VMworld 2012 General Session Day One

Today if the first full day of VMworld 2012 in San Francisco. To kick the week off they started off with a general session with some announcements, but nothing that wasn't already rumored. The biggest announcement was the removal of the vRAM vTAX for vSphere. vSphere will now just be licensed on a per-socket basis with no core limits. vSphere 5.1 was also announced, but technical specifics were saved for break-out sessions. One big theme was virtual datacenters, and being able to provision them in minutes, not hours or days. Software defined networking was also huge, which is key to automated datacenter provisioning. Session was very light on real-time demos and were mostly screenshots of products.

Highlights from the general session:

• 20,000 attendees here at VMworld 2012
• CMO Rick Jackson
• CEO Roundtable later today with Paul Maritz, Michael Dell, Joe Tucci and others
• VMware CEO Paul Martiz took the stage
• 2008: 25% of applications were virtualized
• 2012: 60% of applications are virtualized
• VCPs: 25K in 2008, 125K in 2012
• VMworld Attendance: 13K in 2008, 20K in 2012
• 2008: What is a cloud? 2012: How do I build a cloud?
• Drivers of Change
• Customer Experience, employee experience - Real-time, broad information flows, mobile and social, stream-centric
• Wherever, whenever, in context
• Must get much more efficient in IT to put time into these new experiences
• Fundamentally make IT more efficient and agile
• Top to bottom transformation
• Infrastructure - Servers to Clouds
• Existing apps - New apps and big data
• PCs to Mobile Users - PCs will no longer dominate
• Paul Martiz formally hands over CEO control of VMware to Pat Gelsinger
• Pat Gelsinger takes the stage
• Over the next 3-4 years, get to a point where 90% of workloads are virtualized
• Reduce time to provision new services - Minutes to seconds, not hours or days like today
• Create a virtual datacenter container, the virtual datacenter of the future
• Software-defined datacenter
• All infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, and the control of the datacenter is done entirely in software.
• Museum of IT past: Windows, Linux, Databases, Mission critical, big data, HPC
• Now time to move on
• Abstract, Pool, Automate - Required for the datacenter of the future for compute, storage, network, security and management
• Common software platform for all applications
• Introducing the vCloud Suite
• Software defined storage, software defined networking and security, and federate these pools to make them extensible
• "Unmatched in the marketplace"
• Announces vSphere 5.1 for highest performance
• Yearly cadence of software releases
• 80% of virtualized workloads run on VMware
• We heard you: Customer Survey of 13,000
• Change your pricing - no more vRAM entitlements
• Priced per CPU, no core entitlements, no per-VM costs
• Per-CPU socket licensing
• Cloud Ops
• Operational readiness, Processes and control
• New skills, new people, role based certifications
• Cloud architects for the future
• IT Business management tools
• Service level accounting, CIO scorecard
• Tools and services to navigate the virtualization changes
• Announcing the formation of the Cloud Ops forum
• Addressing a multi-cloud world
• Cloud Foundry, Dynamic Ops, Nicira
• VMware is committed to OpenStack community and open source
• vFabric - Premier platform for Spring/Java, Cloud-Scale services, integrated management
• Cloud Foundry - Open platform as a service, multi-cloud deployment choice
• Access to applications - View/Mirage and Horizon
• VMware will remain an independent company
• Steve Harrod - VMware CTO takes the stage
• vCloud Suite - Management, cloud infrastructure, extensibility
• SDD (Software defined datacenter) - Abstract. Pool. Automate.
• Compute - Biz critical apps - Exchange, SharePoint, SAP, Oracle
• Monster VMs - 64 vCPUs, 1TB/VM, 1M IOPS to a single VM
• Guest NUMA awareness
• New applications upport - Unified Communications, new low-jitter support, HPC support, big data and cloud foundry
• "Big Data" - Hadoop on vSphere  - Project Serengeti (run Apache and Hadoop virtually)
• Provision Hadoop clusters in just minutes
• Storage/Availability
• Enhanced vMotion - vMotion with no shared storage
• Storage directions - vVols - pairs up VMs with the arrays. Arrays will operate at the VM level, not LUNs.
• Flash will be first-tier resource in storage pools - New APIs
• Direct attached storage will be treated as a first class citizen
• Networking/Security
• Abstract the physical network and
• vSphere distributed switch - New backup/restore, health checks
• vXLAN Ecosystem
• Wide vendor support - Emulex, Broadcom, Brocade, Riverbed
• Cisco partnership - New Nexus 1000v, new virtual services, VXLAN, vPath
• Arista L2 gateway - VXLAN to Phyiscal network bridging
• Management
• VCD - Create clouds and virtualized datacenters
• Create clouds - Blur the lines between vCenter and vCD
• vSphere web client is full featured and eases management
• Native web-plugins from HP, Cisco, Dell, EMC and others
• vCloud API - Backup as a service, database as a service
• Ongoing Ops
• vCenter Operations Manager
• vCloud Connector - Connect private to public clouds