VMWorld 2014 Recap

LGarvin

We’ve just returned from this year’s VMWorld conference and it was a busy one! With a dozen staff members and four demo stations we were well prepared to talk to customers and not-yet-customers (yes, there are still a few out there) non-stop, and that’s pretty much what happened.

The Expo Hall Normally at a trade show there’s an ebb and flow of traffic during the day as most participants are in sessions, and then the breaks between sessions are like a breakfast rush at your local coffee shop. This year was noticeably different, however, as we experienced a non-stop line of visitors to the booth throughout the entire show. This is a Good Thing. :-)   I’m not sure if there were just that many more attendees and the sessions were full, or attendees just weren’t going to sessions, but we certainly appreciated the interaction with everybody. The official report is that there were 22,000+ attendees, which I’m told is actually a bit lower than 2013. d think at VMWorld the primary interest would be virtualization software, and yet, we talked about every product in the catalog, some of them more than Virtualization Manager!

Experts & Espresso We did something different this year. We hosted a series of breakfast sessions with free coffee. The sessions were livestreamed, live-tweeted, and live-attended too!   On Monday Scott Johnson, Senior Systems Administrator, LogixHealth and Dan McDougal, CEO, Performance Tuning Corp. presented “Managing & Optimizing Across the Application Stack”. On Tuesday Stephen Foskett presented “Storage I/O is About to Get Crazy”, with an enlightened idea about using external PCI Express as a storage transport.  On Wednesday our own Joel Dolisy, CTO/CIO, SolarWinds, and Venky Deshpande, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, VMWare presented ”. You can watch the video recordings of the presentations at the YouTube links above, or just go to http://go.solarwinds.com/vmworld14.

Tech Field Day Extra! Joel Dolisy (pictured left) and Suaad Sait, EVP Products and Markets, SolarWinds (pictured right), also presented at the Tech Field Day Extra! held in conjunction with VMWorld. They talked about our perspective on the performance of hybrid IT and the importance of integration. You can view that presentation online as well.

Keynotes As expected, VMWare announced some new products, although eagerly anticipated, vSphere 6.0 product was only announced as a forthcoming beta. The big announcement, I guess you could call it, was VMWare EVO, a family of hyper-converged infrastructure services.   EVO:Rail – a base level of services designed to ramp up a hundred VMs in 15 minutes. Real products are being delivered from several vendors. EVO: Rack – building on EVO:Rail, produces an entire cloud environment in a couple of hours. This is still a technical preview, but look for those same vendors to expand into this realm as well. Also announced is an OpenStack distribution that will include vSphere, VSAN, and NSX… but I’m not sure how “openstack” you can call that, since it’s mostly based on proprietary products.  VMWare is also making a big play in the end-user space, with Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) -- my jury is still out as to whether I want my *desktop* to be dependent on my Internet connection! – enterprise mobility management, and content collaboration   You can view all of the VMWorld sessions online. Did you attend VMWorld? What were your thoughts and experiences?

 

_stump

It was great to see so many SolarWinds people in San Francisco last week! I especially enjoyed catching up with Patrick Hubbard at one of the espresso sessions, and of source the presentation at TFDx was excellent. As that bobblehead.... let's just say it's a source of constant amusement at home.