Author: pgkeilty

Husband, Father, Engineer, Player, Coach

VMware Cloud – Continuing VMware’s Force-for-Good for Cloud Choices

by pgkeilty, posted in VMware

One of VMware’s guiding principles is to be a force for good (VMware 2030 Agenda). VMware’s impact to reducing CO2 emissions for customers worldwide has been well documented (VMware Global Impact Report 2020). But in addition to that, VMware’s force for good has enabled customer choice, by liberating organizations from physical constraints. For many years, that meant a choice in hardware to run or access applications. Now, VMware Cloud means customers have a choice to run any application in any cloud with a consistent experience.

From an IT perspective, applications are the center of the universe. For years, IT operational staff have worked to perfect building, running, and managing compute, network, and storage. But none of that would matter if there weren’t applications to run a business.

If there’s a SaaS offering that meets your business needs like Salesforce.com, Workday, and Coupa, then go for it!

For all other applications, the choice is to use a common off-the-shelf software package or build your own. Regardless, that application has to run somewhere, either in the public cloud or in your private data center cloud. There are many factors leading to that choice.

I’ve worked with a large worldwide bank who’s proven that with VMware they can build, run, and manage their own data centers more cost effectively than current big name public cloud providers.

I’ve worked with another financial services company who sees the need for AWS and Azure public clouds so they can burst capacity on demand because having infrastructure on standby is not economically feasible in their own private cloud. However, they need to maintain private clouds to meet the security and performance requirements of some applications. Thus, they require a hybrid cloud and multi cloud strategy.

As you can see, there’s no single clear answer to where applications should reside. That’s why VMware offers choice. One thing is clear, of the organizations VMware studied this year, 90% of executives are prioritizing migration and modernization of their legacy apps. VMware understands that businesses need a range of modernization strategies and the 5R’s of app modernization; Retain, Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, and Retire is designed to do just that.

Retain – If applications must be Retained in a private cloud, then many companies have proven that with VMware Cloud Foundation and vRealize Suite, they can operate their own cloud to achieve the highest levels of performance, availability and efficiency and do it cost effectively, securely, and operationally simple.

Rehost/Migrate – Some customers are choosing to Rehost or Migrate their applications in a public cloud. The good news is that the same private cloud solution that has powered 85 million workloads for the most demanding businesses is available in over 4000 public clouds like VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Cloud, and 1000’s of our other cloud partners. Applications can be migrated instantly, without disruption or having to recode them and they can be secured and managed the same way as in their own private cloud. Once there, the native cloud service can be leveraged to add new functionality to existing apps.

Replatform – With vSphere 7, VMware brings native Kubernetes support to vSphere. This allows you to Replatform or repackage existing applications into containers and orchestrate them in Kubernetes.  In other words, you can run, observe, and manage containers in the same way you manage VMs.

Refactor/Build – VMware has a long history of supporting open-source applications for millions of developers. With VMware Tanzu, developers can build new digital services for the future by

rewriting and Refactoring existing apps to cloud native architecture, Building new ones, deploying them quickly, and operating them seamlessly. 

Retire – If you execute your application modernization strategy well, you’ll be able to Retire legacy applications that have been costly to maintain.

VMware believes the needs of your business and applications should drive your cloud strategy. VMware Cloud supports applications deployed across a range of private and public clouds that are unified with centralized management and operations and centralized governance and security. 

VMware’s force for good maintains your choice for your applications.

For more information on today’s VMware Cloud announcements, check out: The Distributed, Multi-Cloud Era Has Arrived

vSphere 7 Assignable Hardware and Dynamic DirectPath I/O for Latency Sensitive Applications

by pgkeilty, posted in Uncategorized

Lately I’ve been looking into virtualizing latency sensitive applications like the ones used in a lot of financial institutions. In vSphere 6 and below, configuring SR-IOV to hardware accelerate network traffic for latency sensitive VM’s would limit the vSphere features per the SR-IOV Support documentation. This is also true with DirectPath I/O. However, the good news is that vSphere 7 has a new feature called Assignable Hardware that has two consumers; The new Dynamic DirectPath I/O and NVIDIA vGPU. Dynamic DirectPath I/O helps by providing the same functionality as ‘legacy’ DirectPath I/O, but does not pin a workload/VM to a host. This brings back HA and DRS Initial placement to VM’s configured for latency sensitive applications. vMotion is not supported because vSphere cannot live migrate a VM that is directly tied to a physical device. SR-IOV devices are also supported by Assignable Hardware when used as pure passthrough devices.

The VMware High Performance Compute team has been working with our vSphere development teams to bring more capabilities to high performance compute and latency sensitive virtualized workloads without sacrificing bare metal performance.

For more details on Assignable Hardware, check out:

vSphere 7 – Assignable Hardware

vSphere 7 – Using Assignable Hardware with Dynamic DirectPath IO

VMware for AI & ML Workloads

by pgkeilty, posted in AI/ML, VMware

28 years ago I spent a year preparing a University thesis focused on Neural Networks. Practical usage and the job market wasn’t there back then but lots has changed and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) is everywhere. VMware has been focused on AI/ML for awhile by incorporating it into its products and making it easier for customers to run those types of workloads on top of vSphere. Recently I started looking deeper into this and uncovered some great resources that I thought I would share.

This is a good blog summarizing VMware’s strategic direction: VMware’s AI/ML direction and Hardware Acceleration with vSphere Bitfusion

AI/ML was popular at VMworld 2020 and you can see a list of the focused sessions here: Your Guide to AI/ML Content at VMworld 2020. To view the recorded session, you can go to the VMworld On-Demand Video Library. If you don’t have an account already, you can create one.

Some of the announcements at VMworld 2020:

To keep up to date check out the VMware ML/AI BLOG: VMware Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence

IoT is Cool, But What About the Plumbing?

by pgkeilty, posted in Uncategorized

When Internet of Things (IoT) is mentioned, people tend to get really excited about all the interesting use cases around smart building, smart city, smart manufacturing, smart retail, smart healthcare, etc. Let’s face it, the reason IoT has become so popular lately is that the data from IoT devices is being utilized in more and more intelligent ways. We commonly refer to this place where data is being collected and decisions are being made as the insight plane or content plane.

What tends to get ignored in IoT is IoT & Edge Device Management.

In my discussions with customers they tend to talk about various projects that got started, but, never moved from concept to reality because they didn’t have a way to operationalize it at scale. There are many things to think about when it comes to this that start to sound pretty boring compared to facial recognition, autonomous driving, and medical imaging analysis. First, what good is it to have a really good analytic engine making decisions on data if it can’t get the data? What if a temperature sensor battery is low, or a video surveillance camera is tampered with, or you need a software update to a edge gateway system that’s collecting data from things? How do you get all the devices onboarded under management at scale in a consistently configured manner? Then what if there’s a configuration changed needed across all devices? How about monitoring the health of the devices, or collecting data off devices? What if there’s a security patch that needs to be deployed to thousands of devices? How do you make sure all of this is done in a secure and trusted manner? We commonly refer to all this as the Management or Control Plane. Another way to describe it is that it’s the plumbing of IoT. No one really wants to deal with it, but, they know they want it all to just work. That’s where VMware’s Pulse IoT Center comes in. As I mentioned in a previous blog here, VMware has historically been great at providing world class software to manage infrastructure and help it run more efficiently. That’s what Pulse IoT Center is doing. Yes we are excited about all the extremely interesting use cases our customers are deploying. We can help them with data collection and supplying that data to their intelligent applications, but, we are also happy to help deal with the complexities of managing all these hundreds to thousands to millions of devices.

VMWARE EDGE AND IOT CONTENT REFERENCE GUIDE – HOW DO I LEARN MORE ABOUT VMWARE EDGE AND IOT?

by pgkeilty, posted in Edge and IoT, IoT and Edge, Pulse IoT Center

Often I get asked where to go to learn more about VMware Edge and IoT. So I created a “VMWARE EDGE AND IOT CONTENT REFERENCE GUIDE – HOW DO I LEARN MORE ABOUT VMWARE EDGE AND IOT?” page that I will keep up to date with the latest and greatest content references. Click the link below to check it out:

Edge and IoT – Content Reference

Edge and IoT at VMworld 2019 San Francisco

by pgkeilty, posted in Edge and IoT, IoT and Edge, Pulse IoT Center

VMworld 2019 is a week away. If you are going and want to take in all the Edge and IoT action VMware has to offer, here’s a great blog outlining the breakout sessions to attend.

VMworld 2019 – Edge and IoT Session Guide

In addition, you can stop by the Edge and IoT Zone Booth next to the VMware booth in the Solution Exchange. There you’ll find many of our great eco system partners demonstrating interesting use cases in conjunction with VMware solutions. You can also get a demonstration of VMware Pulse IoT Center managing Edge and IoT infrastructure. I look forward to this event every year so I can bump into old friends and meet some new ones. And I prefer San Francisco over Vegas so it should be a good week.

IoT is Coming… EMPOWER 2019 Wrap Up!

by pgkeilty, posted in Edge and IoT, IoT and Edge, Pulse IoT Center

After watching the season premiere of the Game of Thrones (GOT) final season a few weeks ago, I flew to Atlanta for EMPOWER 2019 which is VMware’s event for Partners. It kicked off with a happy hour and demo station presentations. I supported the Edge and IoT demo station where we did some fun Raspberry Pi demos and had some cool giveaways.

One fun theme we had was that IoT is Coming and if you use Pulse IoT Center, “you’ll know things”. GOT fans will get the reference, if not, search “I drink and I know things” in your favorite browser. Pulse IoT Center is a tool for managing your IoT and Edge environment. See this post:
https://livevirtually.net/2019/03/29/edge-and-iot-vmware-compatibility-guide-vcg-is-now-live/
for more detail on how it compares to vCenter and WorkspaceOne.

I was really impressed with the number of partners who had a good understanding of Edge and IoT and were already working with customers on their overall strategy. In one case the partner was planning for State and Local schools to implement IoT device management for video surveillance cameras and gunshot detection sensors. In another case, they were looking to bring operational efficiency to their customers manufacturing floors that were being refreshed with new ruggedized gateways and wireless sensors.

Many of the partners were excited to see the Raspberry Pi demo which went like this.

At the booth we had a monitor with a browser and one AstroPi:
https://astro-pi.org/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/education/programmes/astro-pi/

Raspberry Pi with SenseHAT (Astro Pi)

This is a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with an add-on SenseHAT that monitors temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, yaw, pitch, roll, and has a joystick and LED display. We logged into the Pulse IoT Center dashboard which is based on the standard VMware Clarity HTML5 UI. So the look and feel and navigation should be familiar to administrators of other VMware products.

Pulse IoT Center Dashboard

This is our recently released Pulse IoT Center 2.0. Then we clicked on “Devices” to show list of Devices under management:

Device List

Notice that this lists “Gateway” Device Types and “Thing” Device Types and that Raspberry Pi is a Gateway and the SenstHat is a Thing. The difference is that a Gateway can run our Pulse IoT Center Agent (IOTC Agent) and a Thing cannot. However, a Thing can be managed via the IOTC Agent running on the Gateway it’s attached to. In this case, the SenseHAT Thing is physically attached to the Raspberry Pi Gateway. In other cases, Things may connect via Bluetooth, Zigbee, Modbus, or some other IoT protocol that both the Thing and Gateway can support.

Clicking on the Raspberry Pi Gateway you get this basic information:

Clicking on “Properties” you get more detailed information:

This is a good way to find the IP Address of the device, uptime, os-release, status of SSH, or any custom information specific to that device like the location of the physical gateway.

Clicking on “Metrics” shows CPU, Memory, etc. about the Raspberry Pi gateway.

Clicking on “Connected Devices” shows the Things connected to the Gateway.

In this case, there’s only one Thing, the SenseHat. Some gateways could have many Things connected physically or wirelessly. If you click on the “SenseHat” Thing and then “Metrics” you can see what the Raspberry PI has been collecting from the SenseHat.

OK, now for the fun part. If you go back to the Raspberry Pi Device view and click on the three little dots on the right you can click on “Commands” to get to the command console.

Once in the Command Console you can click on “SEND COMMAND” to get this list of predefined commands as well as some commands we added:

For the demo, we want to turn on the SenseHAT LED display so we select “SenseHatDisplay On” and then click “SEND COMMAND”.

The Pulse IoT Center Agent running on the Gateway will check in with it’s Pulse IoT Center every 5 minutes by default. For the purposes of the demo, we shortened this to 5 seconds. When it checks in, it will inquire if there is a command or campaign to run. In this case, it’ll see that there is a command to run and it will execute that command which will turn on the LED display.

Raspberry Pi with SenseHAT (Astro Pi)
LED’s on

If the device is in a remote location, the status of the command can be monitored:

This is an example of sending a command to a single device. Pulse IoT Center is capable of running Campaigns which will perform commands on multiple devices. We can address that topic in another post. And, this is just one of the many examples of how Pulse IoT Center can be used to manage IoT devices.

IT Runs IoT

by pgkeilty, posted in Edge and IoT, Pulse IoT Center

I began my IT career by migrating the company I was working for off of mainframe and onto a client/server environment. That was a major shift in how IT was done at the beginning of the Internet era. During that time, individual business units at many companies stood up their own LAN servers (e.g. Novel NetWare and Microsoft Windows NT Server). You could call this the first instance of “Shadow IT”. At some point, IT departments brought those servers and applications under IT management. VMware then came along and helped those servers and applications to run more efficiently on vSphere.

When cloud emerged, many individual business units started consuming cloud resources at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google and exposing sensitive company data. I was working for EMC at the time as a vSpecialist and remember one of my colleagues talking to a customer about “Shadow IT”. Many IT departments scrambled to gain control of those company assets to secure them. For a while now, VMware has helped IT with its Hybrid Cloud strategy to help support, manage, and secure public and private cloud resources.

In the mobile space, for a long time, many companies would issue cell phones to their employees. Then Apple and Android phones became popular and workers demanded these personal devices be able to access company applications and data. VMware helped IT provide secure access and control with its Mobile Device Management solutions using AirWatch and now Workspace ONE.

Internet of Things (IoT) has been going on for 20+ years back as long as I can remember when my first university internship was helping to build SCADA systems for a power company. Back then and until recently, each IoT use case was implemented and managed by the vendor providing the solution. My friend and colleague, Grant Challenger, posted a blog on the evolution of IoT in the enterprise here: What is IT’s role in IoT? He talks about the challenge with what he calls “Shadow IoT” and how now there’s a need for IT to get involved. Grant also coined the phrase “IT runs IoT” which means that it’s now time to bring IT disciplines to IoT, just like they did for LAN, Cloud, and MDM. This is the problem VMware is now targeting to help IT solve. There are millions of Edge gateways and IoT devices that need to be onboarded, managed, and secured and VMware Pulse IoT Center does just that.

When I was in a meeting last week and “IT runs IoT” came up again, I was sitting next to another long time colleague who was drinking his favorite coffee. So, I had my resident graphics artist create the image you see at the top. I hope you like it!

Edge and IoT VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG) is now live!

by pgkeilty, posted in Edge and IoT, IoT and Edge, Pulse IoT Center

You can check out the VCG supported devices for Edge and IoT here:

Edge Gateways for Pulse IoT Center
Embedded Systems for Pulse IoT Center

This is a result of some great work by our Edge and IoT product and engineering teams to test and validate gateway vendor hardware with our Pulse Agent and Pulse IoT Center.

I think VMware does 2 things really well.

1) Provides world class software to manage infrastructure and help it run more efficiently

vSphere provides an efficient and secure compute platform for hybrid cloud and vCenter is a centralized platform for managing vSphere environments across hybrid cloud. Workspace ONE delivers and manages any app on any device with an integrated digital workspace platform. And now with the emergence of Edge and IoT, Pulse IoT Center provides a secure, enterprise-grade solution for IoT device management and monitoring.

2) Maintains an extensive VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG) of vigorously tested hardware from many different vendors that is supported by VMware software.

If you browse the VCG for Servers/Systems you’ll find Dell, HP, Cisco, Lenovo, and many many more. If you search for vSAN you’ll find thousands of HDD and flash media listed. If you search for End User Computing you’ll find various Thin Client vendor hardware listed. And now for Edge and IoT, you will find a list of devices supported by Pulse IoT Center. This is only the beginning. The VCG will be updated to reflect the rapidly expanding Edge and IoT market as new hardware is certified and new versions Pulse IoT Center are released.