Amit's Technology Blog

It seemed like a whirlwind few days at VMworld but Day 2 was an eye opener for many reasons which I’ll go into here.

Keynote

The theme was kept similar to previous years and Day 2 enhanced the Day 1 keynote by delving deeper into the solutions and technologies unveiled the day before. This format provides the audience with the knowledge and know how of concepts they perhaps didn’t key understand on Day 1. In this case VMware showcased a fictitious company called ‘Elastic Sky Pizza’ and how they used Cross cloud, HCX, Network Log Insight and various other products on stage. It’s good to do this as it reinforces the key messages from Day 1 and shows real use cases to the wider public. Chris Wolf, VP & CTO, and Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products (Cloud Business Unit) both played a part in demonstrating the provisioning of workloads, portability, monitoring and the extensive use of the product sets. Personally, I felt there was a lot of content here and the audience did start to feel a bit lost towards the latter part of the presentation so keeping the content light and digestible is a key element here but difficult to achieve in practice.

Dell EMC Elect Podcast

I was asked to appear on the podcast as were a few members of the community and I didn’t hesitate to say Yes. It’s always great to catchup with Mark Browne who runs the programme and it was good to give my feedback and thoughts on the event. You can hear my interview below after the 9 min mark on iTunes or via the the player below.

Itunes

Interviewing the VMware execs

My highlight of this VMworld was being able to interview some special guests for the Opentechcast podcast that I co-host with my good friends (Alex Galbraith, Ather Beg, Kev Johnson & Gareth Edwards). Now I always like to try and do something different at each VMworld I attend and this one really knocked it out of the park. What was a simple idea and something that seemed unachievable was eventually planned and executed just the way I imagined. Arranging these interviews was difficult as I was also on holiday whilst the fine detail was being planned but I was happy that I got in touch with the right people at the right time and all the pieces finally fell in place.

First up was our interview with Pat Gelsinger, CEO VMware, which was a monumental episode and was every bit as exciting as it sounds. Here’s a link to listen to it via the OpenTechCast webpage or iTunes.

OpenTechCast Ep6

iTunes

Second up was Sanjay Poonen, COO VMware, who I’ve always admired from his stage presence and candid nature. I just don’t think I’ll ever play the piano as well. Links below.

OpenTechCast Ep7

iTunes

Thanks for reading my impressions of VMworld 2017.

It was a busy and hectic day as usual but Day 1 was very insightful. Over 11,000 attendees so it was a busy conference already.

Being on the other side of the tech circle and now in the vendor world meant I wanted to learn a bit more about the ecosystem and less on the features and functions of the new releases. Of particular interest was how VMware’s vision ties into the ecosystem and the wider Dell Technologies umbrella.

Pat Gelsinger was keen to draw our attention to VMware’s ambitions to be the glue that bridges the multi-cloud world. It’s evident that the messaging is now encouraging customers and partners to understand that this is not a closed eco system but one where VMware can partner with all the clouds of this world.

HCX not HDX

Pat announced HCX which can bridge the app mobility gap between on and off premises worlds. This is not a GA product yet looks to have a bright future. You can read more below. At the moment IBM and OVH have the prime focus but this will spread to other clouds I’m sure – https://cloud.vmware.com/vmware-hcx

Dell EMC + IBM – say what ?

Close to my heart was the news around Dell EMC and IBM. Personally I never knew this was being worked on but hearing that there is now an integrated cloud solution with vCenter – you can read more on what this entails and how Dell EMC is reselling services to the IBM Cloud by going here – https://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2017/20170912-03.htm

VMware on AWS

As a follow on from last year there was a lot more focus on this managed service from VMware. There were a number of breakout sessions as this is now GA but I didn’t manage to get a space. I did hear that at GA not everything is available to seamlessly migrate workloads using NSX but this is a heavy piece of engineering and is something that will come in time. As yet the focus of this announcement is around offering choice and flexibility and the vibe around the conference was one of enthusiasm especially for existing VMware and AWS customers.

VR that Datacenter…

It was good to see a mix of content and this year Alan Renouf’s pet project got a major boost as he was featured on stage with Pat showing how an HTC Vive could be used to migrate a virtual machine to the cloud and also destroy a virtual machine. It was a really good demo but will we ever see this adopted in the workplace. Hmmmm..not sure on that one but at least the APIs can be used to control vSphere workloads in an alternative way.

Wrap Up

For me Day 1 was a great job by the marketing and events team at VMware. Keynote was executed to the highest standard and there was a real focus on simplicity and choice. Pat also had VxRack and VxRail references in his presentation so the synergy with Dell Technologies is ripe and evident this year. As shown above my mission statement is clear on how I intend to help the ecosystem…