VMworld 2013 San Francisco – Live Blogging
• 0 Comments • Conferences, VMworld
All Systems Go. VMworld 2013 has kicked off and things are in full swing. We’re about 10 minutes away from the Monday morning General Session beginning and there is definitely an excitement in the air. We have bloggers, analysts, customers, partners, attendees that have been to all 10 VMworlds (including myself) all standing around, mingling and anxious to hear Pat Gelsinger give his state of the union address.
This aggregated page will serve as a central repository for some live updates (mainly around keynotes, and sessions) as well as a live feed from my Twitter profile as well as my Instagram profile (for pictures). For my up to the minute VMworld 2013 Schedule please visit this post.
This is going to be an amazing week! I can’t wait for the fun to start and ingest all of the great information that will be delivered. I also hope to see all of you throughout the week and especially at my Ask the Experts sessions (VSVC4569 and VSVC4570)
So that’s it for now… let’s switch on the live blogging and hope this all works out! Have a Great Week!
Live Blogging Feed…
Thursday, August 29th, 2013 at 9:01:07 am
VMworld 2013 San Francisco Thursday General Session
Good morning! This is it, VMworld 2013 is wrapping up and many have already headed home. But, for those of us diehards, we’re in for a treat.
First Jay Silver, which is the Founder of JoyLabz, is on stage showing some really cool ways to use everyday things as user interfaces. His projects have inspired tons of people world-wide to rethink how you look at the world. You should definitely check out the Makey Makey, it’ll allow you to do cool things like use a banana as a spacebar!
Second Keller Rinaudo, CEO of Romotive, is helping drive robotics to the consumer instead of keeping them locked into manufacturing type roles. Meet Romo, an awesome little consumer grade robot that’ll brighten your life. Romo has had an exciting life so far, growing from Kickstarter in a small apartment all the way up to now being an educational tool to teach children about programming and robotics in a fun and exciting way. Romotive has ambitious dreams for consumer grade robotics, and as mentioned by Keller it will be the hackers that build up this industry and not big industry.
Finally Bre Pettis, CEO of MakerBot is going through the history of their amazing 3D Printer and Scanner which took roughly two cases of ramen and a ton of caffeine to create. This is another amazing technology that will completely change the future as we know it. One of the most touching stories he explained was how people are using MakerBot to create custom prosthetics for people that previously wouldn’t be able to obtain them.
So here we go, another VMworld complete. It’s been a great week, amazing new technologies, great new connections and some really good memories. Now off to a couple sessions, meetings and wrap up an amazing 6 days here in San Francisco.
Until next year.
Tuesday, August 27th, 2013 at 8:59:24 am
VMworld 2013 San Francisco Tuesday General Session
We’re just a few minutes away from starting, the energy levels are up and they’ve played some advertisements from Cisco, HP, Dell and EMC…let’s get this party started!
Carl comes on stage to a huge good morning, he announced that there are 22,500 people in attendance this year, including 33 that have been to all 10 VMworlds in the US, the first in San Diego with only 1,400 attendees. Recapping Monday’s announcements, vSphere and vCloud Suite 5.5 along with NSX Network Virtualization, Virtual SAN, vCloud Hybrid Service and Cloud Foundry on vSphere were all laid out Pat along with the vision, strategy and direction. For the next few minutes Carl is just reaffirming the points that Pat made yesterday, including the 3 Imperatives for IT Infrastructure; 1) Virtualization extents to ALL of IT. 2) IT management gives away to automation, and 3) compatible hybrid cloud is ubiquitous.
Carl introduces Kit Colbert (Principal Engineer) on stage to discuss the new methodology of business as it relates to IT, followed by playing the hilarious Chocolate Factory skit from I Love Lucy which shows the challenges that IT is going through when attempting to respond to the requests from the business. This quickly roles into a demonstration of vCloud Automation Center showing the deployment of a service to the cloud of your choice (Private, Public (Azure or AWS)) which shows the details of the associated costs and control of what type of SLA you’d like, including auto scaling. This instantly leads me to believe that vCAC makes chocolate. Once deployed, you can easily view the health of the service that was deployed. Under the covers it looks like vCAC is now deeply integrated with vCenter Operations and ITBM.
The second demonstration was focused around the behind the scenes view of the first demo, including showing the blueprint creation of the application service within vCloud Application Director (previously known as vFabric App Director). Big changes to vSphere is going to allow the virtualization of even more applications and services, big improvements to reduce latency and improve performance.
Next they get into Networking with NSX. To sum it up, NSX is to Networking as ESX is to Compute. Virtualizing the control plane of your network, encapsulating L2 switching, L3 routing, firewalls, etc to be mapped to your applications (VMs) so the network will follow the life-cycle of your application. The following few minutes are being spent going into a deep dive of the features of NSX, the easy way to put this together is that ALL networking logic is handled by NSX and no changes need to be done to your physical network. One huge benefit is that with NSX any L3 services on a single ESX host will not need to traverse the network. So, why? Because traditional networking takes days to deploy (even in a virtual world). With NSX as part of your virtual infrastructure you can now deploy your complex applications and network services within a matter of minutes.
Now they get into the next silo, Storage. Virtual SAN (vSAN) is at the top of this, taking all local disk and flash and pooling into a cluster of available disk usable for VMDK storage. They show how easy it is to deploy, how easy it to scale and consume. Finally they show how resilient vSAN is, when a failure occurs other nodes in the cluster will rebuild the storage.
And finally! The time that End-User Computing deserved yesterday…or so we thought, just a brief demonstration of Horizon Workspace showing the deployment of a virtual desktop and then accessing that desktop. Is EUC just not that exciting? Guess this isn’t the year of VDI.
OK, so what’s next? Carl brings up @JoeBaguley to discuss Operations and the fact that the conventional approach will not work in this highly dynamic and fluid environment. This demonstration was is really cool, deep integration into vCenter Operations and vCloud Automation Center, showing application health and recommendation actions along with integrated remediation with cost approval in vCAC. Very cool stuff. It also showed that vCOPS used integrated adapters from partner products (storage, networking, application, etc) to show some validation that the recommendations are real (and not just coming from vCenter). There was even some integration with ITBM to show the cost difference of needing to move the storage to Gold from Silver to resolve the disk I/O performance issue.
Next, they get into a demonstration of vCenter Log Insight, a great new tool (previously released) that provides deep “Big Data” analytics into all of the logs of your infrastructure, making it easy to cross correlate events. As a special offer for VMworld attendees, simply follow @VMLogInsight on Twitter to get 5 Free Licenses of vCenter Log Insight.
In a final demonstration and to close out the Tuesday General Session they did a demonstration of vCloud Connector Content Sync, where they made an update to a VM Template which was pushed out to vCHS seamlessly. They also showed their common vCloud Automation Center interface deploying their Project Vulcan application to the vCHS environment, and for the IT Staff it was visible in their common vSphere Web Client.
So that’s pretty much it. I really enjoyed the General Session today, even more than yesterday..perhaps because I’m an engineer at heart. So thanks for viewing and I really hope I get to see you at VSVC4569 – Ask the Expert vBloggers which is starting in 30 minutes in Moscone West 2009! SEE YOU THERE!
Monday, August 26th, 2013 at 9:02:18 am
VMworld 2013 San Francisco Monday General Session
General Sessions started with a decent intro video, shoving Software-Defined Data Center down our throat a little further, but hey…it’s where the industry is going! Then acting CMO Robin Matlock opens up with introducing the Alumni Elite, a group of people that have attended all 10 VMworld’s in the US. Robin then went into showing how aggressive VMware customers are with their journey to IT as a Service, and that VMware innovation is driving this accelerated growth. She then hands off to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.
Pat opens up to a lackluster welcome, people are a little tired. He quickly gets into the IT Mantra, with IT-as-a-Service at the finish line, with Social Media, Mobile Devices, Cloud and Big Data driving the majority of this Mantra. 40% of VMware customers spend their money on innovation, but the goal should be about 50% once companies hit ITaaS.
Pat then went into boosting the confidence of VMware customers by giving them some titles of how they may feel after conquering virtualization and start to tackle this new wave of computing and industry. Masters of the Universe, Gods, Martyrs, Bull Fighters, Ninjas, Dragon Slayers, Champions.
Next, the 3 Imperatives for IT Infrastructure; Virtualization extents to ALL of IT, IT Management gives away to automation and compatible hybrid cloud is ubiquitous. This all aligns to the SDDC and Hybrid Cloud messaging. So, we all know SDDC is how we get there, and there are four focus pillars that we need to transform; Expand virtual compute to all applications, Transform storage by aligning it with app demands, virtualize the network for speed and efficiency and management tools will give way to automation. Don’t believe VMware? Hear about someone that’s done it, Columbia Sportswear (BTW a great VCE Vblock customer).
Next, Announcing VMware vSphere 5.5, 2x more of everything and now 64TB VMDKs! Cloud Foundry on vSphere was also announced. Pat is now getting into storage transformation, talking about how complex storage is and also the evolution from spinning disk to solid state. He’s setting the stage of how VMware has been at the cusp of storage innovation, with VAAI and VASA for example. But now, Software-Defined Storage, complete with a Policy-Driven control plane and a virtualized data plane and finally the virtualization of application-centric data services like De-dup, Snapshots, Replication, Caching, Backup and Encryption….so without further ado, the introduction of VMware Virtual SAN (vSAN). Sadly, another announcement of vVols but still no meat behind it, maybe next year :). vFlash was also announced as well as Virsto for storage optimization. But Partners, don’t worry! VMware is still going to work with you to continue to drive storage innovation.
Ok, so compute and storage done… what’s next? The introduction of VMware NSX (Nicira+vCNS), the Network Virtualization Platform, doing to network what ESX did for compute. Pat brings on Martin Casado (CTO, Networking) to give us a deep-dive. The concepts to NSX is simple and very similar to ESX. NSX acts as the Network Hypervisor, bringing all of the benefits that we saw with ESX to NSX. Martin is bringing three existing customers on stage to discuss their environments and challenges, eBay, Citi and GE. Pat wrapped up networking talking about the huge partner ecosystem that will integrate into available NSX APIs.
To wrap up the pillars, management and operations. vCloud Automation Center and vCloud Application Director for Provisioning, vCenter Log Insight and vCenter Operations Management Suite for Operations and IT Business Management Suite (Digital Fuel) for Financial round out the VMware Cloud Management suite. IDC Says VMware is #1 in Cloud Management.
Quick shift in gears to talking about integration with OpenStack and the efforts they’re putting into Nova, Quantum and Neutron—then a even quicker change into the announcement of GA of vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). vCHS release cycle is 6 weeks so innovations and customer requests can quickly get integrated into the offering. One customer success story was Apollo Group (University of Phoenix – also a Vblock customer) and how they can quickly migrate workloads to vCHS. What’s in the future? Disaster Recovery as a Service, Cloud Foundry and Desktop as a Service. New datacenters being built out soon, including Santa Clara, Sterling, VA, Dallas, TX and also a partnership with Savvis to open up shop in Chicago and New York.
And to wrap things up… End-User Computing, a brief blip and not much meat behind it. To sum it up, one common interface to access common applications and persistent data across any device….pretty much the same thing we’ve heard for a few years.
Hmm… good overall session, however a little disappointed in the end, definitely didn’t end with a bang. Alright, well that wraps up the General Session. Until the next session!
Live Feed from Twitter…
[twitter-feed username=”rick_vmwaretips” id=”372026304926728192″ mode=”feed”]
Live Feed from Instagram…