This morning the second general session of VMworld was given at Moscone North. It basically covered the same topics as yesterday, but with some extra sauce and flavours. Read on to find out what announcements were made.
Before continuing about the general session, I want to thank VMware again for my Blogger Pass! I had one of the best seats in the hall AND a desk to place my laptop on. Great view!
On stage, Ben Fathi kicked off todays General Session by recapping the topics of yesterday including the GiveBack initiative.
Customers currently have three choices for placement of their virtual infrastructure: On-Premise, Public Cloud or Hybrid Cloud. What the best direction is, depends on the business and requirements.
Next on stage was Sanjay Poonen. He recapped last year where VMware acquired a lot of companies and is growing fast. IT is changing, customers want simplicity and able to access their applications everywhere, from every platform.
Sanjay announced VMware is partnering with Google and NVIDIA to enable Google ChromeBooks to stream graphics-intensive applications. With this approach, your applications will run in the Data Center and your client can be a low-end machine that only needs a stable connection.
After this announcement, Kevin Ichhpurani enters the stage and Sanjay announced another partnership with SAP where AirWatch will be used in combination with SAP Secure Mobile to deliver applications to mobile devices.
Before Sanjay leaves the stage, he mentions that sharing should be possible anywhere, anytime on any device.
Kit Colbert enters the stage! It’s always good to see him there as he performs very well and gets better on stage each year amazingly.
Kit demonstrated that VMware Horizon enables you to centralize your apps and deliver them to different platforms like a Windows-based laptop and your Apple iPad. One of the customers in the health care industry showed how they are using Horizon with Airwatch Secure Content Locker to access sensitive data in a secure way from different platforms. Graphic-intensive applications can easily be streamed using a thin client and does not require any high-end graphic processing on the local client.
Next, Kit shows Project Fargo, which speeds up virtual desktop deployment up to 30 times and uses CloudVolumes to publish applications almost instantly to the deployed desktop. Enrolled desktops can be automatically deleted after the user logs off, because re-deploying is a matter of seconds. Really impressive! If you are into VDI you should definitely check out Fargo and CloudVolume!
Raghu Raghuram enters the stage and states that the vSphere 6 beta has been downloaded over 10.000 times. I guess a lot of people are waiting for cool features and improvements to come =) some of the cool features we already heard coming are:
- Faster vSphere Web Client (yay!)
- Fault Tolerance support for up to 4 vCPUs instead of 1 vCPU
- Long-distance vMotion (up to 100ms RTT)
- Cross vCenter vMotion
Next up Raghu talked about VMware EVO:RAIL, an all-in-one solution to build a Software-Defined Data Center with the minimum amount of time and effort. You can find more about EVO:RAIL in my post about Hyper-Converged Infrastructure and in these posts by Marcel van den Berg and Viktor van den Berg. Some nice things to know about EVO:RAIL can be found below.
- Deploys in 15 minutes
- vSphere and VSAN are being used
- One RAIL appliance consists of 4 VSAN nodes
- A maximum of four appliances can be connected together, making a 16 node cluster possible
- 100 VMs or 250 desktop VMs can be deployed on a single appliance, making a total of 400 VMs or 1000 desktop VMs possible
- 15.000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes can be served with one appliance
- Upgrading EVO:RAIL nodes can happen non-disruptive
Next, Ben Fathi comes back on stage and talks about EVO:RACK, which is basically EVO:RAIL for enterprises and combines more EVO:RACK units for larger capacity. EVO:RACK will use vSphere and VSAN like EVO:RAIL, but will also have NSX on board.
“From zero to app in 2 hours”
VMware does not want to create a vendor-lock and wants their customers to choose freely between solution providers. That’s where Ben announced VMware’s integration with OpenStack, which is currently in beta. The best way to run OpenStack, is on VMware.
Next up on stage is Simone Brunozzi. Wearing a Google Glass, he was able to see the health of his objects monitored by vCenter Operations Manager. Very cool, and something that will probably become the usual way of monitoring your Data Center, right? =)
Thanks for reading!
For more information about VMworld see their website at vmworld.com.
SnowVM 