This log was written in the course of last 15 hours as it captured live events of my day 2 In VMworld.
Today, first event in the morning was Steve’s keynote. In previous VMworld, he has always played a role to show products and excite the audience. Today was no difference. Using white board and postit is a cool way to show the concept. He showed VMware’s new desktop projects – thin app factory and horizon. It is a service catalog but mainly for the desktop apps. I am not sure how this is uniquely different from a universal service catalog that should cover all services I want to use, desktop or not He also showed project octopus. The concept is not new. The enterprise content management has always tried to do this but failed. Project octopus is essentially a provisioned dropbox managed by IT. The live show is pretty cool by letting Vittorio, VP of end user computing product management, show a day in the life by using these products. As expected, Steve also showed virtual phone. I think the problem it tries to solve is legitimate – using your personal smart phone with your work. But it is a very difficult problem to solve. How do you solve the coexistence of contacts, email, twitter accounts, blogs, phone numbers from my work and personal?
Steve then shifted its focus on vSphere itself. That really is VMware’s crown jewel. In addition to the monster VM, vSphere 5 largely focuses on storage. Paul and Steve both emphasized that it is a high quality release, which has 1 million development hours and 2 million QA hours spent. Steve also talked about the “noisy neighbor” problem and how vSphere 5 helps alleviate it. This is a quite important problem, particularly in the cloud shared pool. I have talked about it from operations perspective in my earlier blog. We will talk it a lot more in the future.
To complete the story, he moved the topic to a higher layer – management. This is what VMware did many acquisition and has focused in the last couple of years. He first spent several minutes to talk about agentless discovery. And then he moved on to vCloud Director and a little bit vCenter Operations, with sneak peeks for their upcoming features.
Overall, great presentation and great demo. He spent half of the time talking about end user computing and implies that virtualization (on your PC, server, apps, data, and your phone) is the key to solve everything. Will it be true?
Today is the first time that solution exchange hall opens full day. Many vendors demonstrated great infrastructure and management products. The virtualization market is very mature. Consumers are deploying VMs in mission critical services. Vendors has experienced a few innovation cycles and now produced many great products. However, in the cloud world, things are different. It is still emerging. Consumers, at this moment, are little bit ahead of the curve to demand solutions for their newly met cloud management challenges. Vendors, on the other hand, still, most of them, don’t have a real cloud management solution. That’s why cloud washing is popular. I hope next year by this time we will have a range of better solutions.
To end this day, how can I not show one of the purpose-built cloud solution booth. We want to see more like this next year.
Flying with the Jet Stream 