VMworld 2013 Recap: VMware Day 2 General Session

VMware (VMW) CEO Pat Gelsinger took stage yesterday to make several announcements around compute, storage, networking and automation, aiming to “defy convention” at VMworld 2013 in San Francisco, Calif. And what about today? That’s where President and COO Carl Eschenbach enters the spotlight. Here’s an update.

Before we jump ahead to Eschenbach’s time on stage, the virtulization company also unveiled the following over the course of the event: two new hires to the company’s payroll, a sneak peak at PEX 2014 and a full day for partners

Here’s a quick recap of the action at the second day of general session:

VMware President and COOCarl Eschenbach

• The attendance this year at VMworld 2013 is higher than ever: We have more than 22,500 people here in attendance this year – 23,000 if you round up.
• Out of our attendees, there are 34 people, including me, who have attended all 10 VMworlds.
• To review yesterday’s announcements: vSphere 5.5 and vCloud Suite 5.5., NSX Network Virtualization; Virtual SAN; vCloud Hybrid Cloud Service; and Cloud Foundry on vSphere.
• We believe in reducing friction between consumers and producers of IT through software, bringing the IT team and business leaders together.
• Through software, we are going to deliver IT as a service. That’s what we’re bringing to life at VMworld 2013. We want to bring this to market.
• We must extend virtualization to ALL of IT, give way to automation IT management, and compatible hybrid cloud will be ubiquitous to reach IT infrastructure.
• These must haves will come together through a software-defined data center, that’s the architectural foundation. ITaaS includes self-service, transparent pricing, governance and automation.
• Application provisioning delivers: streamlined application provisioning, decoupling of application and infrastructure, automation to reduce steps, costs and errors for IT. Conventional networking approach takes too long and is too complex. This is where VMware NSX solves IT complexities.
• VMware NSX delivers speed and efficiency through the same operating model as compute virtualization and extends the value of existing network infrastructure. We protect infrastructure investments of our customers and partners.  
• Application dependencies of storage must have time to market, predictable performance, certain SLAs and cost management.
• Virtual SAN delivers simple provisioning at time of VM provisioning, storage that scales with compute and storage that extend existing direct attaches.
• VMware Virtual SAN Public Beta is now available for download.
• Users can now bring any device to office, provision their devices and get access to those apps, while IT still has control.
• Anyone attending VMworld can receive five licenses of vCenter Log Insight by following us on Twitter.

VMware Principal Engineer Kit Colbert

• There are complex IT requirements: end-user team, infrastructure team, CIO, CTO, CFO of IT, ops team, and apps team.
• We want to bring apps to market quickly, but safely as well.
• vCloud Automation Center enables IT to select which apps can viewed and requested. It also provides app owners with the ability to view costs of running application in the private or public cloud, instead of guessing the cost. 
• App owners have options available to them, but IT has the control and governance with vCloud Automation Center.  
• vCloud Application Director automates and creates an execution plan. It integrates with software deployment configuration tools.
• Conventional networking is a barrier to IT agility. To break this barrier we use networking with NSX. We layer NSX over existing infrastructure, providing L2 switch, L3 router, firewall, and load balancer with an API.
• Every time you create a VM, switches needs to be provisioned and configured physically, but NSX solves that. NSX places the concept of switching into the hypervisor.
• Routing needs are also addressed with NSX, instead of configuring a physical router. NSX moves the routing intelligence into the hypervisor.
• 70 percent of the traffic in a data center is between VMs, and now that traffic is gone with NSX.
• You can take a VM, do a virtual to virtual migration, leveraging vMotion, and place it onto the new NSX platform.
• Virtual San radically simplifies storage. It takes storage of all hosts in clusters and pools them together into one data store. Virtual SAN can be enabled through the vSphere Web Client through a simple click.
• IT has more control over what end users can control in the vCloud Automation Center.

VMware EMEA CTO Joe Baguley

• Conventional operations have silos, and everything is done manually, instead of automatically through automation.
• As we go through accelerating change of velocity forces, there will be a highly dynamic environment, no visibility into and across clouds, and more complexity with scale.
• We are bringing policy-based automation in the software-defined data center.
• Our automated operation features allow the ability to have a policy-driven, automated, proactive response, intelligent analytics, and visibility into application health for app owner.
• Guided remediation delivers broad ecosystem that improves accuracy, specific recommendations to speed up troubleshooting, policy-driven IT and financial governance.
• The world is going to get faster than ever before and with VMware’s tools, we will prepare you with the right tools.

Stay tuned for further VMworld 2013 updates from The VAR Guy …