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Project Pacific - Workload Evolution in vSphere 

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Project Pacific was definitely one of the most exciting and most talked about announcement at this past VMworld. In case you missed the big news, check out this quick snippet of the Day 1 Keynote where Pat Gelsinger and Joe Beda (one of the co-creators of Kubernetes, now at VMware) introduces Project Pacific to the world.


If you ask most folks what Project Pacific is about, they would probably answer something with Kubernetes and Containers in vSphere, which is a fair assessment, especially as Kubernetes was probably mentioned once or twice during the conference 😉

However, Project Pacific is actually more than just Kubernetes but with all the new lingo like Supervisor and Guest Clusters, one can easily get lost in the implementation or what I would refer to as the "how" part of Project Pacific. If you ask me, the "why" part is much more significant and Project Pacific is fundamentally re-defining what and how to deploy a workload in vSphere.

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VMworld Startup: Hivecell - Stackable Edge Computing

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One thing I really enjoy at VMworld when I have a few minutes to spare between sessions and customer meetings is to walk around the Solutions Exchange and learn about what our partners are doing in the VMware eco-system. I usually do not make it in very far before bumping into an old colleague or customer before having to run to my next engagement, but some times I get lucky.

While walking the show floor, I came across a really interesting company that immediately caught eye and you can probably guess why from the picture I took below.


The company is called Hivecell and they make it super easy for Global 500 companies to deploy and maintain software at the Edge without requiring a large IT team to manage the deployments which can be spread across hundreds if not thousands of sites with very little to no IT staff.

One of the biggest challenges with Edge Computing is being able to process the large quantity of data being generated in all of these remote locations on a daily basis. In some cases, the dataset can grow up to several Terabytes and it is no longer feasible to send all of this data to the Cloud or back to your Datacenter to extract the business intelligence and value. In fact, depending on the connectivity of your remote site, it can take weeks before the data is available. For any type of real or near-real time applications, the window where the data is of value can literally be hours if not minutes and it must be processed immediately at the Edge.

Speaking of use cases, here are some of the scenarios where Hivecell believes they can really help with their solution, more details about each use case can be found here.

  • Petrochemicals
  • Renewable Energy
  • Quick Service Restaurant Chains
  • Manufacturing
  • Healthcare
  • Weather
  • Data Science
  • Hotels

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Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2019 US Sessions

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VMworld US 2019 just wrapped up yesterday and it looks like the VMworld team has already processed and published a number of recordings! Similar to past years, I have put together a nice summary page that contains all the session recordings links separated out by the different categories which you can find by visiting http://vmwa.re/vmworld2019.

As of writing this, there are a total of 554 sessions with 496 published with recordings. I will check back next week when more videos and/or PPT decks are posted. Huge thanks to the VMworld team for getting this content out so quickly, be sure to give them a huge thanks if you are on Twitter. For those in the US, enjoy your three day weekend, I know I need a break away from the computer!

UPDATE 1 (09/03/19) - Added both Showcase Key Note and VMware {Code} sessions as well as initial Top 20 session stats by views.

UPDATE 2(09/07/19) - PDF decks are now available and links are published

Here is wget example:

wget --referer http://www.vmware.com https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2019/HBI1967BU.mp4

Here is cURL example:

curl --referer http://www.vmware.com https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2019/HBI1967BU.mp4 -O HBI1967BU.mp4

Here is PowerCLI example:

$headers = @{"referer" = "http://www.vmware.com"}
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2019/HBI1967BU.mp4 -Headers $headers -Outfile HBI1967BU.mp4

In addition, I have also published us.txt file which contains the name of the session + download URL which can then be used by this quick PowerShell script called downloadSessions.ps1 to automatically download. You can edit the us.txt file to only include sessions you want downloaded (make sure its copied from the original file) since it contains "#" symbol as a delimiter for the title and the download URL.