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Server Consolidation Using IBM BladeCenter and VMware Infrastructure
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Event recap: VMworld 2018 Europe
It is the 20th anniversary year for VMware and at the VMware European conference in Barcelona, the company famous for its hypervisor, showcased how it had changed the face of IT, and where it was heading next. For many, virtualisation has become a no-brainer: take physical servers and virtualise the workloads. This approach has enabled businesses to consolidate and modernise large server estates, using larger servers, segmented into multiple virtual machines, each running a workload that previously would have required a physical server.
For its CEO, Pat Gelsinger, this approach to running datacentres has resulted in companies making massive savings on the energy required to run large x86-based server estates. At VMworld, the company has now extended the benefits of virtualisation to the world of blockchain which, incidentally, has the potential to consume vast amounts of server power.
Beyond virtualisation, Gelsinger used his keynote to speak out about the responsibility of the tech industry.
On the second day of the show Martha Lane Fox also spoke about ethics. She said: “We need to make sure the human is at the start of everything we do. I want to try to encourage the use of technology to solve the problems that really matter. Lead with a human, not the technology.”
But while industry leaders discussed the role of IT in society, the real focus of the event was about what VMware is going to be doing next - and it is fair to say that the company is lining up to follow Gartner’s Hyper cycle on emerging technologies.
Certainly, blockchain and artificial intelligence are on the cards. Among the technology bets VMware is making is in-memory computing, with the introduction in 2019 of Intel’s Optane platform, which will replace SSD in hyperconverged systems. In fact, on November 12, Evaluator Group published new record IOmark-VM-HC benchmark for a VMware vSAN using Intel Optane. The Intel based hyperconverged system comprised of 4 Intel Xeon scalable processor servers, together with Intel Optane SSD storage and VMware vSAN software achieved results of 1,152 IOmark-VMs at a price of $216.23 / IOmark-VM. According to Evaluator Group, the cost per VM of this configuration is a third of the cost of the previous best ($667 per VM).
More near term, VMware now regards containers as a viable enterprise platform for its existing customers. Its approach to containerisation is about offering on-premise Kubernetes through VMware PKS (Pivotal Kubernetes on Bosh platform) and Cloud PKS, to support public cloud deployments. During VMworld, the company also announced it would be acquiring Heptio.
The company is building up a portfolio of tools and a technology stack, which it can position as a common platform for enterprise Kubernetes and virtualisation. Ed Hoppitt, director for applications transformation and cloud native at VMware, said: “Every CIO I speak to wants to avoid the silos. They say their developers want to go in Kubernetes but to go into Kubernetes, they will need an IT infrastructure. Why would you do that?”
These are also closely related to: "Server Consolidation Using IBM BladeCenter and VMware Infrastructure"
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VMworld 2019 Europe: Where next for VMware?
In the same way many enterprises have had to adapt and innovate in the face of new challengers and market changes, VMware is also in the midst of huge transformation of its own.
The company’s server virtualisation software is commonplace within enterprise datacentres, but with many firms increasingly looking to shutter their server farms, move off-premise, and embrace cloud-native development practices, VMware has had to adapt accordingly.
As such, the firm has moved to align itself with the major public cloud players, and help their joint customer tap into the benefits that come from operating a hybrid cloud setup.
At the same time, the company has also made a concerted effort to ensure its technologies can continue to support customers as they negotiate re-engineering their application estates, so they can take advantage of containers, and adopt microservices strategies, for example.
That’s just a snapshot of the huge body of work the company has undertaken in recent years, which we will examine more closely in this e-guide. It also offers a round-up of some of the biggest announcements VMware made at this year’s VMworld US 2019 conference, as part of a countdown towards its European conference in November 2019.
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A Computer Weekly Buyer's Guide to Server Operating Systems
The role of a server operating system is shifting. It has
been influenced by cloud computing – whether it be
public or private – as well as virtualisation.
In this 12-page buyer’s guide, Computer Weekly explores:
- What’s new in Windows Server 2016; an OS designed with cloud in mind
- What has changed between Linux & Unix and the current state of play between the two competing OS
- The evolution of the server operating
system, and sees the next generation moving into the cloud
