VMworld

It has been a great first couple days at VMworld; on my first day I had the pleasure of meeting up with Greg Stuart before the VMworld reception. He was just getting there from the vOdgeball benefit event (sporting the vExpert team shirt). I can't thank him and the sponsors (Nutanix, Veeam, and TrainSignal) enough for giving me the opportunity to attend this year's 10th anniversary VMworld.

 

At the VMworld reception on Sunday evening, I was also able to meet one of my blog sponsors Fara Hain from Zerto. This was a picture from the Zerto booth with Fara, Chris Wahl, and Alaistar Cooke.

 

This morning, I was able to attend the VMworld General Session with some of my old colleagues at Unum, Jeff Look and Curtis Gunderson.

 Most of Today's announcements were expected.

• Software-Defined Datacenter
• Hybrid Cloud Services
• End User Computing

What I found unexpected was the market expectations for the Software-Defined Datacenter, the underpinnings for the private cloud, were on par with the market expectations for the End User Computing and Hybrid Cloud Services combined. In my role as a Pre-Sales consultant, I am seeing much more traction with the new Horizon end user computing strategy than I am for the software-defined datacenter. Granted, most of the people I work with are SMB, but still, with the explosion of mobile devices that seems like a more pertinent strategic initiative than the software-defined datacenter.

The four core components for the software-defined datacenter defined by Pat Gelsinger were:

• Compute (vSphere 5.5)
• Storage (Virtual SAN)
• Networking (NSX)
• Automation (vCAC)

However, I could be wrong, thinking about the long-term impact that VMware NSX could have on the datacenter is profound. In essence, it was announced that it has the same type of capabilities as server virtualization - (snapshots, cloning, vMotion, ect.) Here is the image that was shown at the VMworld General Session about how virtual network ports have surpassed physical network ports since 2012. The effect of being able to manage network components and virtual ports at the virtual layer could improve agility and improve business continuity, but it isn't like server virtualization which focused on capital savings through physical server consolidation.

Anyways.... Back to the sessions!