Another IT conference?

There are few global IT conferences that I look upon each year because each of them represents the state of specific part of the IT industry. Networking and security is one of my favourite subject because it is dynamic and innovate rapidly for the last 10 years. We see the transition from physical network into the cloud networking. From static, to as-a-service and on-demand. The geek side of me craves more to learn how a technology works under the hood. So I love to see conferences in the networking and security subject because it gives me opportunity to learn deeper about innovation in networking and security technology.

Recent article lists VMware as one of the top 10 enterprise networking company. The interesting thing is that VMware is the only pure-software networking and security company in that list. I believe software is much more agile in terms of innovation and speed of deployment. So you will expect to see innovations in the networking and security subject at VMworld 2021.

This year VMworld 2021 is held in online format, virtually around the globe. The advantage of an online conference is that everyone is able to join without travel. Registration for general pass is free. You can get Tech+ Pass as well which includes access to private sessions such as 1-to-1 discussion with VMware Engineers as well as getting discount vouchers for certification.

In this article I would like to list three sessions that I are thought provoking in my view.

Apply SRE’s Golden Signals for Monitoring Toward Network Operations [NET1088]

Overview

Golden signals, such as rate, latency, saturation and utilization, are critical for SRE and operations teams. Getting these golden signals can be a challenge. VMware NSX-T native operation capabilities and related tools can help simplify operations and provide observability for network operators. We will cover the key principles and native components in NSX-T, and how to customize the NSX-T dashboard to enhance your network operational experience. We will also demonstrate the open source NSX-T Power Operations tool and how it can help maintain network and platform health and security compliance, and provide posture and configuration documentation. We will discuss how the VMware NSX native operation capabilities work in concert with other tools to provide proactive network management that helps to identify a problem and takes action to remediate.

Speaker: Dominic Foley, Solutions Architect, VMware Jing Shi, TPM, VMware Sonam Sinha, Product Manager, VMware

What’s Make This Thought Provoking

Network infrastructure is a blood vessel that carries data and information between the systems. Having and maintain a healthy network infrastructure is important to make sure the data is flowing correctly and securely. For the longest time, metrics collected from the network are rate, latency, and utilization. Collecting, storing, and processing these metrics from multiple places can be a challenge. How might we enable a new way of network monitoring, a programmable way to constantly monitor the important metrics (or golden signal) to ensure the reliability, availability, and security of the network.

10 Things You Need to Know About Project Monterey [MCL1833]

Overview

Project Monterey was announced in the VMworld 2020 keynote. There has been tremendous work done since then. This session details how Project Monterey and SmartNICs will redefine the data center with decoupled control and data planes for management, networking, storage and security—for VMware ESXi hosts and for bare-metal systems. We will discuss 10 things you need to know about Project Monterey to help accelerate your business. Find out how it helps to increase performance, security and manageability for the entire spectrum of VMware vSphere and bare-metal infrastructure management. We will cover and demo the overall architecture and use cases.

Speaker: Sudhanshu Jain, Director Product Management, VMware Niels Hagoort, Staff Technical Marketing Architect, VMware

What’s Make This Thought Provoking

SmartNIC is one of the innovation I follow upon in the networking industry. SmartNIC enables more advance data processing directly in the NIC card. Enabling security function like encryption or firewall directly in the NIC card sounds simple. But imagine doing that on a 100G NIC card. Having SmartNIC offload the processing in the main CPU to the CPU in the NIC card. I’m excited to see what this project can benefit the industry.

Supercharge the Ingress Controller for Multi-Cluster Kubernetes [VMTN2808]

Overview

There are a lot of options when it comes to Ingress Controller for Kubernetes. However, managing it for multi-cluster, highly secured environment is a challenge This tech talk is about how we can enable ingress controller function as well as security function in an integrated fashion. How you can integrate these capabilities for multi-cluster kubernetes setup.

Speaker: Robert Alvianus, Specialist Solution Engineer, VMware

What’s Make This Thought Provoking

Well, there are many options on Ingress Controller for Kubernetes platform. The idea of Kubernetes itself is to make application elastic and more resilient to failure. But how might we make the network services, in this case Ingress controller, to be elastic as well as resilient to failure but still maintaining high performance. What can we do to supercharge the ingress controller function.

Summary

VMworld 2021 is an opportunity to learn more and get update on what’s new in the IT industry, particularly in the networking and security. I wish you a ton of fun, intrigued, and getting excited for what’s ahead at the VMworld 2021. See ya