VMworld 2014 Roundup: Day 2

Monday’s when VMworld really kicks into gear. Starting with the first general session and the kick-off of the week’s worth of sessions, panel discussions and other activities. Let’s get right to the Roundup Rundown:

General Session

While not the finally tally, it was interesting to hear that there are an estimated 22,000 attendees this year. Should this bear out via the final count, that means there were close to, or slightly less than, the number of attendees last year. I idly wonder if this means that VMworld has reached critical mass as far as attendance goes. Some have speculated that we could be experiencing the peak of technology conferences as we know it and that the conference experience will simply be beamed into people’s homes and offices, and not have people geographically congregate. I think that a real stretch, especially with the VMworld crowd. The pulls of community, not to mention the old adage “a change can be as good as a break” (meaning for some this is almost a working vacay) means to me that this conference is not going anywhere anytime soon.

It was nice to hear the VMUG shout out and recognition that VMUG membership has reached 100,000 across 50 countries globally. Well done VMUG crew, both the Chicago based head office and all the VMUG leaders and attendees that, in effect, are VMUG.

Interesting to note that, perhaps due some of VMware’s announcements preceading VMworld, that vCloud Air and VVOLs were not first mentioned on stage with any fanfare. In fact they were mentioned extremely casually, which I thought was a little unusual. It was almost as if to say, “these are no big deal, just evolutionary improvements”. Which, in a fashion is true, however it’s a bit of a surprise that the marketing machine wasn’t cranked a little higher from the start. VMware’s gotta eat, after all.

Liquid. Brave. Not sure what to say about the focus here. If you didn’t catch the session, watch the video to decide for yourself.

Some more incremental improvements, such as vCloud Suite version 5.8 and VVOLs being announced as well as the formal announcement that vSphere 6.0 and VSAN 2.0 are in beta. Essentially confirming the versions that the publicly accessible betas will release as. Also another rebranding with VMware vRealize Suite.

EVO Rail and Rack are both interesting products. VMware’s software and new software glue to help hardware partners shake ‘n’ bake their own “hyper-converged” solutions. This was another expected product, following on teh heals of Mystic and MARVIN. It’ll be interesting to see how this progresses, however it’s also interesting to note that the players in the hyper-converged infrastructure solution space didn’t really blink (check the Twitters for reaction from Nutanix’ big boss). All told, my favourite takeaway from this, and one of if not the biggest of the keynote, in my opinion, is VMware joining the Open Computer Project and contributing some of the EVO goodness back into OCP.

The graphic that was up showing all the various API layers on top of VMware’s technology stack, including the newly announced OpenStack support was very interesting. I think we’ll need to see some practical applications of how this may help large enterprise, especially in the complex case of requiring a mix of technologies that leverage multiple APIs from the same service. The use case is obvious for anyone invested in a particular API, however the multi-API is intriguing.

Coolest name for a project in a while, Project Fargo brings us containers. Expect to hear more specifics on this later in the week.