VMworld 2013 Live: Day 2

In the day 2 keynote at VMworld 2013 Carl Esenbach VMware’s President and Chief Operating Officer demonstrated many of the new products that Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO, announced the day before. Carl started out by saying that the official overall attendee count for this year’s VMworld 2013 was 22,500 -- making it the biggest VMworld conference so far.

Carl then recapped the vSphere 5.5, vCloud Suite 5.5 and NSX network virtualization announcements. Carl went on to state that VMware’s overall goal was to deliver IT as a service. Carl said that in the long run all of IT must be virtualized – not just compute resources but network and storage resources as well. IT, he stated, is moving to a world of automation where IT controlled policies will be automatically implemented by software in a hybrid cloud environment.

Playing up the friction between business management and IT, Carl brought out Kit Colbert, Principle Engineer VMware to help demo vCloud Automation Center and VMware NSX. One particularly funny bit was where Carl compared IT to that famous scene of Lucy and Ethel try frantically to keep up at the chocolate factory. Kit went on to demonstrate how vCloud Automation Center can show the costs of provisioning an application and how it allows users to set application scalability properties within the confines of policies set by IT. Kit also demonstrated how you can use vMotion to move VMs to from existing VLANs to VMware NSX with no downtime. They also showed how the upcoming Virtual SAN product can use direct attached storage on vSphere servers to create storage pools. They discussed how Virtual SAN makes intelligent use of SSD disks as well as provides built-in resiliency and is enabled through the vSphere Client. A free beta of the Virtual SAN product is available from www.vsanbeta.com.

Another highlight from today’s keynote was when Carl brought out Joe Baguley, VMware Chief Technology Officer for EMEA. Joe demonstrated how the new Log Insight Manager uses big data analytics to provide operational data and performance analysis for VCenter Operations Manager.