Virtualization may feel like an abstract technological construct, but it’s coming closer to everything that touches our lives.

This idea of virtual computing is transforming our organizations and shaping the edge, embedded, mobile and other tangible devices at the heart of our technological existence. Without hypervisors, containers and other virtualization technologies, the digitization of our lives will still take place, albeit at a much slower pace.

However, virtualization-stoked innovations would be impractical without the educated workforce needed to design, build, deploy and manage them. No country anywhere can build robust virtualization expertise if the necessary education, training and other skill-building opportunities are denied to particular demographic groups, such as young women from underprivileged backgrounds and living in remote or rural areas.

This is no idle threat, as the personal experience of 21-year-old Nobel Peace Prize recipient Malala Yousafzai (pictured) illustrates. In the day two keynote at VMworld 2018, Yousafzai discussed her foundation’s ongoing efforts to help young women in the developing world gain the educations necessary to life themselves, their families, and communities out of poverty.

Nobody present in the conference hall — from any of the 85 countries represented — would have become a successful virtualization professional if they had been denied a quality education during their formative years. And they had every opportunity to continue deepening their expertise in this and related fields — such as artificial intelligence and the “internet of things” — by availing themselves of the abundant breakout sessions, hands-on labs and other educational resources at VMworld 2018.

Pioneers of the possible

Day two’s general session focused on “pioneers of the possible” — in other words, how some visionary users had leveraged software-defined data centers, hybrid clouds, containerized applications, and the Internet of Things to transform their operations for the better. Prior to Yousafzai’s keynote, Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer of VMware Customer Operations, kicked it all off in conversation with several customers who had used virtualization tools, edge computing, and artificial intelligence to prepare their organizations for the future.

Most of the key announcements on day two — from VMware and its corporate parent Dell Technologies Inc. — focused on the tangible possibilities unlocked by the convergence of the IoT, network virtualization and artificial intelligence.

Dell signaled its commitment to openness and standardization in IoT by declaring its active participation in EdgeX Foundry, a vendor-neutral open source project that is building a common interoperability framework to facilitate an ecosystem for edge computing. It also participates in such IoT-related standards groups as the Industrial Internet Consortium, the OpenFog Consortium and the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium.

In IoT-related product announcements, Dell announced that next month it will be releasing its new IoT Connected Bundles. Intended as turnkey offerings that partners may choose to tailor for specific customer requirement, these new bundles address specific customer IoT use cases. The bundles combine sensors and partner-sourced licensed software. Designed as revenue opportunities for channel partners, the bundles are validated, market-proven solutions that partners can deliver to their customers as turnkey offerings. Some of the first group of IoT Connected Bundles address a wide range of distinct vertical focused IoT requirements, including energy efficiency and food safety for grocers, video surveillance for K-12 educational institutions, efficient remote monitoring of field assets for oil and gas, and predictive maintenance for manufacturers. Others address horizontal requirements, including compliance-as-a-service for HVAC, refrigeration and power systems; advanced data center infrastructure management; and self-contained and powered surveillance for safety and security in outdoor spaces. Additional IoT Connected Bundles will be made available after further curation through Dell Technologies’ IoT Solutions Partner Program.

Separately, Dell Technologies announced its new IoT Solution for Surveillance, which is a hyperconverged, preintegrated edge-to-cloud solution that will be made generally available in October. It has been tested and certified by Dell EMC Surveillance Validation Lab in extreme simulations to ensure it will stand up in rugged real-world conditions. It incorporates such built-in security measures as NSX-T’s micro-segmentation and the ability to push real-time over-the-air updates and security patches from the cloud to potentially thousands of edge-based surveillance cameras at the same time. The devices will be remotely manageable through VMware Pulse IoT Center. The solution will use Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage for automated, fault-tolerant scaling from 300 terabytes to 50-+ petabytes of storage in private or hybrid clouds, as well as on-premises environments. It will guarantee high availability and zero data loss with vSAN RAID 5/6 across flash and disk and use VMware ESXi Enterprise Plus for high availability and disaster recovery services.

These new IoT solutions incorporate VMware Pulse IoT Center, which is software for securing, managing and monitoring edge endpoints, gateways, embedded PCs and server hardware. Also announced this week, the new version 2.0 of Pulse IoT Center is consumable as an on-premises or SaaS solution, with the latter hosted by VMware or its cloud provider partners. Version 2.0 offers more fine-grained remote administration tools, more stringent security for distributed devices and their embedded applications within edge-based SDDCs, enhanced alerts and notifications and improved over-the-air cloud-to-edge updates. It also supports larger IoT deployments to hundreds of thousands of edge devices, RESTful APIs for customer and partner integration and role-based user access and multitenancy for isolation among distinct organizations, use cases and cloud-to-edge workloads.

These day-two announcements followed several sophisticated edge-related R&D previews that were announced the previous day:

• Project Magna will rely on AI to manage application software and hardware infrastructure in public, private, hybrid and multiclouds and all the way to the edge nodes.
• Project Dimension will extend VMware Cloud Foundation to the edge in a hyperconverged appliance that will be managed remotely by VMware, offering built-in security and workload isolation.
• The new 64-bit ARM for Edge will run VMware’s ESXi purpose-built bare-metal hypervisor on 64-bit ARM devices in edge deployment modes, such as the edge-based windmill turbines demonstrated in day one’s general session.
• Amazon Relational Database Service will run on VMware in a private data center or on edge nodes.

On theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell Technologies, discussed the move to the edge, the opportunities that this trend presents for vendors of virtualization solutions, and the roles of AI, multiclouds and software-defined data centers in making edge deployments self-driving, flexible and comprehensive in scope:

Photo: VMware/Twitter