Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

Transition in our industry…and for me!

For more than 11 years, I have had the privilege of sharing details about the remarkable products, people, partnerships, and strategies that make up the VMware family. I have shared these via this blog, at our VMworld or vForum events, on twitter, in 1-on-1 discussions, or with my many friends in the VMUG, vExpert, PTAB, and other technical groups. I have enjoyed these interactions immensely and learned so much from my time in this role. And so today it is with both excitement and sadness that I announce my transition from VMware to a new adventure as managing director at General Catalyst, a premier venture capital firm jointly based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Palo Alto, California.

I am amazed by the changes our industry has undergone over the last decade. Virtualization has become the default technology upon which the majority of the world’s server applications run. What’s more, virtualization’s impact is rapidly extending into storage, networking, security, and every other aspect of the modern datacenter. The resulting “software-defined datacenter” is clearly the architecture of the future, enabling the efficient private, public, and hybrid clouds that are becoming part of every company’s IT strategy.

There is also a renaissance in how we consume applications. We’re in a world where we continue to use Windows applications, but augment them with web, SaaS, and mobile applications. It’s also a multi-device world where tablets and smart phones join PCs and laptops as our omnipresent technology sidekicks. The grand challenge is to help organizations offer these new choices to their employees while keeping company information safe and secure. Throw in dramatic changes in the way we write applications, analyze massive amounts of data, share files, or communicate with one another, and you can understand why I’m so excited about today’s technology world!

It is indeed an incredible time to be in our industry, and the challenges ahead will keep engineers busy for many years to come. And engineers are at the core of my proudest accomplishment at VMware: helping to build and develop one of the best system software teams anywhere. This team is well poised to continue to change the world of enterprise computing.

It is this team-building experience that I’m hoping to leverage in my role at General Catalyst, extending it into an even broader technology domain. My primary focus will be finding, supporting, and developing great technical entrepreneurs as they build the products and companies that they’ve always dreamt of building. These companies will bring the same tremendous energy, creativity, and innovation to these and other challenges, just as VMware has for so many years.

Again, it’s been an incredible journey at VMware, and I look forward to my ongoing role as a technical advisor to the company. I’ve appreciated every single day of the last 11 years, and here’s to an exciting future ahead for each and every one of us!

Sincerely,
Steve Herrod (@herrod)

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

VMworld Europe kicked off today in Barcelona with approximately 8,000 attendees. My keynote this morning focused on the software-defined datacenter and our updated cloud management portfolio. This management offering includes enhancements to the management products in the recently released VMware vCloud Suite, and stand alone tools, plus the newest member of our cloud management solution: vCloud Automation Center.

Management must change in a fundamental way. In today’s cloud era, there are faster moving parts, a requirement for greater scalability, a substantial need for self-service – and a core requirement of deep automation. VMware brings new capabilities to our customers to better manage their software-defined datacenters – with vCloud Automation Center, vCenter Operations Management Suite and vFabric Application Director. I address these areas in greater detail below, and in my keynote.

Self-Service is core to Cloud

• VMware is delivering self-service to customers with vCloud Automation Center. We recognize that cloud is about self-service access and automation; we are delivering tools to do this.
• vCloud Automation Center is a portal where users can select from a set of applications that will deploy and run automatically with full policy linkages. IT can enable users to move faster.
• Once the applications are deployed, users can manage and monitor apps on their own, in vCloud Director-based public/private clouds or external clouds such as AWS.

Application Management must evolve

• With the growth of applications in a software-defined datacenter, the challenge for users becomes ‘how do I manage all of these applications’ since practically any application can be run on vSphere.
• vFabric Application Director provides modular blueprints to users so they can easily compose applications, configure properties and settings inside the application, and ultimately have the applications deploy automatically.
• We’ve built the Cloud Application Management Marketplace for customers to download application blueprints from other software vendors and also share their own blueprints.
• If you want to learn more about our application management strategy and the supporting app management products that launched today, check out my colleague Preeti Somal’s blog.

Cloud Operations needs to be automated

• After your cloud is up and your environment is likely getting larger and change is happening more quickly, we know customers will want to automate the operations and analytics.
• vCenter Operations helps customers figure out what’s happening in their environment. The product has integrated and automated performance, capacity, and configuration management capabilities along with deep analytics.
• Some of the cool new features in the vC Ops product include:
  • Custom Groups which let’s users slice and dice views of their environment from a business perspective. This will help ensure your important business applications are healthy.
  • Best Practices have also been embedded in the product. We published our own deep knowledge of vSphere to help with troubleshooting.
  • Application Visibility: You can now determine if there’s a problem at the infrastructure level or the application level.
  • Single Pane of Glass: Customers now have a single dashboard to monitor the state of their environment across multiple clouds, private to public.

Multi-Cloud world

• VMware is enabling our customers to operate across multiple clouds – VMware, AWS, OpenStack, physical, you name it.  While we feel it’s best to deal with a homogenous set of resources, that isn’t always the reality and we’re helping customers bridge the gap.
• Multi-hypervisor Manager is a new feature I previewed today in my keynote. Users will be able to manage both VMware and Hyper VMs while staying in their reliable VMware environment.
• My colleague Kit Colbert today blogged about VMware’s support for heterogeneous management and how we’re making this a reality for our customers.

¡Ay, caramba! Lots happening at VMware on the management front and we couldn’t be more excited about where it’s all headed. If you’re at VMworld Europe this week, I encourage you to check out all the management spotlight and breakout sessions, and walk around the VMware booth to learn more about what we’re doing in this space.

Now, it’s time to get some tapas…

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

It’s my favorite time of year, again – VMworld! VMware is proud to host its annual conference in San Francisco this week where we get the opportunity to share the company’s vision, strategy and product portfolio with the industry, while interacting with tens of thousands of our best customers and partners. I have the pleasure of keynoting Day 1 and Day 2 of VMworld along with Paul Maritz and Pat Gelsinger.

My talk today on Day 1 focused on the software-defined datacenter (SDDC). A software-defined datacenter is where all infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, and the control of this datacenter is entirely automated by software.

VMware is making the software-defined datacenter a reality with the vCloud Suite announced today. The vCloud Suite brings together what customers need to build, operate and manage cloud infrastructure – virtualization, software-defined datacenter services, policy-based provisioning, disaster recovery, and applications and operations management.

During my keynote, I spoke about the vCloud Suite technologies available today and in the future. Here are some of the highlights:

Software-Defined Compute

• Customers recognize that vSphere is the best place to run all applications. With the latest release of vSphere 5.1 there are numerous new features and technical enhancements that all applications can benefit from.

• Monster VM capabilities are back and better than ever! vSphere 5.1 now supports 64 VCPUS and it also is the first to hit record performance numbers – 1.05M IOPS from a single VM. It’s all about I/O, and you can check out our Performance team’s blog to learn more about this awesome benchmark.

• In addition to today’s applications we are also thinking about future applications. vSphere is an asset to both PaaS environments and Big Data, and  is backbone of VMware’s Open PaaS offering, CloudFoundry. We’re also making Hadoop run well on vSphere, as you’ve heard from our recent announcement of Project Serengeti. For developers thinking about next-generation applications, think about vCloud Suite.

Software-Defined Storage & Availability

• We’re making storage a first-class citizen in the datacenter. I’ll show a preview of our Virtual SAN Technology, Virtual Volumes and Virtual Flash. At a high-level these efforts let network attached storage better leverage the server resources – and both VMware and our partners are making this possible.

• On the Availability front, I encourage all SMB attendees to check out Russ Stockdale’s VMworld Spotlight Session where you’ll have a chance to see a tech preview of DR to the Cloud for SMBs.

Software-Defined Networking & Security

• We’re enabling logical networks to work best in virtual environments, and with the ecosystem. vCloud Security and Networking is paving the way for L2 and L3, and we see real value in how you plug in L4-L7 services into logical networks, automate all this and then pull these services together. This is available now and I’ll demo this capability on stage. For a deeper dive on this area, check out the blog published today by my CTO colleague Allwyn Sequeira.

Management

• Management wraps all of these software-defined services together! We give our customers the ability to create clouds, deploy applications and pay attention to ongoing operations.
• vCloud Director 5.1 and vCenter 5.1 feature new enhancements and together make your infrastructure available as Virtual Datacenters. Customers will be pleased to know that the vCloud API is more extensible and can now be used with other clouds.
• vFabric Application Director can be used to deploy applications via an easy-to-use blueprint and is a key part of the vCloud Suite. vCenter Operations continues to handle the ongoing operations of a dynamic environment within a SDDC.
• To hear more about managing a SDDC, please read another great blog published today by Kit Colbert, a long-time engineer at VMware.

Multi-cloud

• We are also making vCloud Connector part of the vCloud Suite in order to address the need for management of hybrid cloud environments. This is particularly timely as our vCloud Datacenter Service Partner list grew today. We welcome T-Systems as the latest to share our hybrid cloud story.
• We believe standardization across the datacenter is critical if you’re a customer looking for efficiency and reduced complexity. However, we recognize the world has become more heterogeneous and we see a need for open platforms.
•  We are extending automation and orchestration (via DynamicOps) as well as software-defined networking (via Nicira] to OpenStack, other clouds and even physical infrastructure. 

Innovation

What’s the secret sauce behind a lot of these technologies? VMware Innovation. Innovation is a big focus for the company, especially VMware’s R&D and Office of the CTO. A lot of the cool innovative projects happening at VMware are featured in the Innovation Lounge and in Julia Austin’s Spotlight Session. I encourage attendees to check it out.

A lot going on this week at VMworld 2012! If you aren’t in San Francisco, you can tune into watch my live keynote at VMware NOW or catch the replay afterwards. I’m looking forward to some great conversations with our customers and partners this week.