VMworld 2015: Day One

More than 23,000 attendees were at this year’s VMworld 2015 conference in San Francisco. In this year’s keynote Carl Eschenbach, VMware’s President and Chief Operating Officer, said the theme VMworld 2015 is Ready for ANY theme. That certainly seems to fall in line with VMware’s practical customer-oriented focus. Unlike, Microsoft or Amazon who seem primarily focused on moving you to their cloud offering, VMware is presenting a hybrid approach that’s focused more on addressing immediate customer problems and pain points and less on migrating you to their cloud offering. VMware put forward their concept of the Unified Hybrid Cloud which is essentially about bridging the gap between your on-premise infrastructure and the cloud. Carl presented the concept of “One Cloud” which doesn’t mean choosing a single cloud vendor. Instead “Once Cloud” describes seamless integration between private cloud(s) and public cloud(s) -- eliminating the distinction between on-premise and off-premise IT.

VMware made several announcements during today’s day one keynote. Some of today’s big announcements include:

EVO SDDC
EVO is VMware’s hyper-converged infrastructure offering. Previous versions of EVO RAIL and RACK were focused more toward medium and small business or departmental solutions. EVO SDDC (Software Defined Data Center) is enterprise and data center focused. Building a SDDC is normally a complex undertaking that can take weeks or months. VMware’s goal with EVO SDDC is to go from zero to a SDDC in two hours. Built on scale-out architecture EVO SDDC starts with 8 servers and can grow from there. Each rack can support 1000 IaaS VMs or 2000 VDI VMs.

VMware EVO SDDC will include VMware EVO SDDC Manager, a management and automation engine that is designed to simplify VM management tasks like the provisioning and monitoring of virtual and physical resources.

VMware Virtual SAN 6.1
VMware also announced the new release of Virtual SAN 6.1. The new Virtual SAN 6.1 release includes support for stretched clusters.  Enhanced integration with VMware vSphere Replication supports five-minute Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). Additionally, the latest release includes deeper integration with VMware vRealize Operations for improved storage management, monitoring and capacity planning

VMware Hybrid Network Services
Networking is at the core of VMware’s Unified Hybrid Cloud strategy and their newly announced VMware Hybrid Network Services is designed to seamlessly extend your on-premise network securely to the public cloud. VMware Hybrid Network Services provides the following features:

To illustrate the capabilities in their new Hybrid Network Services VMware demoed using the Web Client to initiate a Cross-Cloud vMotion where they moved a live VM from an on-premise ESXi server to the cloud and back.

vSphere Integrated Containers & The VMware Photon Platform
Containers are the latest trend in IT and VMware’s new vSphere Integrated Containers announcement shows that VMware intends to be one of the leaders in container support. vSphere Integrated Containers support Docker, Kubernetes and the other leading container formats. It allows containers to be seen as first class citizens within vSphere.  Kit Colbert, VMware VP & CTO Cloud-Native Apps, demoed creating five Docker containers and showing how the management of these containers was completely integrated into vSphere. Each container is managed as a VM.

VMware also announced the Photon Platform which is essentially a virtualization platform that is expressly designed to run and manage containers. The Photon Platform consists of: