VMware Data Services Manager coming to VMware Explore Barcelona
Many of you will have noticed that I have been writing a lot about VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) over the past year or so. Well, we have been working diligently behind the scenes on an amazing set of new features and functionality for this product. We are planning on sharing quite a few tech previews of these new features and functionalities at VMware Explore 2023 in Barcelona. The crux of VMware Data Services Manager, as the name implies, is to make it simple to provision data services such as databases onto vSphere infrastructure. However, a critical part of the product is to enable VI Admins maintain control over vSphere resources. At the same time, DSM provides the end users of the data services with a simple consumption model to make it easy to provision those data services as needed. DSM providers the necessary guard-rails, lifecycle management and monitoring features to take care of all day 2 operations associated with the provisioned data services. Essentially, we are building a product to allow the VI Admin take more control of data services, similar to how enabled VI Admins take control of the storage infrastructure through vSAN. Now that our VI Admins are well versed in managed the storage infrastructure, we believe the next natural step is enable these VI Admins to manage the data services that sit on top of the storage infrastructure. Its no longer a matter of only managing the bits, bytes, blocks and files, but stepping up to manage the actual applications that are using the data.
In this post, I want to share some of the major VMware Data Service Manager topics we are hosting at the event.
Meet the Expert (MTE) Round-table [CEIM1287BCN]
For any of you who have any questions regarding the VMware Data Services Manager product, especially from an internal workings perspective, then this is a must. I’ll be joined by members of our engineering team and field team to help you to understand how the product operates as well as use-cases and best practices. Note that scheduling for the MTE Round-table sessions only become available two weeks prior to the event. However, I already have my slots for this MTE if you want to make a note.
- Monday, November 6th at 1pm | Hall 8.0, Meet the Experts, Table 5
- Tuesday, November 7th at 11:30am | Hall 8.0, Meet the Experts, Table 4
Best Practices for Operating VMware Data Services Manager [CEIB1286BCN]
In this session, I will be joined by my good friend Amaury. We will share some of the lessons learnt from various DSM deployments that we have been involved in, along with a lot of the advanced options that we learnt ourselves as we familiarized ourselves with the product. We will also use this opportunity to provide some tech previews of the newer features mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, we had to move this session from Thursday to Wednesday, so apologies to those of you who had already registered, and have had a cancellation. Hopefully you can also join us at this new time on Wednesday.
CTEX 2: VMware Data Services Manager – Database Management for vSphere
This is part of the Customer Technical Exchange (CTEX) event. If you are unable to make it to the CEIB1286BCN breakout earlier in the morning, then you might be able to join Amaury and I for this one. Again, we’ll be talking about all aspects of DSM, and hope to give you some tech previews of what we have coming soon. Also, this is a longer slot (1 hour rather than 45 minutes) so we will plan on showing a few more details in this session. I did not have a link for this event at the time of publication, but I did have the scheduled time and data. I will update the post as soon as I have a link.
So those are the session where you will catch me talking about VMware Data Services. There are a few other sessions where you might see VMware Data Services Manager discussed. I added them here as you might want to attend these to learn more.
TAM Success 360 Deep Dive: Cloud Data Infrastructure: Strategy and Product Portfolio [TAM1425BCN]
This is an opportunity for TAM/Success 360 customers to join Christos Karamanolis (VMware Fellow) and Michael Gandy (Product Director) as they share our storage vision and strategy. Here they will show the combined efforts in innovation across all of our storage and data product portfolio. Should be good, since Christos is at the forefront of driving many of these efforts. Note that this session will only be visible to TAM/S360 registered customers, so I do not have a link. However you can search on the title or the presenter names in the catalog to locate it.
- Tuesday, November 7th at 2:45pm.
Storage and Data Infrastructure Innovations: from vSAN to Data Services on VMware Clouds [VIB1300BCN]
This session is an opportunity for all of our customers to join Christos and Michael as they share our storage vision and strategy once again, not just for the underlying storage infrastructure innovations at VMware, but also for the services that we are building on top. This will be a great session to get a futuristic view of where we see VMware heading from a data perspective, especially in the context of our recently announced Private-AI initiative where data plays a key role.
Solution Keynote: Innovations to Accelerate Your Enterprise Cloud Transformation [CEIK2158BCN]
This is the keynote of our business group at VMware. Here you will see the various products and offerings brought together in a coherent vision and presented by some of our business group leaders. I’m working with some others behind the scenes to build out some of the demos and talk tracks. This is significantly different to the keynote that was delivered at VMware Explore in Las Vegas earlier this year. We think you will find it interesting.
Technology Innovation Showcase [TECK2157BCN]
This is always a great session. It shows off many of the projects that are underway at VMware. As you can imagine, AI (and our own Private AI) initiatives are generating a lot of interest. My understanding is that this session will focus on this area, and highlight many of the innovations that we are working on to deliver on a Private-AI stack on vSphere. Again, data is key in this situation, so we want to demonstrate how VMware Data Services manager, albeit only a part of the stack, is a major component of this vision.
Kubernetes for vSphere Administrators Book Signing
I’ll close with this exciting event. My good friends over at Runecast are once again sponsoring a book signing of my Kubernetes for vSphere Administrators. Now last year the books went in a matter of minutes. However, this year, after a chat with Stan and the team at Runecast, they are going to sponsor 5X the number of books compared to 2022. This is really very generous of them. So if you would like a free copy of Kubernetes for vSphere Administrators, signed by my good self, come along to the Runecast booth in the expo on Wednesday.
- Wednesday, November 8th at 3:30pm
As you can see, we are hoping to create quite a splash around VMware Data Services Manager at VMware Explore 2023 in Barcelona. I’m very excited to be involved in this product, and looking forward to what 2024 will bring in this space.