VMworld Barcelona 2016 - Part 2

So today VMworld kicked off, I can't believe it's been a year since I was sat in this hall listening to last years announcments!!! The hall was packed, the drummer was playing, it must be time for the VMworld keynote to get started!! 

Pat Gelsinger took to the stage reflecting on where we have been in the IT industry but more importantly where we are going. The future direction until at least 2030 is a hybrid infrastructure, in fact VMware predicts it is going to take this long to get 50% of workloads into the public cloud. I would love to see these statistics further subdivided by the size of customer and the sector they sit in. Today's announcements focused on what I will call the traditional infrastructure, that being compute, storage and networking. We saw Pat Gelsinger announce vSphere 6.5, notably, there was a single slide on this, gone are the days where a whole keynote would be spent on this. VSAN 6.5 was also announced, this further builds on 6.2 that was largely seen to be the first enterprise-ready release. I'm not going to breakdown what was new in these releases here, check out the links below form more information. https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/10/introducing-vsphere-6-5.html

 http://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2016/10/18/vmware-virtual-san-6-5-whats-new/

The majority of the keynote was taken up with information regarding the newly announced Amazon Web Services (AWS) partnership. We saw a demonstration of the user interface, we rolled out a brand new vSphere infrastructure straight from the vSphere AWS portal, we could see a choice of T-Shirt size solutions starting at 4 hosts upwards, we also saw the option to choose our commitment length from hourly to a year to 3 years, with a promise of discounts the longer you choose to commit. VMware cloud on AWS includes vCenter server appliance  connected to your on premises vCenter using enhanced linked mode, ESXi and VSAN, along with NSX for security and connectivity. We saw how you could connect your on premise DC to the cloud use AWS Direct Connect and NSX. There was also a demonstration of vMotion migrating a workload from an on premises DC into AWS and the mention of a new technology elastic DRS available only in the AWS, this is able to use the power of DRS but also is able to spin up or down new hosts when demand requires.

There was also demonstrations of VMware cross cloud services ​billed as the management layer on top of the public cloud. Tomorrow we have been promised more from the end user computing and the cloud native apps teams! 

Here is my doodle from the keynote​

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Watch the recording of the keynote below:

VMworld 2016 Europe - General Session Day 1

For the rest of the day I sat on several sessions one regarding VMware and AWS, the doodle from this session is below, others regarding the use cases and integration between airwatch and Workspace ONE.

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I also spent an amount of time taking in the solutions exchange, speaking to partners and contacts and understanding others opinions on the show and the announcements. The solutions exchange seems smaller this year, it's in a different hall so that maybe why, or maybe it is the layout, or maybe because Dell and EMC now only have one stand and apparently Nutanix have been restricted to a smaller stand, who knows?

The day ended for me with a trip to the vExpert gathering in the middle of town, it took place in a nice small bar with some nice food and drink, it was great to catch-up with other fellow vExperts and discuss anything and everything!  

It has been a good day at the conference for me, I am left deep in thought regarding the future and where my customers will be going but I am excited by the AWS relationship and the vision for cross-cloud management. In the short term it is clear that hyperconverged is now a major consideration but ultimately choice and flexibility are the order of the day. You want a traditional infrastructure, VMware do that, you want hyperconverged, VMware do that, you want AWS VMware do that etc etc. Tomorrow I am looking forward to hearing more from the EUC team.