Take Five With Tom Fenton
5 Takeaways From VMworld 2016
Cross-cloud architecture, containers and Dell highlight the show.
According to VMware, more than 23,000 people attended VMworld 2016 this year in Las Vegas. Most of the crowd seemed to enjoy that the venue was not San Francisco; lodging was readily available and affordable, travel options for the east-coasters were plentiful and convenient, the diversions were plentiful, and the weather was great.
The keynotes and most of the sessions were on message with VMware’s vision: One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device. VMware knows that it needs to branch out from being a hypervisor company, and at this VMworld it seemed to stress everything but its hypervisor. Here are five items that stuck out to me from VMworld 2016.
- The cloud is the next big focus. VMworld kicked off with a joint announcement of an IBM/VMware joint partnership surrounding cloud services. This announcement was a lead-in to VMware’s new Cross-Cloud Architecture, which will enable customers to run, manage, connect and secure their applications across clouds and devices using a common management platform. VMware also announced a new disaster recovery (DR) offering for vCloud Air: VMware vCloud Availability. For all but the largest of organizations, the cloud is a logical choice for DR.
- New product announcements. Containers are a hot topic in IT right now, and VMware announced two new features for VMware Integrated Containers: a self-service portal (Admiral) and a registry (Harbor). OpenStack is another trending topic, and the company touted VMware Integrate OpenStack 3, based on the latest OpenStack "Mitaka" release.
- Retaining autonomy. Dell isn't going to radically change the way VMware does business, for now at least. Michael Dell spoke about the Dell/EMC merger, and generally indicated that VMware will remain a fairly autonomous company. He even mentioned that the new corporation can think in decades, not quarters. As long as VMware keeps pumping out cash, Dell will keep a hands-off approach to it.
- VMworld Europe anticipation. A lot of things were not mentioned at VMworld US that were expected to be announced, such as the new releases of vSphere and Horizon. VMworld Europe is in mid-October, and there's much speculation these announcements will be made at this event.
- Location, location, location. It seemed like holding VMworld in Vegas was a success, and VMware has announced that VMworld 2017 will be held in the same place. This will be welcome news for travelers from the east.
About the Author
Tom Fenton has a wealth of hands-on IT experience gained over the past 30 years in a variety of technologies, with the past 20 years focusing on virtualization and storage. He previously worked as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He also previously worked at VMware in Staff and Senior level positions. He has also worked as a Senior Validation Engineer with The Taneja Group, where he headed the Validation Service Lab and was instrumental in starting up its vSphere Virtual Volumes practice. He's on X @vDoppler.