Unified Hybrid Cloud Announcements
- New EVO: SDDC Manager Application
- Non-disruptive lifecycle automation including firmware updates for the hardware
- Content Library in vSphere 6.0 will be able to sync automatically with vCloud Air
- Cross-Cloud vMotion Tech Preview
- Tech preview of live migration between private and public clouds, both directions!
Cloud Native Apps Announcements
- VMware Integrated Containers (finally!!)
- Docker containers are supported using a new lightweight Photon VM
- Uses a 1:1 ratio instead of many:1 that is common with Docker hosts
- This is done for security, a big concern in container based solutions
- Allows NSX to apply security on the per-container network interfaces
- The performance hit is actually very small, Photon VMs power up in less than 1 second
- Photon includes two main components:
- Open Source Photon Controller
- Distributed multi-tenant control plane
- Photon Machine
- ESX based "Microvisor"
- Distributions include:
- Subscription based model
- Subscription based and bundled with CloudFoundry
Everyone seems pretty excited about the cross-cloud vMotion demo. I was actually more impressed with the news about container support. They showed a demo of deploying a Kubernetes and Mesos clusters within minutes, including large scale deployments of 1000 containers in about 30 seconds!