording of the keynote below:

VMworld 2016 Europe - General Session Day 1

For the rest of the day I sat on several sessions one regarding VMware and AWS, the doodle from this session is below, others regarding the use cases and integration between airwatch and Workspace ONE.

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I also spent an amount of time taking in the solutions exchange, speaking to partners and contacts and understanding others opinions on the show and the announcements. The solutions exchange seems smaller this year, it's in a different hall so that maybe why, or maybe it is the layout, or maybe because Dell and EMC now only have one stand and apparently Nutanix have been restricted to a smaller stand, who knows?

The day ended for me with a trip to the vExpert gathering in the middle of town, it took place in a nice small bar with some nice food and drink, it was great to catch-up with other fellow vExperts and discuss anything and everything!  

It has been a good day at the conference for me, I am left deep in thought regarding the future and where my customers will be going but I am excited by the AWS relationship and the vision for cross-cloud management. In the short term it is clear that hyperconverged is now a major consideration but ultimately choice and flexibility are the order of the day. You want a traditional infrastructure, VMware do that, you want hyperconverged, VMware do that, you want AWS VMware do that etc etc. Tomorrow I am looking forward to hearing more from the EUC team. 

VMworld Barcelona 2016 - Part 1

This is my fifth VMworld and the forth one I have attended in Barcelona, so I have come to know what to expect and how to get the most out of the event. Before I leave I like to try and set myself a challenge or a focus for the event. This year is no exception, my goal is to understand or at least have a glimpse into the IT industry for the next five years, specifically for small to medium customers who I work with predominately. This sounds like an impossible task but VMworld is a good place to at least start formulating an understanding and seeing where the trends are going.

I flew out too Barcelona earlier on Sunday morning, my first stop was for a day of NSX training at an amazing meeting space in central Barcelona.  

The training focused on the architecture and benefits of NSX. There is quite a compelling case for NSX where security and governance are held in well regard within an organisation, that's everyone, right?? For organisations of a small to medium size it is the security benefits of microsegmentstion and the continuity aspects that by far will be of most interest. I enjoyed learning about the integration with third party products like checkpoint and Palo Alto amongst others as well. 

My second day in Barcelona was spent attending the partner day. Whilst partner day tends to be very sales focused, it does give me an understanding of VMware's messaging and positioning. This is extremely useful when trying to find out the use cases that really work and how to best serve my customers. We also got to hear for the first time some details of the main announcements for the conference from people like the main man himself Pat Gelsinger. The main message for partner day was it's time to start focusing outside of vSphere. Virtualization alone is no longer enough for our customer's or VMware and we now need to move onto understanding what is next. From VMware's perspective this very much focuses on security, management, monitoring and automation, the workspace and the cloud. With the announcements coming and the acquisitions and partnerships we have seen it is clear VMware is very close to delivering the full, any app, any device, any cloud vision. As a VMware partner you need to pick and understand the areas you will specialise in. Whilst it used to be possible to be a VMware specialist with the length and breadth of the portfolio, today that simply isn't possible. 

After partner day it was straight on a coach and heading down to the harbour to attend the Dell EMC welcome reception, held in the bar at the top of the W hotel. The views from the top looking over the harbour and the beach were amazing, Claire Vyvyan VP of Dell Enterprise gave an inspiring speech about the newly formed Dell Technologies, but also hinted to bright and transformative futures as we move into an era of technologies such as analytics and IoT.

Tomorrow is the official start of VMworld where a further 7000+ customers will join the 2900 partners to listen to the keynotes, attend sessions and run through hands on lab.  

Replace KMS with AD based Activation?

For those who have a need to activate windows 2012 servers or later and/or clients with windows 8 and above it is well worth having a look at AD based activation.

There are a couple of prerequisites, notably that the AD schema must be extended to the 2012r2 level and the Volume Activation Services role (VAMT) must be installed on a 2012r2 server.

Once you have that you can add your KMS host key using VAMT – this key can be activated online or over the phone.

**When I last did this at a dark site I was able to use a smartphone to complete the activation rather than the rather tedious process of relaying seemingly endless amounts of numbers**

When this is complete qualifying client computers are activated from a Domain Controller during their startup process.

Wins

This removes the need to have KMS servers in your environment along with the minimum count requirements associated (the number of requests before the KMS server will activate clients).

You’ll still need KMS if you need to activate workgroup PCs or windows 7/2008r2 but for those migrating to Windows 10 and especially within a VDI deployment I think this is certainly the way to go!

Importantly you can also activate office 2013 suites and above this way.

For the full process check out the TechNet article here