Day 1 Keynote | VMworld 2015

Are you ready for ANY? What is VMware’s Unified Hybrid Cloud platform?
by Betsy Amy-Vogt | Sep 1, 2015

Carl M. Eschenbach, VMware, Inc.’s president and COO, kicked off the general session on Day 1 at VMworld 2015 from the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

“What if we, at VMworld 2015, could enable you to run, build, deliver and secure any app, anytime, anyplace?” Eschenbach asked the crowd. He then promised, “Our goal for VMworld this year is to make sure you’re ready for ANY – any challenge or business opportunity that lies ahead.”

Introducing the four main categories for today’s session, Eschenbach claimed that the Unified Hybrid Cloud will solve the most common challenges encountered by IT professionals.

Eschenbach welcomed DIRECTV, Inc. EVP and CIO Mike Benson to the stage for a question and answer session. DIRECTV’s long-term partnership with VMware is allowing the company to manage periodic huge service demand for live special events, such as the Floyd Mayweather super-fight. DIRECTV successfully leverages the VMware virtualization technologies and NSX platform to do this: “We use NSX to allow us to move from manual rigid delivery to a more software friendly delivery. On top of that it has better security in that space,” said Benson.

Next on the stage was Bill Fathers, executive vice president and general manager for VMware’s Cloud Services Business Unit. Fathers spoke about use cases for the Unified Hybrid Cloud.
Fathers reviewed three use cases for hybrid Cloud:
Disaster recovery
Using Cloud to protect mission-critical applications
Application scaling

Fathers claimed that VMware has solved the issue of bottlenecks at networking: “The VMware Unified Hybrid Cloud platform allows you to extend your entire network arch into the Cloud. … This folks, is the future.”

Yanging Li, VP and GM of Storage and Availability at VMware, joined Raghuram to introduce VMware’s new software, the EVO SDDC manager.

Describing the specifications for EVO SDDC in detail, Li provided a live synchronization demonstration of the software’s capabilities. She claimed that: “The chief benefit of EVO SDDC is that it makes the installation and configuration of a software-defined data center relatively easy. What used to take weeks of effort and a team of experts can be accomplished in two hours. It is that simple.”

She underscored the importance of this seemingly simple demonstration: “Ladies and gentleman, you have just witnessed history. What we have shown here is the cross-Cloud VMotion capability. We have been able to accomplish this feat of moving our virtual machine across the Cloud and across between private into public data centers.”

Fathers returned to join Li in a demonstration using VMware’s software to create a mobile application without writing a single line of code. Fathers summed up the demo, saying, “Basically, your developers have used a third-party capability, integrated with the hybrid platform, created a mobile app, linked it securely to data that was living on-prem in their private Cloud environment, and ‘Bob’s your uncle,’ it’s up and running.” He closed out this section of the session by reminding the audience, “The future of applications is hybrid applications, and you’re going to need a hybrid platform.”

As CEO of EMC’s newest federation company Virtustream, Inc.,
Ray O’Farrell, CTO and chief development officer at VMware, and Kit Colbert, VP and CTO at VMware, took to the stage for the final speech of the general session for two demonstrations. First was a demonstration that showed a developer leveraging Docker to provision an application that they built out. However, in the first limited demonstration, the containers in each virtual machine were isolated, and there were problems with partial visibility, limited security and lack of compatibility with tools.

“We’re making containers first-class citizens in vsphere,” said Colbert. “What we are trying to do is give the developer the speed, portability and agility that they want from containers while at the same time providing IT ops with the security, visibility and management that they require to run these apps in production.” He continued, “vSphere integrated containers provides the ability to run both traditional apps inside of virtual machines, as well as Cloud-native apps inside containers and do it side by side, all on a single platform.”

The second demonstration was of the new VMware Photon Platform. “We’re really excited about the Photon Platform,” Colbert said. “This is a new scalable infrastructure stack from VMware that is built and optimized for Cloud-native apps.” In a demonstration, Colbert showed how Photon “enables multiple application and development teams to very rapidly build out their apps in a safe, secure and scalable manner.”

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