The VMguy

The “regulars” at VMWorld know that this is the keynote to attend.  The second day is where we hear less about The Vision and more about The Technology.  Looks like a much fuller house this morning.  The Keynote begins at 8:07 am pacific time.

Here we go:

The keynote kicks off with a video with admins and some of the issues they have and how they are solving them.

First speaker is Dr. Steve Herrod, CTO, VMware.  Steve talks about the world we come from, the world of managing desktops and servers.  He says that we want to start managing services and not servers.  We want to manage devices, not users.  Steve shows another video about how people are using mobile devices for their day-today work.  Steve is segueing into how we keep up to managing these devices and the user’s information and data.  Steve says we need to simplify, manage and connect the users.  He says VMware has been using View to provide the desktop as a service and using ThinApp to create an App Catalog Service.  Lastly, VMware has been creating a new data service which manages the user’s information.

Steve now starts to show a demo of View 5 and how it provisions desktops.  This is a demonstration of the “desktop as a service” above.  The next thing is to provide the apps as a catalog.  Steve then does a demo of Horizon.  The cool part here is he’s showing how Horizon will be able to scan for apps and import them into the catalog.  (This is huge as I believe the main challenge to ThinApp adoption is the admin work required to package the apps. – This drastically reduces that time.)  He shows how Horizon will be able to deploy apps automatically when the user uses it the first time or can be chosen by the user from a catalog.

Steve goes on to talk about the user data to manage.  He talks about “Project Octopus” and compares it to Dropbox.  He shows how the data will be managed: A user can use a spreadsheet on their desktop and then it sill automatically be available on their phone.  All of the demos are from the Administrator perspective and how the admins will control these products.

Steve moves on to demo the same products from the user perspective.  Steve introduces Vittorio to demo View5 and Horizon and he pretends to have it first day on the job.  He shows how he logs into his desktop for the first time and chooses his office applications from a dashboard.  He also shows how he can choose mobile apps from the same dashboard.  As he chooses one for his mobile, he gets a text message from the server with a link to install the app. (Pretty cool stuff).  Steve is back and summarizes the demo.  He talks about how they are working on implanting this on Android mobile devices.  He says that they have started strategic partnerships with Samsung to roll it out on their devices.  (No mention of Apple whatsoever.)

Vittorio is back again to demo how he gets his data on the road.  He does a demo where he has Excel on his iPad to edit a spreadsheet on the road. Steve is back recapping the demo.  Steve explains AppBlast (just demoed for the first time publicly) which gives users the ability to run Windows Apps on the iPad with nothing but HTML5.  (Very, very cool stuff – get ready Citrix, you’ll need something comparable).

Steve is now switching from desktops.  He shows the new vSphere Client for iPad and how a vMotion is done by “dragging” the VM from one host to another on the iPad.  Steve goes on to the new features in vSphere 5.  Steve gives an overview of VMware Go.  It’s a hosted service that helps SMBs deploy VMware in their environment.  He also talks about the new vSphere Storage Appliance and welcomes Bruce to the stage to show both.  Bruce shows a demo of VMware Go and the vSphere Storage Appliance.  Steve now talking about Auto Deploy and how it can spin up hosts running ESXi very quickly.  He talks about the large VMs of vSphere 5 (32-vCPUs, 1TB RAM, etc)

He talks a little more about Intelligent Virtual Infrastructure and when we deploy VMs, we should be able to “set it and forget it.”  When we deploy VMs we should be able to set policies for VMs so that they cannot “misbehave” in the future.  He’s now reviewing the new storage IO controls, pools and storage DRS in vSphere 5.  He moves into networking.  He’s describing the problem we have with networking today.  This issue is that identifier = location.  He describes their solution: VXLAN.  VXLAN is a way to move VMs across datacenters and maintain connectivity while moving VMs.  VMware has summited this as a standard with the help of Cisco.  Steve says this is the last barrier for full Cloud mobility.  After we solve this, customers will be able to unleash the full power of the global cloud.

Steve goes on to DR and Site Recovery Manager 5.  He talks about the new vSphere Replication built in to replicate the VMs to the DR side without the need for storage based replication (love this stuff.)  He mentions that when they integrate VXLAN, you will not need to reconfigure the IP addresses in the VMs.

Now on to security.  Steve describes vShield Endpoint, Edge and App and how the new features in 5.0 protect the VMs at many layers. He then goes on to management and how the focus of VMware is to automate as much as possible.  He gives the audience a “sneak peek” at where the automation tools are going.  He shows the new vSphere Web Client and shows a new column in the client labeled “Services.”  This enables the admin to see what is running on them without an agent.  The client is also showing the integration between VMs.  The use case is that if I protect a app server by SRM, the client can warn me that the app server depends on the sql server and it is not protected (absolutely brilliant.)  Steve goes on to show an upcoming version of vSphere Operations.  It has a new display of “Business Metrics” these are rollups for Management to be able to see how the infrastructure is performing.

Steve starts to sum up the keynote and how it’s about services and people.  How we have to adapt and use these technologies in the future.

My notes:  A few nice peeks at advances: AppBlast, VXLAN, vSphere and Operations futures sprinkled in with all of the new stuff in vSphere 5.  One thing I absolutely noticed: minimal vFabric mentions.  Reason being that this is not a developer conference and I’ve seen vFabric clear a room of non-developers.  Well done VMware.