VMworld 2016: What happens in Vegas ... could be just a desert trip VMworld 2016 is just around the corner. While some are giving VMworld a pass in 2016, things are looking up from earlier this year. If you don't mind Vegas in the summer, it might be worth your while. VMworld's return to Vegas marks something of a turning point for VMware. Over the past several years VMware has seemed to be in …
2nd platform vendor in a 3rd platform world.
VMware will announce some very cool stuff this year, but as is their current trend, it's stuff that would have been awesome 5 years ago.
Photon? Awesome - if serverless platforms like Lambda and Azure Functions didn't exist.
VDI? Awesome - if software wasn't being replaced at pace with SaaS as soon as it's made available.
vSAN? Awesome - if people needed on premises storage, and it didn't cost more than a real SAN.
NSX? Awesome, very cool technology. Sadly not scalable enough for hosting providers and too expensive for normal IT shops. Also unnecessary in a cloud environment. And no, VMware, Hybrid and multicloud are not a real thing that smart people do!
Sorry, dead vendor walking...
With the exception of Photon, these products are still very relevant for 75% of the customers out there... you know, the ones not actually using the cloud.
Markets and territories that aren't in Silicon Valley or other startup-heavy areas still have a lot of catching up to do in the platform 2 space...and most of those workloads aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
TLDR: I disagree with your broadly dismissive assessment.
@AC2 in a couple of years you'll probably wake up one day and realise just how wrong you were here. Most customers are fine with virtualisation as it was in 2010 for their on prem stuff. None of the innovation since then has helped a lot other than for those who charge by the day to set up "cloud" portals which I have yet to see succeed on premises.
That stuff continues to not be broken in 2016 and doesn't need fixing.
Meanwhile, software vendors supplying traditional applications are being displaced by SaaS vendors who get 3rd platform technology and methods. Of course people still need some Exchange but O365 has decimated that market. Same is happening accross the board, and complex business systems are being replaced by micro service cloud solutions because they offer what IBM and Oracle and the rest never could - agility and responsiveness.
There's other glaring brown spots they need to clear up:
1) Why is ANY Flash still in their products full stop?
2) What is the plan with NSX -- dead, dying, or investing?
3) Why in the name of all things holy can't customers migrate N<->S AND E<->W without more pain that a root canal done through their back passages w/o anaesthetic?
4) What's happened to innovation or do they plan to be an also-ran?
Not going to the show, but can answer any ways.
1) There is Flash still in their products because they were spectacular dumbasses in denial of the problem for years and didn't invest in a post-Flex interface until it was damned near too late. They are now working as fast as they can, but didn't get serious about it until yay-not-very-long-ago, so it's at least another year before Flash is gone.
2) NSX is something VMware is investing heavily in. They are betting a lot on it.
3) You can't upgrade as you like because if you could VMware wouldn't make as much money from raping your wallets and telling you that you like it. I gave up having that argument with them years ago.
4) There is plenty of innovation occurring at VMware, but it is all super-tip-top-hush-hush secret stuff that may or may not see the light of day. The fact that you are asking that question validates my argument that it's time to let the world see under the kimono before Microsoft manages to win hearts and minds.
Once their customers leave them for Microsoft, those customers aren't coming back. Sadly, VMware either doesn't believe they can/will lose customers to a resurgent Microsoft powered by a top-notch hybrid cloud story, or they just don't care.
"didn't invest in a post-Flex interface until it was damned near too late"
There shouldn't have even been a flex interface if they had listened to their beta customers and field staff before it even got to GA in vCloud Director Way back when, let alone vCenter. Instead the elites in product management told everyone they were wrong and pushed ahead with a substandard UI.
>is IMHO a darn sight more interesting than Vegas itself.
Still hoping to make a trip to Furnace Creek next time it starts threating 130 again.
>Just gotta keep an eye out for those pesky traffic cops when going from Vegas to Ely.
Utah highway patrol near St. George (as far as getting to Vegas) is the worst.
The nice thing about going to Vegas in July or August for me is unlike most of the tourists its usually a tiny bit cooler there than at home lol. Still as far as this conference virtualization is just a personal hobby for me and sadly my exposure to the industry is fairly negative with me now somehow being on every VM sales list out there. Pushy fsckers in that industry.
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Well we basically have two seasons, hellfire (4 months or so) and very nice out (rest of year). We stay indoors mostly during hellfire kind of like many do during winter. Still it is nice to never have to see snow again unless say I choose to go skiing in the mountains not far away. And for me personally being able to afford a decent house and yard in the middle of growing metropolis and yet still only be a 4 to 5 hour drive from the perfect weather on the coast (Disneyland and everything else) or Vegas as well (been there enough times in my youth that one is a bit less enticing these days). Guess it takes being born a desert dweller to love the desert.
The current web client is still effectively unusable for day to day admin.I tried to use a VM console session on it yesterday. Every time I moved focus away from the window and back, the mouse pointer would turn invisible.
I usually only ever use it as an absolute last resort to do things that can't be done in the legacy client.
The Flex client is lovely, and the basic ideas behind it were sound. For small deployments. But it fell apart when used at scale and the inventory service (upon which the Flex client relies) needs to be killed.
The HTML 5 client works at scale. It has seen far more testing in that regard than the Flex client ever did. It - for the most part - keeps the good stuff of the Flash client, and jettisons the crap bits. Of course, it's not feature complete, so it's all going to depend on when they get that done.
The other thing to note is that the Flash client wasn't such a big deal when it was launched for two reasons:
1) deployments (and cluster sizes) were much smaller
2) most browsers at the time didn't freak the hell out about flash
But it all went sideways in short order. The world changed not too long after the Flex client emerged and VMware didn't adapt. The Flex client subsequently became n albatross.
That's really where my disillusionment with VMware started. Not because they don't product great technologies or ideas - they do - but they have such overwhelmingly powerful "not invented here" syndrome that when there are issues with the product - or when the world changes around them - VMware can't and won't adapt.
The majority of the grief people have with the Flex client would have gone away if it didn't need so much pissing around with browsers to make it work properly. But VMware pretended the world was the same for way too long and here we are.
I want a browser-based client. After the day I just had trying to get a downed VMware cluster back online, I could (and probably will) write several blogs on why that's a much better idea than an installable one. I want the asynchronous actions capability of the Flex client.
I just want the inventory service to not be shit, the client to be faster, the whitespace to be less and the damned thing to Just Fucking Work in modern browsers. The HTML 5 client meets all these requirements.
Try it. I bet you'll really like it.
I want it to work too. Which is why I am on vsphere 5.5 with .net client. No plans to upgrade. I stayed on 4.1 until past end of support. I've had to file maybe 1 or 2 vmware related support requests per year over past 5 years.
As someone who has been using linux as their primary desktop since 1996, I hated the .net client for a long time. Till I saw the flash client. Even for small scale it's just too slow.
I'm happy if the new HTML5 client works better, though even if it worked perfectly it wouldn't make me consider upgrading for that. .net client works fine for me.
My normal interaction with vsphere is running a windows VM on linux then running a xenapp client to a xenapp server running vsphere (xenapp on linux and vsphere don't mix well in my experience ). My two vsphere servers are 3000 and about 8000 miles away from my desktop.
I've been a loyal vmware customer since 1999, I don't see that changing but I am firmly in the vsphere only camp when it comes to servers at least (also use vmware workstation on my systems too).
Citrix re did their netscaler interface in html5 too (before it was java only). Html5 interface is terrible. So slow compared to the java UI. Once again at first glance I hated having to use java, till I saw what they did to "fix" that problem. Then I wanted java back.
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