VMworld general session

Here’s my attempts at live blogging the VMworld general session from San Francisco . 

With most of the press releases already pushed out this morning I’m not sure how many surprises VMware will have in store for us during the first keynote of the conference.

I’m seated with the wonderful VMUG team about 6 rows from the front thanks to Angelo Luciani.  To get a feel for what that might look like here are a couple pictures.

The whole cracking of walls noises blasting through the speakers is kind of ironic seeing as we just had an earthquake a couple nights ago. A great conversation starter at the least.

After a pretty entertaining episode of dancing with the stars CMO Robin Matlock takes the stage to kick things off touting VMware will continue to leverage their three main strategic priorities; Software Defined Datacenter, hybrid cloud and end user computing. Furthermore she went on to say that VMworld is really about community and leveraged VMUG as an example of that. Something I completely agree with.

From here let’s get a lesser known guy on the stage, CEO Pat Gelsinger. He started out by comparing our industry and life to water, stating we need to be more adaptive to change, a liquid world.

Pat spoke about bravery comparing engineers working on the most important piece of software in the world to that of sending your child off to school for the first time. Pat does a great job at attend!pting to relate to almost every person in the audience. He then went on to call out a few customers that have been innovating using VMware products, having customers stand up in the audience.

Finally the announcements.

SDDC

Announcing VMware vCloud Suite 5.8 and beta of vSphere 6.0 and VVOL. And the oddly named vRealize suite!

Perhaps one of the most rumoured announcement is that around Project Marvin, VMware’s hyperconverged play. Now dubbed VMware EVO, with the first member of the family EVO:RAIL. A software based appliance that can be delivered by some big named VMware partners such as Dell and EMC. Certainly at this point I see RAIL with specific use cases, but am super excited to see this grow.

A common platform for all apps. VMware now working very closely with docker, pivotal, and google to best leverage the use of containers in a VMware environment. A VMware openstack environment at that. Yes, they have also announced a VMware integrated version of Openstack.

Most the EUC information will be covered in Tuesdays session.

And now Bill Fathers comes up to talk a little Hybrid Cloud, more specific the VMware hybrid cloud offering vCloud Air!

Speaking of the four phases of cloud adoption; experimental, professional, mass market and legacy he believes we are moving from experimental to professional today. The challenge being how do we make that move? Concentrating on the apps and putting the IT professionals back in charge, all in a hybrid offering is VMware a answer. This was then backed up with a quick video of some vCloud Air customers.

New features being introduced into vCloud Air are devops services, database as a service offerings, object storage through EMC VIPR, mobility services and cloud management tools, being vRealize Automation ( vCAC ). All of this which will be available in a on demand minute by minute billing environment.

Next VMware ‘s own Carl Eschenbach brought up three customers with real insight on how the software defined data center has changed the way they work and run IT.

To cap things off we heard a few of the advantages of VMware EVO rail early access customers And that, is a wrap. And a poor attempt at live blogging 🙂