VMworld 2014: General Session – Monday

The first general session for this year’s VMworld just finished and brought us some interesting announcements and provided new and returning VMworld visitors insight into the vision and strategy of VMware. More then 400 unique sessions will be given this year!

First of all, more then 22.000 visitors from 85 different countries were pulled to VMworld this year in San Francisco! Together, we will make sure this VMworld is going to be unforgettable.

Right after a spectacular show (which VMware does an amazing job at each year), Robin Matlock kicked off today’s general session with a speech about challenges and in particular the Golden Gate Bridge. Building it seemed impossible because of budget, objections and destroying peoples view, but still it was built within budget. If you want to, you can achieve anything! Next Robin told people about the GiveBack initiative where VMware donates up to $250.000 when constructing your own paper plane and generate donations for the distance it flies; cool!

Pat Gelsinger got on stage after Robin and talked about a liquid world where everything will be adapting to the business needs. From rigid structures to liquid business. Pat also mentioned businesses are still thinking in silos instead of using virtualization to their advantage. VMware will be supporting OpenStack with the vRealize Suite, making sure you can use the best of all worlds.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure was also touched during Pat’s speech, where VMware EVO (Project Marvin!) was announced. The rumours about VMware delivering hardware were wrong as VMware will partner up with Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Net One, Inspur and Supermicro for hardware delivery.

This solution eases the deployment of SDDC and automates the deployment and provides you with a user friendly web-based interface. The first member of the EVO family will be EVO:RAIL and upcoming is the EVO:RACK solution.

Yesterday I had a good read by Marcel Broeken at vclouds.nl about EVO:RAIL which you can find here.

Pat mentioned VMware is the first software company that has entered the magic quadrant by Gartner for Data Center Networking. Cool achievement and says enough about NSX being an enterprise solution!

Bill Fathers was next on stage talking about vCloud Air (New name for vCloud Services) and the increase of VMs running in the public cloud. To support workloads, VMware has been expanding it’s Data Centers for vCloud Air for the past 11 months, expanding with one Data Center each month: Wow! With vCloud Air, you are able to get access to the following services:

• Cloud Management (vRealize Air Automation (vCloud Automation), which is coming in the fourth quarter of 2014)
• Database as a Service (Microsoft SQL and MySQL including Disaster Recovery services)
• DevOps
• Mobility Services (Airwatch and Pivotal)
• Object Storage (Designed to be scalable, cost effective and durable. Pay for your usage. Based on EMC VIPR and the beta program starts in september)

Next up was Carl Eschenbach stating that everyone should rise above the silos and keep automating and innovating to keep business happy and have more time to increase efficiency, security and flexibility. There were three customer cases on stage: MedTronic, MIT Media and Ford. Always nice and good to see feedback from big customers about VMware products, giving you confirmation about the solidness in big environments.

To wrap up this article, you will find the product release announcements below that I didn’t mentioned earlier.

• vCloud Suite 5.8
• vSphere 6.0 (Beta)
• Virtual Volumes and Virtual SAN 2.0 (Beta)
• Site Recovery Manager 5.8
• vSphere Data Recovery 5.8
• NSX for vSphere 6.1

A complete list of announcements can be found on the blog of Marcel van den Berg at up2v.nl.
For more information about VMworld see their website at vmworld.com.

Thanks for reading!