It gives me great pleasure to announce a new open source project from VMware called VMware VR Datacenter Experience, this is an immersive experience that allows you to put on your virtual reality headset and take yourself into a virtual management environment where you will be able to control your vSphere Environment with the wave of a hand or click of a button.

Details

The VMware VR Datacenter Experience allows you to use a HTC Vive headset to enter a virtual datacenter where a virtual representation of each of your hosts is created by integration with the vSphere 6.5 REST API, once these are created the VM’s are dropped onto these hosts, one for each VM currently registered with the host. In this environment you are able to teleport yourself to each of these hosts and interact with the VMs.

You can pick them up to find out more information about their configuration:

You can even drop them into a trashcan to remove them from your datacenter:

We even extended it to work with VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) where you could literally throw (vMotion) your VM’s from your On-Premises datacenter into VMC.

Showing you the 2D pictures of this virtual reality environment really does not do it justice, you need to try it to believe it!

Background

At VMware we have internal Hackathon’s where we are able to take a couple of days away from our day job to work on projects which we think are interesting and could provide valuable to VMware, this is a great initiative that fosters

innovation, personally I love working for a company that provides this level of free thinking! Together with William Lam, Yateendra Kulkarni, Vinod Pai and Steve Trefethen, I put a team together and we set out to work on what a VMware Datacenter would look like in Virtual Reality.

I should mention at this point that none of us had developed for VR before, in fact we had never even used the IDE (Unity) before, that was fun! After a couple of days we were pleased when we managed to produce a single host and VMs on that host all by calling the vSphere 6.5 REST API.

After this and some internal marketing and some spare time hacking away at the project we came up with something pretty cool that later allowed me to realize one of my bucket list items and present on the main VMworld Keynote stage with Pat Gelsinger (VMware CEO).

VMworld Keynote

If you didn’t get a chance to watch the VMworld Barcelona Keynote then please do take 5 minutes out of your time to watch the demo below that shows the full remit of what we expanded this project to work with.

Where Can I Get this?

The initial project is now available and ready for you to download, it has been cut down to its basics so we can build on it and ensure the code we are adding and the functionality is based around user input.

Of course you will need the following:

Check out the project landing page here for more details: https://vmware.github.io/vr-dc-ex/

And if you want to take a look at the code, ask for more features or even contribute back to the project then please checkout the github repo here: https://github.com/vmware/vr-dc-ex

The Full story

At VMworld I had the chance to catch up with Barry Coombs who interviewed my on this complete story, check out the clip below to learn how a small town boy ended up on stage with a Silicon Valley CEO…

-Alan

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