VMworld: Opening Keynote

The first General session introduced the term Unified Hybrid Cloud.  VMware is continuing to push the vCloud Air product as a solution and brought several big industry names out such as DirectTV to talk about how they are utilizing VMware's public cloud and SDDC products for their business.  Here's a few of the noteworthy announcements:

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!