VMworld 2013 Day 2 Wrap-Up

By David Davis

On day 2 of VMworld 2013, the day started off with the general session/keynote with VMware COO Carl Eschenbach. Carl announced that the official number of VMworld attendees hit a record this year with 22,500 (but he is rounding up to 23,000). He introduced VMware Senior Principle Engineer, Kit Colbert. I have met Kit a number of times, I know that he was one of VMware’s early employees, and he’s a very smart engineer.

Carl and Kit went through the struggles happening in the datacenters of today. It was a great skit with Carl playing the role of the business and Kit playing the role of IT. They bickered back and forth and had a lot of laughs. They showed a video of “I Love Lucy” where Lucy couldn’t keep up with the rate (demands) of the conveyor belt.

The video helped us visualize the demands that the business will place on IT and how there is a disconnect in many cases.

What Kit showed Carl was really that with the latest advancements in vSphere 5.5 and vCenter Automation Center (vCAC) that both parties (business and IT) could come together and work more efficiently. Examples include provisioning of new multi-tiered applications, latency sensitive workloads, and how the new VMware NSX software-defined network virtualization can help businesses. Carl and Kit spent a lot of time covering the NSX, how it provides virtual firewalls, load balancers, and, of course, switching. They had a video interview with Canadian airline, WestJet, who is already using NSX so that WestJet could tell us how NSX helped them. Finally, Carol and Kit discussed Horizon View and VSAN, showing how it could help them.

Finally, Carl announced that VMworld attendees (and really anyone who follows @VMLogInsight) will receive an edition VMware’s Log Insight log analysis tool that is capable of monitoring up to 5 virtual machines but at no cost.

Special thanks to Scott Lowe of Blog.ScottLowe.org for his great live-blog coverage of the keynote!

Best of VMworld Awards

At noon, TechTarget announced the results of their Best of VMworld awards in an award show to a packed house (there were so many people I couldn’t fit into the room to watch them be presented). This year, there were 160 nominated products across 9 categories. The winning companies were:

• Storage and Backup – Simplivity and Omnicube
• Security / Compliance – Afore and Cloudlink
• Virtualization Management – Eaton Intelligent Power Manager
• Networking – Plumgrid
• End-user computing – Lakeside Software
• Private Cloud Computing – Nutanix
• Public and Hybrid cloud – Embotics
• New Technology – Neverfail Continuity Architect
• Best of the show – Eaton Intelligent Power Management

Parties

Tuesday night was really the single night with the most party invites with numerous conflicts. I attended the vExpert / VCDX gathering arranged by John Troyer (@JTroyer). It was a great gathering of some of the most intelligent passionate people I have ever known.

While I probably should have gone to bed, I instead went stopped by the #vBacon Gathering, arranged by Cisco’s Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja). I was there long enough to get a great picture of the “tower of bacon!”

Both were great events and I was overwhelmed by the number of friendly people shook my hand, were excited about the latest VMware news, and were loving VMworld 2013!

Day 3 is going to be a great day filled with sessions and it’s the last day that the solutions exchange will be open (so don’t miss it!) It is also the night of the VMworld Party! Exciting!

David Davis is a virtualization author at Pluralsight.com, the global leader in video training for IT pros. He holds several certifications including VCP5, VCAP-DCA, and CCIE #9369. He has been awarded the VMware vExpert award 5 years running. Additionally, Davis has spoken at major conferences like VMworld and authored hundreds of articles for websites and print publications, mostly around virtualization, for respected publications like Virtualization Review and ComputerWorld.