With over 23,000 people in attendance, this year’s VMworld event was a packed affair in every sense of the word. Unlike previous years, VMware lent an extraordinary focus on not only their traditional IT ops audience but also the developer community. The conference started off with some people dressed as square-shaped cloud-native apps joining VMware’s COO, Carl Eschenbach, to emphasize their increasing push as the one platform that can bring both the traditional and the new IT worlds together under one-roof. The mantra of ‘One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device’ played through the event across the various keynotes and sessions. To clarify a bit further, the ‘One Cloud’ does not imply a singular focus on VMware’s platform but more of a common cloud management console across multiple cloud fabrics. 

While VMware outlined the key building blocks of its Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) vision last year, this year’s event lent further depth and substance to the vision. Essentially, the company reaffirmed its commitment to hybrid at the core of its strategy and differentiation with its Unified Hybrid Cloud platform that ties various existing and new building blocks together. Key announcements around this included:

• VMware EVO SDDC (previously code named EVO:RACK^TM): New suite of software that includes several of the company’s existing data center management tools, as well as an automation engine and open-source hardware management software, all packaged to streamline and ease deployment of hyper-converged appliances.
• vSAN 6.1: Several new features including support for stretched clusters, improved Recovery Point Objective (RPO), integration with management platform.
• vSphere Integrated Containers and Photon Platform:Support for containers on a slimmed down hypervisor, designed for DevOps teams planning to build large pools of commodity computing capacity that solely run cloud-native applications.
• OpenStack 2.0: VMware’s second release of its distribution of the OpenStack open-source cloud software, based on OpenStack Kilo.
• NSX 6.2: Improved support for application continuity and disaster recovery, deeper integration with physical infrastructure.

There was equally concerted focus on driving innovation on the End-User Computing (EUC) side, with a string of exciting announcements including:

• Project A²: VMware is bringing together AirWatch with App Volumes software for deploying applications to not only virtual desktops but physical ones as well.
• Project Enzo: Clone technology, App Volumes, and User Environment Manager rolled into one along with unified management of on-premise and cloud-based virtual workspace services through a single pane management interface. This is aimed at enabling a true persistent desktop experience for end users leveraging shared resources. Sounds like nirvana!
• VMware Identity Manager Advanced Edition: Standalone identity as a service (IDaaS) solution that is available as a cloud service or on-premise offering for simplified access and identity management.
• VMware Horizon 6.2: New features including better scalability support for Skype for Business, NVIDIA GRID^TM vGPU^TM, vSAN storage, enhanced security.

While the keynotes were packed with a lot of content, the cooler moments included:

• Demo of cross-cloud vMotion: This is something that has been a big ask across both enterprises and service providers, and drew a big applause from the audience.
• Demo of Project A²: Using AirWatch to manage App Volumes on physical desktops, endless possibilities here!
• Microsoft and VMware sharing the stage together: Who would have thought about that!

VMware’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, delivered a fascinating talk where he covered the Five Imperatives for Digital Business. And of all the things he shared, the one odd but interesting data point was the explosive growth of the app economy!

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