This morning Robin Mattlock opened the General Session at the Moscone Centre-North with an awesome intro movie and prepared everyone for the Software Defined Data Center topics coming up the rest of the event.

She welcomed some ‘Alumni Elites’ on stage, persons who participated all VMworld events, for 10 years.

Robin mentioned that the number of VMs managed by an admin has been tripled when looking at the following ‘virtualization phases’:

• Compute virtualization (120 VMs managed per admin)
• Virtualizing Business Critical Applications (BCA) (170 VMs managed per admin)
• IT-as-a-Service (350+ VMs managed per admin)

Soon after Pat Gelsinger took stage and announced that everything has to be virtualized and VMware will never stop chasing the vision of virtualizing all apps, including the Business Critical Apps mentioned earlier.

Next, Pat announced the release of vSphere and vCloud Suite 5.5 introducing support for large datastores and bigger virtual disks (64TB!), overall capabilities and application-aware High Availability.

VMware Virtual SAN is finally coming to GA as is VMware NSX which was announced by Martin Casado. I really have to show the features and capabilities provided by NSX to my networking colleagues, they will be flabbergasted! Most features you know of usual Virtual Machines like snapshotting and cloning will be made available to the networking aspects.

Ebay, Citi and GE Appliances came on stage telling their experiences with NSX and how they have (completely or partly). That proves that the technology is production capable.
They told us that no physical changes were needed in the infrastructure which sounds promising to me but I think more is needed to completely transform your networking infrastructure to a full virtualized infrastructure.

The last announcement I want to write about is VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, the public cloud solution provided by VMware and providing customers with an extension or even a replacement of their own datacenter. Solutions like Disaster Recovery as a Service can be provided easily and saves customers the need and costs for building their own failover site.

Pat states that VMware is the number one VMware Cloud Management provider and the fastest growing provider as well.

From what I can tell now, last year, VMworld 2012 was all about providing SDDC (Software Defined Data Center) services for Virtual Machines and now the next step has arrived for storage, networking and automation.

Thanks for reading!