David’s VMworld 2013 Day One Wrap-Up
On the first official day of VMworld, Monday morning, the biggest keynote of the show kicked off with acting chief marketing officer, Robin Matlock, taking the stage, welcoming everyone to this special VMworld. She talked about the history of the show and brought up a half dozen of the 17 attendees who have been to all 10 VMworlds. Robin covered the “virtualization journey”, VMware’s 10 years of innovation, and introduced VMware CEO, Pat Gelsinger.
Photo thanks to Duncan Epping of Yellowbricks.com
Pat talked about customer use of VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) solution, including Columbia, a VMware user who has had SDDC success. From there, Pat moving into a series of new product announcements. In my opinion, the sheer volume of new product announcements in a single keynote was AMAZING. Pat announced:
- vSphere 5.5 – which includes enhancements to the vSphere Web client, vCenter Server Appliance, the new vFlash feature, and much more. Specifically, the configuration maximums have been doubled by 2x.
- vCloud Suite 5.5 – which includes the new version of vCloud Director, vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS), and Site Recovery Manager
- VSAN – VMware’s new software defined storage solution (SDS) which allows you utilize your existing local disk storage on each ESXi server, combine it with local SSD storage, and create a distributed, highly available, and fully supported VMware file system for storing your virtual machine. This could be in addition to your traditional SAN and, in some cases, eliminate the need for a hardware SAN for the virtual infrastructure.
From there, Pat brought up Nicira founder, Martin Casado (now VMware networking CTO) to introduce the new VMware NSX, software defined networking (SDN) solution (acquired from Nicira). The simplest explanation of NSX is “what ESXi is to servers, NSX is to the network”. I really enjoyed Martin’s presentation and would personally welcome him as the next CTO of VMware as he is well spoken, extremely intelligent, and passionate about virtualization.
From there, Pat talked about vCenter Automation Center (vCAC) and its expanding role into the datacenter with automation for private cloud. I was interested to hear that vCAC is now going to support VMware Horizon View.
From there, Paul move to “the clouds” and covering VMware’s new vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). I was excited to hear that vCHS will be able to not only run VMs in the public cloud but there will be solutions for DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service), Cloud Foundry (creating PaaS), and desktop as a service (DaaS). vCHS will expand their datacenter presence in the US and being a new partnership with Savvis.
The keynote was a great start for the show!
Special thanks to Scott Lowe of Blog.ScottLowe.org for his great live-blog coverage of the keynote.
Sessions
From the keynote attendees split up visit the opening of the solutions exchange and attention great training sessions. I was not able to attend any sessions except for my own, dubbed “Mythbusters Goes Virtual” with Mattias Sundling. We put some of the most well-known and debated virtualization beliefs to the test and had over 500 in attendance.
Parties
That night, there were some great parties including-
- Solarwinds
- Nutanix
- VMworld Community Tweetup vFlipcup Competition
- VMUG Leaders party
- And more…
Here’s a shot I took at the VMUG Leaders party:
VMworld.TV
At one of the events, I ran into virtualization author, instructor, and speaker Eric Sloof (of NTpro.nl) who has become known for his awesome VMworld TV interviews that he does with Jeremy.
Below, you’ll find Eric’s VMworld Day 1 wrap up:
Update: Day 2’s wrap-up post is now live!
Editor’s Note: This wrap-up is a re-post of my day one recap on VMware vCloud blog.
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