Take Five With Tom Fenton

Take 5 with Tom Fenton: 5 VMworlds/Explores that Reshaped the IT World

• By Tom Fenton
• 08/18/2025

With Explore (FKA VMworld), VMware's annual conference, less than a month away, I thought I would go back and look at five previous VMworld/Explores that have reshaped the IT world.

1. VMworld 2004 (San Diego - November 2004)
   It is hard to believe that the first VMworld was held more than twenty years ago in sunny San Diego in the fall of 2004. At this event, attended by approximately 1,500 tech enthusiasts at the Hyatt Convention Center in San Diego, VMware formally launched VMware vCenter. This revolutionized IT by enabling centralized management of multiple ESXi servers and their virtual machines from a single location. This allowed vMotion, which was demonstrated the year before, to become a mainstream feature, and storage vMotion, which would be announced three years later in 2007, to be possible.

   vCenter set the strategy and vision for VMware for the next two decades and separated VMware from the rest of the field at this event. The announcement made at VMworld 2004 firmly cemented VMware as the leader in physical server consolidation.

2. VMworld 2007 (San Francisco - September 2007)
   Just three short years later, in 2007, VMware released ESXi (ESX integrated), which was a departure from VMware's former bare metal hypervisor, ESX Server. Its major difference was that it removed ESX Server's Linux-based service console for management and operations. This gave ESXi a smaller footprint (32MB), which made it more secure and easier to patch and maintain. ESXi required the use of VMware Infrastructure Client for enterprise-level control of the ESXi nodes and the virtual machines. This design allowed more of the host's resources to be allocated to guest virtual machines, increasing their overall performance and reliability.

   VMworld 2007 was a busy event, as it saw the announcement of three other significant developments that shaped the IT world: VDM, SRM, and FT. Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM), which morphed into View and then Horizon, was announced. This let the IT world know that VMware was entering the virtual desktop fray against Citrix. Site Recovery Manager (SRM) allowed organizations to seamlessly restore a company's entire IT infrastructure at a separate location. Finally, vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) was truly amazing and showcased VMware's engineering acumen, as it allowed workloads to failover in less than a second from one server to another. When Mendel Rosenblum demonstrated it, audible gasps were heard in the audience. These announcements solidified VMware's position as an IT business continuity solution and not just as a physical server consolidation technology.

3. VMworld 2013 (San Francisco - August 2013)
   VMware made two massive announcements in 2013 that extended its footprint into the datacenter. The first was when it unveiled VMware Virtual SAN (vSAN). This instantly made VMware a major player in the software-defined storage and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) space. vSAN was tightly integrated with vSphere and ESXi. It allowed the pooling of local storage from ESXi hosts to create a resilient, high-performance data store that could be shared among any of the ESXi hosts in its cluster.

   VMware also announced that it acquired Nicira, a pioneer in the software-defined networking (SDN) field. VMware incorporated Nicira technology into its NSX product line, the company's network virtualization platform. Through this integration, VMware brought advanced network virtualization and automation capabilities to its data center and private cloud offerings.

   These two offerings, along with vCenter Server, became foundational to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

4. VMworld 2019 (San Francisco - August 2019)
   VMware made its entry into the Kubernetes and container world in a big way with the announcement of Tanzu and Project Pacific. Tanzu was primarily based on VMware's acquisition of Heptio, founded by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, who worked on Google's original container orchestration project.

   Project Pacific integrated Kubernetes natively into vSphere, marking a significant step in VMware's embrace of Kubernetes. The company saw these two products as a way to reach beyond its virtual machine focus to capture cloud-native application workloads.

5. Explore 2024 (Las Vegas - August 2024)
   The conference was renamed from VMworld to VMware Explore in 2022. In 2024, VMware announced a significant shift in how it would bundle and sell its software with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, which was officially announced that year.

   VMware highlighted several key benefits of VCF 9, including simplified architecture and lifecycle management with the new VCF Lifecycle Manager (LCM), enhanced integration with Tanzu Platform -- particularly for AI/ML and Kubernetes workloads -- and improved developer and operations experience through unified automation and governance tools. This was a significant step in aligning VCF with enterprise needs for private AI, edge compute, and modern application platforms.

   The central theme of Explore 2024 was shifting workloads from public clouds to the datacenter.

Explore 2025
This list focuses on transformational announcements made that reshaped the IT world based on VMware's products, licensing, and ecosystem strategy, from the first VMworld in 2004 through its most recent event, VMware Explore 2024.

Since Broadcom has taken over VMware, there has been an emphasis on continually releasing new features and products throughout the year rather than waiting until their annual get-together to make them; however, they have been known to keep a few features or products under wraps until the event. I am betting that VMware will surprise us with some interesting announcements about AI integration at this year's event.

You can read my article on why you need to attend Explore 2025 here, and you can see my 5 must-see sessions here.