VMware pulse IoT center, an IoT management suite

VMware pulse IoT center, an IoT management suite
Abstract— Internet of things is one of the catch words now a day.
It promises a great future for the internet. Today common types
of communications are person to person, machine to person, or
person to machine. But Internet of things brings a new
technology where a type of communication is machine to
machine. Many technology and protocols have been studied for
this new communication. One of the new and emerging
technologies is VMware Pulse IoT center which provides IoT
device management in a pretty manner. It serves as management
glue between hardware. This paper will take a look on features,
benefits and working of VMware pulse IoT center including
summary of IoT solutions by VMware pulse IoT center.
Keywords—Internet of things, VMware pulse, IoT center.
I. INTRODUCTION
The notion of Internet of things was first given by Kevin
Ashton in 1999 [1]. The term “internet of things” is not
clearly defined and has been used and miss used as a buzz
word of scientific research, marketing and sales strategies [2].
One definition has recently been sketched in the Strategic
Research Agenda of the Cluster of European Research
Projects on internet of things [2]. (CERP-IoT 2009);
“Internet of Things (IoT) is an integrated part of Future
Internet and could be defined as a dynamic global network
infrastructure with self configuring capabilities based on
standard and interoperable communication protocols where
physical and virtual ‘things’ have identities, physical
attributes, and virtual personalities and use intelligent
interfaces, and are seamlessly integrated into the information
network. In the IoT, ‘things’ are expected to become active
participants in business, information and social processes
where they are enabled to interact and communicate among
themselves and with the environment by exchanging data and
information ‘sensed’ about the environment, while reacting
autonomously to the ‘real/physical world’ events and
influencing it by running processes that trigger actions and
create services with or without direct human intervention.
Interfaces in the form of services facilitate interactions with
these ‘smart things’ over the Internet, query and change their
state and any information associated with them, taking into
account security and privacy issues.”
The internet of things is here and the data generated by the
millions of connecting things is helping enterprises improve
business agility, create efficiencies and deliver better customer
experiences but is enterprises embrace IoT the one of the
challenge; management, security and scale, which can further
amplify by disconnect operational technology (OT) which
owns assets, the sensors and Information Technology (IT)
who must secure in managerial? VMware has the solution to
address all of these challenges. VMware pulse IoT center is an
enterprise great IoT device management and monitoring
solution that enables both OT and IT to Onboard, Manage,
Monitor and secure their IoT use cases from the edge of
available cloud. It all starts with LIOTA a little IoT agent
which is an open source SDK that resides on connected things
and edge gateway. It helps to collect the information of
sensors being managed and delivers OTA (on the air) software
and security updates. It also provides a single pane of glass for
IT and OT users to manage all of their IoT use cases. OT
tracks the status in health of connected devices while IT
manages complete software and firmware lifecycle. With
pulse IoT centers, we can define and view metrics and alerts,
monitor the health of IoT devices to identify anomalies in real
time and take preset actions if required. Pulse IoT centers
provides over the year security updates and patches. It also
supports on-prem deployments to address privacy in
governance. VMware pulse IoT centers extends VMware’s
digital trends for major expertise to the edge of your business
where your IoT infrastructure resides.
It’s a survey paper. We took a survey with in a city to review
the common business man’s opinion on VMware pulse IoT
center’s benefits. According to their, it’s a very helpful app
where IoT will has horizontal use cases that could apply
across all the organizations. With this point of view, it will
definitely be used to gain profit in the business as both OT and
IT will have a single pane of glass for their device
management.
II. WHY VMWARE PULSE IOT CENTER
“Reference [3] declares that VMware pulse IoT is not about
VMware and AirWatch, as both are separate things. However
VMware pulse IoT borrows some features from AirWatch for
the 3 tier IoT environment. IoT is not just about the sensors, it
also about the scope as well. IoT is limited to OT which is a
disappointing thing that’s why IoT has not any horizontal use
cases which could apply on all organizations.” IoT have many
solutions in market but all of these need much effort and time
consuming deployment. Sometimes there are no adapters for
the sensors and such solutions do not work well at different
edges or devices. VMware is taking a new approach to IoT
with the latest launch of VMware pulse IoT center. By
providing security and end to end infrastructure management,
Muhammad Sheraz Arshad Malik1
, Bakhtawar Jabeen2
. Sadaf Safder3
,
Kiran Huma4
, Iqra Fatima5
Ayesha Saleem6
Department of Information Technology
Govt. College University
Faisalabad, Pakistan
bjabeen49@yahoo.com2
International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),
Vol. 16, No. 6, June 2018
139 https://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/
ISSN 1947-5500

VMware pulse IoT center enables OT and IT to manage,
secure and monitor all IoT devices from the edge to the cloud.
To help customer for addressing complex IoT use cases
across different industries, VMware is forging alliances
related to IoT with;
• Server OEMs/Edge Systems
• Embedded OEMs
• Systems Integrators
• Business Applications and Analytics
• IoT Platform Vendors
Some examples of partners of this project are [4]:
• Dell
• Herman
• Deloitte.
• Pivotal
• IBM
• Viz Explorer
• Microsoft and others.
III. PULSE IOT CENTER WITH LIOTA
LIOTA stands for “little IoT agent” is an open source SDK
provides some kind of ease to the developers of IoT solution
developers to create IoT edge system for data orchestration [5].
For VMware pulse IoT center, LIOTA is a client side module,
resides of edge gateways or embedded things. It transmits data
to the VMware pulse IoT center console back in the cloud or
data centers. Through LIOTA, developers can deliver their
innovation by building secure IoT gateway applications for
data orchestration and control between edge devices and data
centers. Many organizations want to take full advantages of
IoT applications but they couldn’t do so because of a big
challenge of interoperability [6]. This situation appears because
of the lack of common communication protocols and data
aggregation protocols between edge devices as well as network
protocols [6]. So it is needed to create an app that could
support interpretability. One step to this direction is 3-tier
architecture, which connects edge devices to the data centers
via intelligent gateways [6]. A diagram of 3-tier architecture is
shown below in Fig.1
Fig.1
These gateways are intelligent hub but problem with diverse
IoT devices is being unable to understand different languages,
is still persist with this architecture. To overcome this issue
LIOTA comes up with a common model for unified data
acquisition and orchestration [6]. It provides interaction
between any IoT device and any data center component over
any transport and through any IoT gateway or edge system. It
has been successfully tested with many gateways and cloud
components from both VMware and community such as
VMware pulse IoT center [6].
Features
Some key features of LIOTA are as follows [7];
• The underlying hardware system (board)
• Hardware with the operating system (gateway)
• Connected devices (‘Things’)
• A transformer abstraction (for formatting and analysis
of metrics)
• Transport abstractions for connection to the data-center
• DCCs (data center components)
• Alerts, metrics and actions.
Design goals [7]
• primary design goals
• simplicity
• easy to use
• simple installation and modification
A. secondary design goals
• generality
• modularity
• quality
Key components
Liota has abstractions which correspond to a complete data
flow from a device attached to the edge system to an
application in a data-center [7];
• Connected Device represents a device or any entity
attached to or on an IoT gateway.
• DeviceComms is an abstraction of the communication
mechanisms between a device and an edge system.
• Edge System represents the hardware and software
platforms of an IoT gateway or edge system.
• Metric represents a time-series stream from a data source
to a datacenter application.
• Data-Center Component is an abstraction of the
protocol and format a data-center component requires.
Vol. 16, No. 6, June 2018
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• DCCComms is an abstraction of the communication
mechanisms between the edge system and data-center.
These components are shown below in Fig.2
Fig.2
Liota Dynamic Packages
Package Manager allows the loading and unloading of
Liota packages. A liota package is a Python class having
[7]:
• A dependency list (of other packages)
• Code to obtain configuration from registry and references
to objects from other packages
• A run method
• A cleanup method
IV. FEATURES OF VMWARE PULSE IOT CENTER
A. Setup
It is highly scalable and supports many of sensors and
actuators means IoT connected devices [8]. It provides solution
for deployment; security and flexibility. Its future version will
be offered as cloud hosted [8].
B. Enterprise Integrations
It can also be integrated with existing monitoring system
[9].
C. Monitor
It can identify irregularities or unusual things with real time
monitoring. It can also analyze the infrastructure [8].
D. envision the things
It provides topology representation of infrastructure, 2 tier or 3
tier, in a parent child relationship diagram.
E. Flexible rules engine
It also defines what, where and when things are updated.
F. Edge device management system
IoT is a large collection of different connected devices.
VMware pulse IoT center can manage different connected
things and gateways with different hardware, communication
protocols and operating system. It also provides single point of
management for both OT and IT [8].
G. Smart data orchestration
It can transport data where and when it is desired across the
edge and into the cloud by integrating into enterprise system.
H. Security
It provides security at devices, network and user level with
software updates and with VMware identity manager
integration [8]. Pulse IoT centers provides over the year
security updates and patches. Through this, network can also
wipe the compromised gateway [8].
Availability
Channel partners and customers can work with Dell
Technologies and Microsoft to purchase this solution in the
second half of 2018 [10].
V. COCLUSION
With the growing technology, Internet of things has become a
first choice for many organizations. IoT is a very wide field
having emerging technologies with diverse and complex
landscape and these technologies needs complex solutions and
much effort too. IoT seems to be limited only to OT which is a
disappointing thing as it has not any horizontal use cases which
could apply across all organizations. VMware pulse IoT center
provides solution over this issue by allowing both OT and IT to
have complete control over their form the edge all the way to
the cloud. Pulse IoT center provides different features like
monitoring, on boarding, security and management. It all starts
with LIOTA, a little IoT agent. For VMware pulse IoT center,
LIOTA is a client side module, resides of edge gateways or
embedded things. It transmits data to the VMware pulse IoT
center console back in the cloud or data centers. Through
LIOTA, developers can deliver their innovation by building
secure IoT gateway applications for data orchestration and
control between edge devices and data centers. However
LIOTA can work with any OS that support Python. So for
future enhancement, it should support other languages too.
VI. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I greatly thankful to Department of Information Technology,
Government College University, Faisalabad Pakistan
References
[1] Z.Bozdogan R.Kara, “Layered model architecture for
internet of things”, Journal of engineering research and
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[2] D.Uckelmann, M.Harrison, F.Michahelles, "1 An
Architectural Approach Towards the Future Internet of
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ISSN 1947-5500

[5] SDxCentral. (2018). Pulse IoT Center (with Agent
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[7] GitHub. (2018). vmware/liota. [online] Available at:
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[8] VMWare. (2018). IoT Device Management with
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[9] Introducing VMware Pulse IoT Center. (n.d.).
[Blog] Pulse IoT. Available at:
https://blogs.vmware.com/pulseiot/2017/05/09/introducing-
vmware-pulse-iot-center/ [Accessed 9 Jun. 2018].
[10] Delltechnologies.com. (2018). Dell Technologies and
Microsoft Collaborate to Help Customers Simplify Delivery
of IoT Solutions. [online] Available at:
https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/press/dell-
technologies-and-microsoft-collaborate-to-help-customers-
simplify-delivery-of-iot-solutions.htm [Accessed 9 Jun.
2018].
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VMware pulse IoT center, an IoT management suite

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