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VMworld 2016 Day 2 Keynote Wrapup
EUC, SDN, Cloud-Native Apps Take Center Stage
Yesterday was the first full day VMworld 2016. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger gave the opening keynote, discussing the company's take on the datacenter and the state of cloud computing. He signaled that VMware will not be tied to a single cloud, instead embracing multiple clouds. This fits in with VMware's DNA.
Since its inception, VMware hasn't been tied to a single hardware vendor for its virtualization and management stack. It appears it will hold to that strategy with the cloud, and making management software that is cloud agnostic. It will be interesting to see if VMware can insert itself as a layer of abstraction above the cloud providers, just as it has with a layer of abstraction above the physical hardware in the datacenter.
At today's keynote, Sanjay Poonen, VMware's Executive Vice President and General Manager of EUC, and CTO Ray O'Farrell discussed the cloud and how VMware products can not only help with the deployment of cloud apps, but also simplify the development and security of all apps, whether in a local datacenter or a public cloud.
Poonen's presentation was about Workspace One, a VMware identity management product that delivers and manages apps on devices. He mentioned that VMware's end user computing category is now a $1.2 billion business. He then discussed desktop and VDI with an eye to VMware Horizon. He gave a shout out to AirWatch and its 84 percent year-over-year growth and its placement Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM).
Micro-segmentation, the killer use case for NSX, and conditional access was demonstrated. TrustPoint was also demonstrated, showing how a corporation's devices can be monitored, probed and managed from a single pane of glass.
CTO Ray O'Farrell's presentation was focused on VMware's relationship with its partners and customers.
O'Farrell then introduced VP & GM, Cloud-Native Apps Kit Colbert, who discussed cloud-native applications and containers. He discussed how easy they are to develop and how hard they are to manage in an enterprise. He demoed VMware Integrated Containers (VIC) and the Photon platform, detailing how they've been enhanced over the last year. Key upgrades have made them more consumable by developers and easier to manage through existing VMware tools such as vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation.
O'Farrell brought a Nike executive on stage to talk about the success they had running their applications on VMware's software-defined datacenter [SDDC]. That spurred a discussion of NSX, VMware's software-defined networking (SDN) technology, which has experienced 400 percent growth over the past 18 months and now has more than 1,700 customers.
VSAN, the software-defined storage (SDS) piece, has 5,000 customers and is being used to run numerous business-critical applications. For a two-year-old product, VSAN is showing a lot of promise.
O'Farrell closed the session by recapping the VMware vision of "any device, any application and any cloud." It was a good end for a solid keynote session.
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 currently works as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He 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.