The VMguy

It a bit of an unusual move, the Day 1 keynote at VMworld 2011 was at 3:30pm Pacific time. This session is in a amazingly large room that can hold 20,000 people in chairs. If you were at VMworld last year, imagine that room with another 30 yards of chairs on each side. Here’s the session recap:

We begin at 3:40pm pacific time. First up is Rick Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer from Vmware. Rick announces attendance at 19,000. Rick talks about the labs at vmworld. He talks about how in 2009 the labs were in a private cloud, in 2010 it was a hybrid cloud, and in 2011 it is a pure public cloud (mostly running at Terramark in Miami, FL). This year they expect to deploy 200,000 VMs in the labs over the course of this week. Rick reviews a few upcoming schedule highlights for the week. He also mentions VMworld 2012 will be in San Francisco August 27-30, 2012. He also mentions that they are reaching the limits of Vegas (uh, I thought CES was much larger).

Next up is Paul Martiz, CEO, VMware. Paul says that for the first time more than half of the entire install base of server applications is now running on virtualized infrasucture and no longer a majority on physical infrastructures. Here are some cool stats: a VM Is born every 6 seconds (more than human births in the U.S.), and there are more than 20 million VMs in the world. He also said there are more than 5.5 vmotions per second, which is more vms in flight, than humans in flight. There are 800,000 Vmware admins and 68,000 VCPs. Paul goes on to review the history of IT computing until now. He leads the audience the “Cloud Era”. This is a time where PCs are the minority. He talks about eventually replacing the mainframe and mini computers. He says that we are going from a world of apps that were made for a paper world. They were not designed to be real time. These will need to be replaced by apps that now need to scale and perform in real time.
Paul reviews the previous VMworld announcements of sphere, 4.0, 4.1, and now 5.0. Paul said that vSphere 5 is the first release that he has ever delivered that was on time and had all of the features that it was supposed to. Paul says that all of the Cloud Inastructure Suite will be released together, vCloud Director, vShield, Operations Manager, SRM and vSphere. These core platform products will be released together in the future.
Paul talks about the migration of old apps onto the new platforms in the Cloud Era. For these developers, VMware has developed vFabric. Paul makes the announcement of Data Director. This will allow developers to scale out databases for the new modern applications. Last topic on vFabric he explains Cloud Foundry and what it does and how it works. Not much new here, just education for the newbies.
Paul goes on to talk about desktops and announces View 5.0. It has bandwidth improvements, client ubiquity, and VOIP/unified communications. He segues into Project Horizon and delivering applications to different devices. Paul talks about the virtualization of phones and having your personal phone and corporate phone combined. (just don’t see this happening with apple and google now buying Motorola).
Paul summarizes the 3 strategies: the platform, the next generation of applications and lastly the next generation of users and their devices.
Paul invites Carl Eschenbach, co-president, customer operations, Vmware to the stage. Carl goes on to introduce a few customers and how they work with VMware. This seems like a commercial for VMware so I’ll stop blogging for now and continue with the good stuff tomorrow (where we get to dig into the technology)