VMworld Day 2 Recap

Day 2 flew by for me and I have to say, I’m still reeling a bit.

The day was kicked off with the general session keynote which is usually when we see Herrod take the stage, but since his departure, we got another C level (COO Carl Eschenbach). This one was probably my favorite of all of them that I’ve seen as we didn’t have to suffer through a VMware View / Horizon demo. I’m not a fan of desktop support so this has never appealed to me.

What we got instead was a real life demo of the latest and greatest tools with vSphere, NSX, vSAN, and vCAC. A lot of this just seems like the evolution of the products. The impression I got was vCloud is fading into the background and vCAC will be what VMware would like to push forward. Looks great for the Enterprise and should be multi-tenant for the xSPs of the world. They even showed on the big screen the ability for vCAC to provision on other providers. Of coarse their own vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS), but also AWS and Azure with price breakdowns readily available for you to make the informed decision. And even they admitted, sometimes another service is cheaper in certain situations. Might not perform as well, but is cheaper. For the cost conscious folks of the audience, this is a nice feature.

NSX

The rest of the day was spent getting my head around NSX. I’m not sure the small 2-3 host customer will truly benefit from this technology. But the service providers and enterprises should really see some provisioning benefits. I could try and hash out NSX is, but I think its more appropriate to just send you to the official blog post on it. It takes a bit to get your head around and I’m still surprised that VMware is recommending physical boxes for certain roles (controllers), but that soon will change as they get more performance out of the software. Read up on this one folks, its gonna be big.