Live blog taken during the keynote.

The keynote started off with a beautiful Tron-3D stylized video talking about computing, virtualization, automation and ultimately the cloud. Your cloud. My cloud.

Hands on Labs started off as a private cloud onsite in 2008. It went to a hybrid cloud solution using some offsite datacenters in 2009. This year the labs are 100% public cloud in 3 datacenters in both US & Europe. The goal is to handle 25,000 labs with over 250,000 VMs created and destroyed in less than 5 days. A truly scalable solution.

Another big point is the VMUG is over 60,000 strong across the entire world. Thanks to all leaders for the great work they do.

Paul Maritz's started off with some amazing information. 2009 was the first milestone where there is more virtual machines than physical machines. This year the milestone broken is that more than 50% of workloads are now running on virtuals.

Some amazing achivements with some number playing:

  • 1 VM every 6 seconds
  • 20 million VMs
  • A VMotion every 5.5 seconds
  • 800,000 vSphere Admins
  • 68,000 VMware Certified Professionals


So what really is the cloud today? Is this something new or something recycled?

A quick history lesson.

MainFrame
Applications started as glorified bookkeeping for finance.

Client Server
Relational Databases Started. Whole new set of applications
New programing languages. Primarily PC users. Java, HTML, IP
ERP, CRM, Non-Real-Time analytics possible.


When the applications change, then the IT industry really changes.

Cloud
In less than 3 years, the primary device connecting to the networks will be non-Windows OS instances. iPad, Droid, Etc.
New Data Fabrics, new frameworks, HTML5,
Real-time, high scale analytics and commerce - The Facebook generation


A fundamental shift is IT needs to shift from supporting the client server era & the mainframe era to renewing the applications into cloud frameworks and capabilities. Spending in Client Server must become easier and cheaper. In the meantime IT will bridge from existing modes of end-user access.

Server Virtualization is successful since we can add these functionality improvements without changing the apps.

vSphere 5.0 needs to just work. To accomplish this VMware QA is extensively done:

  • >1 million engineering hours
  • >2 million QA hours
  • 200 new features
  • 2,000 partner certifications


By delivering this heavily QAed solution, less effort must be taken to keep the infrastructure up and running which in turn means less cost to the businesses. They can spend the money on new features, new frameworks and redeveloped applications instead of back end support costs.

In the vCloud, Service Providers are creating powerful vertical clouds for their industries. New York Stock Exchange is a good example. High end solutions that are gaining large interest by many clients. On the smaller end, Small Business Solutions are coming as "datacenter in a box" with the Storage Virtual Appliance now. Another vertical cloud is the SMB space and one solution there is the VMware GO. SaaS solution to provide functionality for the small SMBs.

New programs are written by young programmers, not older ones (>35). They are developing new frameworks and tools to make things easier. As such tools like Spring in vFabric 5 with things like tc server, GemFire & SQLFire, VMware aims to offer a full solution of ways to modernize applications along with creating a data fabrics. The newly announced tool is VMware Data Director to automatically provision and manage databases. The other third is the PaaS suite to deliver the new application. Cloud Foundry covers this space. It supports all sorts of frameworks and tools.

Moving up the stack for support of end user computing/Existing PC usage. View 5.0 officially announced. Horizon is the other piece in this layer. Windows offered some great functionality to the end clients. Delivery of the applications is a huge piece of that functionality. Horizon offers a new way to deliver applications. How do you deliver this to a iPhone, Droid, iPad etc?

Paul believes that we are entering a post document world.