Well that’s a wrap, another VMworld in the bag for me. This is the 6th VMworld that I’ve attended so I’ve seen it evolve and change over the years and wanted to give my thoughts and feedback on it.
- Record attendance as usual, my thought on that in this post.
- Gone are the days where VMworld was like an Apple event, full of mystery and cool feature and new product unveilings. The keynotes back then were a lot more fun and enjoyable compared to today where almost everything that is announced you already know about. Things like vSAN, vVols, NSX and vFlash we’ve known about for a while now and were featured in prior VMworlds. So VMware is basically announcing things that they’ve already announced and in typical fashion many of the features you still have to wait for until a new release after 5.5 comes out. The end result is that I found that the keynotes were not that exciting, especially when we had the new guys (Pat, Carl, Robin) doing it, it just wasn’t the same as past years. Paul Maritz and Stephen Herrod had a special way of generating excitement and captivating the audience that will be missed.
- Also in the keynote VMware the OpenStack elephant briefly entered the room and quickly moved on, you can probably guess why.
- The streaming of the Day 1 keynote was very smooth, I prefer watching it from the hotel room where I can capture things more easily. I don’t know why VMware chose not to stream the Day 2 keynote, it would of been nice to give you the option of not fighting the crowds and watching it wherever you wanted to.
- VMware for gosh sakes, please count anyone that attends a VMworld regardless of how they got there towards alumni status. Right now if you went as a blogger, press, exhibitor or some other types of passes they don’t consider that as having attending the event and so it doesn’t count towards alumni status which you get when you have attended at least 3 VMworld events. If I’m there, I’m there OK, count it towards alumni, you’re making all those people that are losing out feel unwanted. It might seem like a trivial thing but it feels nice to be recognized as an alumni.
- Last year was pretty cramped but they did a good job this year with spreading things out and had things spread out further across some of the nearby hotels. It was nice being able to go downstairs from my room in the Marriott to see a session first thing in the morning.
- Thank you VMware for not making us eat outside this year in a park with no seating, pigeons and overflowing garbage cans. It was good to have lunch indoors this year and also split into both Moscone North and West.
- Storage and Networking were the big highlight areas for VMware at the show. On the networking side you had the NSX product which was the result of VMware’s Nicira acquisition, I don’t know a whole lot about it but the networking crowd seems to be fairly excited about it. The one interesting thing I noted on the keynote slide that showed 15+ partners that were working on NSX integration was that Cisco was missing from that list. That wasn’t by mistake either as it seems Cisco wants to sell their own networking solutions and not integrate with VMware on NSX. On the storage side you had all the new storage technologies (vSAN, vVols, vFlash, Virsto) that VMware has been talking about for a while now, so no real surprises there. However the only one that will be available in vSphere 5.5 is vFlash, vSAN will be a public beta for a period of time before it is fully supported (H1 2014). There was hardly any talk of vVols this year as VMware still has a lot of work to do to get that out the door. There was a lot of noise about vSAN though that was reflected everywhere at the show including sessions and in the Solution Exchange.
- Speaking of Virsto, it was mentioned in the keynote but there was hardly anything else on it at the show. I went to the one session that they had on it hoping to find out what VMware plans on doing with it but that was not covered at all. They basically just covered the architecture and how everything works as the product is today, what I want to know is how they are going to integrate it into vSphere. Today they sell the product just as it was before they bought it, I’m guessing that they are going to take some of the technologies from it and use them in their existing and future storage architecture. While what it does is cool, overall as the product is today it seems overly complicated with a lot of components which requires you to basically replace the existing vSphere storage architecture. I think it will be much better when VMware can blend it into their storage architecture.
- The announcement of vSphere 5.5 seemed to get lost in the show as the focus stayed on some of the big upcoming features. VMware has a paper on what’s new in vSphere 5.5 and it show be available sometime in September. As usual there are tons of little enhancements and features that don’t get much mention, so turn to the blogs to find out more about them. I’ll be publishing my vSphere 5.5 mega-link list soon that will have everything in one place for you.
- I thought the sessions went very smooth this year, VMware did a good job of organizing and scheduling them. It seemed like there were a lot more than last year which is a good thing as more sessions make the cut and you can pick and choose what you want to see.
- It sucks that VMware doesn’t give backpacks to everyone, they were actually pretty cool this year and being the 10th anniversary made them collectible. I can understand on keeping costs down but VMware should at least offer them for sale in the VMworld store for anyone that wants to buy one.
- I was pretty surprised to see the winners of the annual Best of VMworld awards that Tech Target runs each year at VMworld. I haven’t heard of many of the companies that won and were finalists. The winners this year seem to reflect that either big vendors aren’t innovating anymore or just not participating. I tend to believe the latter, you have to self-nominate your products and I think the bigger vendors don’t bother that much. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of small companies with cool products, but seriously a UPS power management tool is the best of the best in virtualization management tools for vSphere?
- I spotted Stephen Herrod at VMworld when I was talking with some people over by The Cube. He may not be VMware’s CTO anymore but it’s hard to turn your back on something that you have been passionate about for so many years so I can’t say I was surprised to see him. The folks at The Cube were quick to pounce on him and stick a microphone in his hand.
- Lots of great parties this year, I went to the SolarWinds vMixer, VMunderground, Veeam party and an HP party. My only gripe with the VMunderground this year was it was too far away and there were hardly any cabs around the location if you wanted to take one back.
- The Solutions Exchange was really crowded this year with steady traffic almost every day. Lots of energy in there and lots of great products so its always fun to walk around and take it all in.
All in all I think VMware did a excellent job executing VMworld this year and I look forward to going back next year. It always flies by so quickly and there are so many people that I wanted to bump into but didn’t so I’ll have to wait another year to see them.
Below are some of the Day 1 keynote slides with my comments on them:
I liked this slide that showed a visual representation of VMware innovation over the years. The standout innovative feature on that slide is vMotion which VMware made a special point of recognizing. Today we take vMotion for granted but you have to admit the first time you saw it after it was introduced it was pretty damn impressive.
