VMworld 2015 Recap
Sometimes technology evolves gradually, other times it takes dramatic leaps that change the landscape of the industry. Examples of recent revolutionary technology leaps would be the Apple iPhone, VMware ESX, YouTube and Facebook. This year at VMworld I believe I saw several technologies that will be game-changing technology leaps.
Project Enzo
Having attended a roadmap session on Project Enzo, I can say that Enzo is going to be a game-changer for a few different reasons. It ties together a set of technologies that IDC already ranks as the top virtual desktop platform, namely the pieces found in Horizon Enterprise, as well as some new features to make deploying desktops faster and easier to manage.
Enzo will significantly reduce the high upfront effort required to plan and architect a virtual desktop environment. It also makes ongoing infrastructure maintenance, such as patches and upgrading an effortless automatic task. I predict that in several years, most environments currently running Horizon will be migrating to an Enzo environment, probably based on host and storage hardware refresh cycles. Enzo could even become the preferred deployment model for Windows 10 in the majority of business environments. More information about Project Enzo is available here: http://vmware.com/go/ProjectEnzo
Arraya plans to offer managed services and management of Enzo-based desktops and end-user help desk support similar to our existing offerings for VMware Horizon desktop environments.
Project Skyscraper
Moving to “the cloud” can be a painful and lengthy process. Some cloud providers can have SLA limitations that require you to re-architect your app for high availability, and migrating a VM to the cloud can result in a large amount of downtime. You might have to reconfigure applications to support a different IP address scheme, and your apps might break as the VM undergoes a format conversion.
Enter Project Skyscraper. Your migration to the cloud now involves a vMotion migration. Your app doesn’t go down, you don’t have to reconfigure anything, nothing breaks. This is first hybrid cloud that takes “hybrid” to a real technology and not a marketing buzzword.
Public cloud environments have great adoption for newly-built cloud native apps, but many IT departments are hesitant to move existing production workloads into cloud environments because of the limitations and challenges. By eliminating these limitations and challenges, the floodgates will open to wider scale cloud adoption in use cases where it just wasn’t previously feasible.
More information about Project Skyscraper is available here: http://www.virtualizationteam.com/cloud/vmware-cross-cloud-vmotion-is-another-major-milestone-on-vmware-seemless-hybrid-cloud-vision.html
Arraya can help you plan and execute your seamless cloud migration and provide ongoing managed support for both your public and private cloud environments. Contact your Arraya account rep if you are interested in having a high-level discussion or a deep dive into any of these technologies.
For a full list of technology highlights at VMWorld 2015, see http://www.vmware.com/radius/vmworld-2015-us-its-a-wrap/
