The European version of the VMworld conference was in Barcelona from 13th to 17th of October. ITQ attended the conference with almost the entire vUnit. On Monday the 14th we organized a Pre-conference Party together with one of our new partners PernixData. The “Flashy VIP Party” was at the beach in Beachclub El Boo, it was great meeting and catching up with some of some customers, partners and people from the community.
The conference itself was attended by over 8000 people, again topping last year’s event. Besides the official release of vSphere 5.5 VMware announced a lot of new versions of their products during the keynote. Most of the updated products are about management and automation tooling, the most important were:
- vCloud Automation Center 6.0 – Delivering business agility through IT automation
- vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 – Automated operations management for the mobile cloud era
- VMware IT Business Management Suite – Transparency into cost and quality of IT services
- vCenter Log Insight 1.5 – Automated Big Data log analytics to simplify root cause analysis
VMware also announced that it has acquired Desktone, Inc, an industry leader in desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) with an advanced multi-tenant desktop virtualization platform for delivering Windows desktops and applications as a cloud service. I think it was the multi-tenancy capabilities that VMware was looking for and of course the customer base.
The solution exchange at VMworld was again packed with storage related vendors, a lot of new flash and hybrid arrays as well as several server caching products were demonstrated. It really is the year of storage in the virtual world and it was about time. I foresee the trend will be “Local Performance” and “Remote Capacity”, meaning IO handling is done close to the VM, just as we are used to with CPU and RAM. I see two ways of doing this; the caching way or by creating a virtual SAN out of server flash and DAS disks, I believe there is a market for both solutions, in two years we will ask ourselves why we ever did it differently.
The Storage developments together with Network virtualization will bring the “all scale-out infrastructure” closer for many customers; apart from the lower costs of such an infrastructure the biggest advantage will perhaps be the gained insight in costs per VM.