In the past I did live blogging and it was an interesting thing to do. Realistically it wasn't a great experience for those watching and for me writing it. Now a days, they are streaming live with VMware NOW and with near instant Twitter responses. Instead this is more for me to document and enjoy the event.

Stomp (like) starts off the event. Loud, exciting with drums in the VMworld at the center stage. Never to let down a good show, VMworld hit it off great.

Rick Johnson, CMO start off with presentation around VMworld Agenda, General Session info and other scheduling stuff. Tuesday keynote will be covering the future of End User Computing by Scott Herrod. Then the battle royale among the Platinum Sponsors, live demo presentations with live voting of the event using mobile apps. The best live demo wins by individual votes.

VMUG Rocks the house with some Green Shirts.

Paul Maritz now takes the stage. Some interesting numbers on how the world has changed from 2008 to 2012. Basically his history on VMware. ~25k VCPs to ~125K, Workload Virtualization 25% to 60% of all loads. One of his great contributions is the Cloud direction.

For the past 30 years, the primary driver of change is moving from Paper to Computer and that was considered innovative. This generation is more about streams of data and consumption of that data in different ways. It is about real-time versus specific static reporting. Tying this data to how it impacts a person day to day is the mobile/social link.


One consistent direction for VMware coming from Paul is the 3 categories. Server to Cloud, Existing Apps to Apps & Big Data and PC to Multiple End Points. These three categories are the same breakouts of Server Layer, Development Environment & End User Computing as they have been for the past several years.

Paul at this point hands over Pat Gelsinger as the new CEO. Interesting note Pat stated is that Pat was the R&D director and had a short meeting at an Intel Conference with Mendel from VMware. They held up the conference 10 mins as Mendel was telling Pat about VMotion. Mendel had it working and they were both so excited about use cases for this.

Software Defined Decenter


Pat had said back in 2007 that VMware needed to setup the Virtual Datacenter. Significant progress has been made over the years. In order to do this the stacks and environment needs to be completely automated and virtualized.

vCloud Suite

This suite includes many of the pieces to get the Software Defined Datacenter.

  • vCloud Director
  • SRM
  • vSphere
  • vCOPs
  • APIs


Comprehensive, Highest Performance and Proven Reliability is the only way to put Mission Critical on something. vSphere 5.1 offers all this as the 9th major release.

vRAM is gone. Heard loud and hear and listen carefully. Going to a single CPU approach licensing model with no limits. Woot!.

Cloud OPs

So how do you keep all this stuff running and build it?

  • Process for Operational Readiness
  • Role Based Certifications
  • Training expansions


Multi-Cloud is the future and today.

VMware already covers the PaaS with Cloud Foundry. Now to handle Automation & Orchestration layer they have added Dynamic Ops. Finally to add the bottom is at the Software Defined Datacenter layer is Nicira for Networking Virtualization. Finally VMware joined the OpenStack organization. They have a strong spread to cover many of the layers.

New Application Environment


vFabric and Cloud Foundry is going well. Nothing really to note as new here. Just continued development and movement forward.

End User Computing

Wanova/Mirage to manage PCs both physical and virtual. Horizon is turning into the central portal for all application space access. More to come here.

Pat is very respectful over what Paul Mariz has given to VMware and the kind of visionary VMware needed. Both of these men have been revolutionary IT leaders over the past 30 years.

On to Scott Herrod's presentation.

One of the steps forward in the Server Virtualization space is moving from a single VM up to multiple VMs in a single Virtual Datacenter. To do this compute, storage, networking and management have to be included.

In the compute space in 2011 with vSphere 5, 32 CPUs and 1Million IOPS per host. Now with vSphere 5.1, 64 CPUs and 1 Million IOPS per VM. Yes that's right.. Per VM!!! Serious improvements.

Epic Medical Systems is now offering their medical critical applications on x86 and will ONLY support it on vSphere. This is an amazing announcement.

Along with all of the advancements of vSphere to help low latency and jitter sensitive applications such as Telephony.

Hadoop got some time around Project Serengeti. This is a management application for Hadoop.

Software Defined Datacenter Storage

Interesting that Scott flew over the Storage VMotion that can be done with no shared storage. This is huge as this is a major marketing capability of Hyper-V 3.0. Lots of advancements and announcements here too. Virtual Volumes, Virtualizing Flash, Virtual SAN.. SDDC for Storage is changing this world pretty seriously.

Software Defined Datacenter Networking

Many of the issues that happen now is networking. To configure and setup Load Balancing, Network configurations can be significantly complex. How do we move this along?

vXLAN ecosystem is how Scott is talking about this. There are all sorts of different networking capabilities and I just can't keep up with this all. This space is moving fast from server offload to layer 3 edge interfaces to all sorts. It might finally to be time to make the VM that goes around the world.

After having all this great tech the next challenge is how to manage it. Going forward with the Suite's will have vCOPs for example and how to integrate it in. A good example is vCops shown directly in the vCloud interface.

Ultimately being able to expand this space is the partner enhancements. So being able to utilize the existing API suite (vCloud API) to not have to deal with permissions separately or structure. Just use the existing space.

The finish up is the cool demo on the ability to setup a VDC in a couple minutes between the private and public cloud. Sounds good.. just a big techie and quick with no time to sink in.

Slipped in quickly.. Enterprise+ gets a free upgrade to the vCloud Suite.

VMware is pushing the world forward. I haven't been this wowed since VMotion was first announced.