vmworld 2013 - General Session Day 1

August 26, 2013

vmworld 2013 - General Session Day 1

Written by Brian Ducharme

With over 22,000 attendees this year it was difficult to fit everyone into the hall so we chose to spend the general session from within the comfort of the Hang Space where they were broadcasting the General Session.

First up was Robin Matlock, Chief Marketing Officer at vmware. Robin invited up 10 Alumni members to do a top 10 countdown of the best moments at vmworld which included moments like "Smashmouth playing at Treasure Island", "Checking out the cars at the racetrack in Las Vegas" and when "vRAM became a 4-letter word".

Next she talked about the Customer Virtualization Journey that begins with IT Production then moves into Phase II: Business Production and then lastly into IT-as-a-Service. She stated that in 2013 54% of customers on this journey have moved into the second phase. She also took a look back at the various vmware innovations that have brought us to where we are today.

Next up was Pat Gelsinger, Chief Executive Officer at vmware who talked about the 4 Trends in IT: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Big Data. He then went on to talk about the 4 Pillars of the Software Defined Datacenter: Compute, Storage, Network and Management.

Beginning with compute, he announced vSphere 5.5 and vCloud Suite 5.5 which now give you 2x the performance on mission critical applications

Next was storage. Pat talked about Policy Controlled Data planes, Application-Centric virtualization of the data plane and virtualized data services which make storage virtualization possible and the announcment of vSAN availability in public beta.

Pat then welcomed Martin Casada, Chief Technology Officer of Networking to the stage to talk about vmware NSX. Martin worked with the likes of Mendel Rosembloom during his work at Stanford and explained how NSX is a networking hypervisor just like ESX was to servers and how port virtualization is already exceeding physical network ports.

Next they brought executives from EBay, Citi and GE to speak about the need for networking virtualization and how they are using it to move their companies forward.

Over 20 partners are announcing compatibility with NSX during vmworld.

Next the conversation shifted to Management and how VMware was voted #1 in Cloud Management by IDC. They then announced the availability of the Hybrid Cloud and invited Bill Fathers, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Hybrid Cloud Services to the stage. Bill is new to vmware and launched the early access program in June of 2013. Two companies that are in the program spoke about how they are using Hybrid clouds, the first was Harley Davidson Dealer Systems who are utilizing it for deploymentment of new mobile app and the Apollo Group, who are using it to achieve 15:1 consolidation of their servers.

Bill then outlined the Roadmap for Hybrid Cloud services to include DR-as-a-Service, Desktop-as-a-Service and 3 new datacenters by 4th quarter of this year.

The session ended with a recap:

Virtualization extends to ALL of IT
IT management gives way to automation
Compatible hybrid clouds

Last modified on August 26, 2013

Published in VMWorld 2013

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vmworld 2013

Brian Ducharme

Brian is an event reporter for VMBlog.com and an expert in virtualization/cloud techonlogies. In his 15+ years of experience in the virtualization/cloud field he has interviewed hundreds of companies, users and executives. Brian has been an active member of the NEVMUG (NEVTUG) since 2006 and attends both vmworld and Citrix Synergy every year. Brian works full time as a Senior Software Engineer for Liquidware Labs.

Brian also spent 5 years as the managing editor of Virtual Strategy Magazine, an online magazine focused on the virtualization industry and has been with vmblog since 2011. He has a background in Computer Graphics, Marketing, Programming, Web Design, Mobile App Development, Linux Administration and is an active member of the NHJS group.