A personal snapshot of some of the big news from the show;

The keynote from day 1 mentioned IT bravely delivering brave products by making brave decisions, bravely. There were also some new product numbers announced, which is what people really want to hear, I guess. I’m sure Pat Gelsinger broke the vSphere 6.0 Beta NDA by mentioning that it contained VVols, but who’s gonna tell him? There was also an update to the cloud stack, with vCloud Suite 5.8. Gelsinger also mentioned the VSAN 2.0 beta and the new bundle of VMware vRealize Suite. You might know this as vCAC + vCOps Suite + Log Insight + IT Business Management Suite!

There is now a VMware OpenStack distribution available in beta today, called VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIOS) which combines the APIs from  both vSphere and OpenStack. I assume this will allow VMware to both manage and integrate with OpenStack. VMware also announced their Gold Level Open Compute Project membership. OCP was launched by Facebook back in 2011. VMware draw parallels between SDDC and OCP, so claim it is a natural fit.

Also new, VMware are collaborating with Docker, Google and Pivotal to increase enterprise exposure to Containers. This should integrate Linux Containers with vCloud Air in time. VMware’s Project Fargo is designed to enable containers on virtual machines. There’s a lot of container based releases here, I expect more information to come out over the course of the rest of the show.

Bill Fathers announced that vCHs is now rebranded as VMware vCloud Air and suggested that the number of VMs in the public cloud has risen from 2% to 6% over the past 5 years. Bill also covered DR as a service, Desktop as a service, Platform as a service, DevOps as a service, DB as a service (SQL and MySQL first, with others to follow) quite a lot of scope there. Another interesting point was that VMware have brought a vCloud datacentre online at a rate of one a month in the year since it was announced!

Q3 will also see vCloud Government for US Government customers and there will also be object storage based upon EMC VIPR technology, offering the ability to store unstructured data long term.
vRealize

VMware EVO: VMware’s Project Marvin - their stab at Hyper-converged infrastructure. The simple ground level product is EVO:RAIL, named for the fact that it fits into your infrastructure on the 1 rail, promising a universal HTML5 interface and a wizard driven deployment, to get you going in 15 minutes. Then there’s EVO:RACK, a step up from the basics, which comes with the full vCloud suite and deploys in a couple of hours.

Finally (it seems like it’s been a long time coming) we have the new certifications for networking VMware Certified Professional - Network Virtualisation (VCP-NV) and VMware Certified Implementation Expert (VCIX-NV) were both launched and are available from today. I’ve signed up for the VCP today, since you can just take the exam if you already hold a VCP certification and this will renew your VCP’s. I was thinking of taking the VCP-Cloud to then give me 2 years to hit the VCAP’s for DV, but as NSX is the new hotness, this NV track seems more viable.