I’ll be posting updates here as the session progresses….

• 3:30 — Random pop music list as we wait….now an announcement another 5 minutes before we start.
• 3:40 — cool opening video. Call it “video guys to nuts around some general image themes as supplied by VMware”.
• 3:44 — Rick Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer speaking.
• 3:45 — Diamond Sponsors — Cisco, EMC, Dell, HP, NetApp — we love Diamond Sponsors and they love us.
  • Platinum Sponsors — 11 of them which we love too but not quite as much….all good companies though.
  • Hands-on-Lab Public Cloud — 2009 was a private cloud, 2010 was a public cloud.
  • This year we’re using a pure public cloud model
  • 3 datacenters — all offsite, 24,000 lab hours — Las Vegas, Miami, Amsterdam.
  • Will deploy over 200,000 VMs during 5 days of VMworld.
  • All using vSphere and vCloud Director
• 3:47 — Agenda for the week.
  • Paul Maritz speaking about bridging from existing IT world into the new cloud era.
  • 3 customers joining Carl Eschenbach later this afternoon.
    • NYSE Euronext, Revlon, Southwest.com
  • Wednesday 7-9 PM party = Killers and then 9-11 PM after party.
  • Thursday morning keynote — all outside speakers talking about interesting topics.
    • “The Brain, The Mind, and Consciousness”.
• 3:50 PM — 60,000 strong community in the VMware User Groups.
  • We love users, we love users, we love users — no sweaty shirt unfortunately.
  • Recognizing VMUG leaders (they deserve it) — applause.
  • Next year VMworld is August 27-30 and back in San Francisco.
• 3:52 PM — Paul Maritz now on stage — the ultimate gravelly voice.
  • Now more than 50% of workloads virtualized.
  • From 9% in 2005 to 51% in 2010. Forecast as 59% in 2011 and 65% in 2012.
  • Ways to comprehend half of workloads virtualized..
    • New VM born every six seconds (more than physical babies in US)
    • More than 20 million VM’s ticking away around the globe (if physical would stretch more than 2x the Great Wall of China).
    • 5.5 vMotions per second. More VMs in flights than aircraft in flight.
  • 800,000 vSphere Admins today — population of San Francisco.
  • 68,000 VCP’s in 146 countries — all except North Korea.
  • 1,650 ISV Partners, 3,000 Apps certified on VMware
    • Healthcare — 10 out of the top 10.
    • Finance — 10 out of the top 10.
    • Telecom — 5 out of the top 5.
    • Retail — 4 out of the top 5.
  • Is Cloud just “timeshares rediscovered”? Of course not….but let’s talk about it.
• 3:57 PM — Cloud is the next major round of interaction between consumerization of IT and enterprise IT.
  • Force over the next decade.
  • Benefit of being older is that you can bore people with history lessons….here we go….
  • Started IT career as Computer Science grad (not many at the time) in London.
  • Turned down by IBM and others but finally got a job at Burroughs, ended up debugging ATM micro-code.
  • End up categorizing IT generations by canonical applications.
  • Mainframe canonical app was about “automated book keeping” — CIO reported to CFO.
  • Beginning of client-server era, now 100+ million users, GUIs, C++, etc.
  • New data fabric of the RDB – relational database and IP Networks, HTML, JAVA etc.
  • New canonical apps in late 20th century = ERP, CRM, eCommerce, Non-Real-Time Analytics
  • Cloud is about the big pool of computing flooding out of the consumer space flowing over into the enterprise space and driving new canonical applications.
• 4:02 PM — 3 years ago 95%+ of devices on internet were personal computers.
  • 3 years from now PC’s will be less than 20% of devices on the internet — massive shift in 6 years.
  • Next generation of canonical apps = Real-time, High-scale Analytics and Commerce
  • It’s all about real-time. We’re impatient people now basically for better or worse.
  • Steps forward to handle legacy from each generation….
    • Main-frames — Ring-fence off the main frames and eventually replace.
    • Client-server — Modernize infrastructure and operations to carry existing and future apps.
    • Cloud Era — Invest in new and renewed apps.
  • Again, it’s all about real-time. Can’t do this by putting lipstick on existing apps….we have to handle those but have to recognize it’s truly legacy.
  • 3rd major force — users expecting to see all the data on any device they voice.
  • Yep, it’s BYOD — Citrix and VMware singing the same song here (because the market forces here are so overwhelming).
• 4:07 PM — big challenge is to bridge from existing world to new modes of end-user access.
  • The stakes are….well….Burroughs doesn’t exist anymore, does it?
  • 3 Dimensions here….
    • 1st Dimension – Infrastructure Renewal of Existing Compute, Storage and Networking.
      • Virtualization becomes key enabling technology to do this.
      • Can’t just redo underpinnings or else don’t save enough money for transformative changes.
      • Transforming from savings via hardware efficiency but to operational efficiency.
      • Not just about the hypervisor but about a complete suite to address infrastructure operations.
• 4:12 PM
  • Now a sidebar on vSphere 5.0 — very please to announce a new version at each VMworld.
  • Requires serious overlapping development efforts.
  • vSphere 4.0 in 2009, 4.1 in 2010, 5.0 in 2011
  • > 1 Million Engineering Hours, > 2 Million QA hours, 200 new features, > 2,000 partner certifications.
  • First big software project Maritz has been involved in that went out on time with originally planned features.
  • Leading with…
    • Performance and scale to handle monster VMs….
    • Lots of automation around the management of storage….very much needed and almost overdue.
  • But not just the vSphere layer (pools of compute, network, and storage elements)…
  • Also the whole suite that overlays vSphere….vSphere is one component of 5 now.
    • vSphere 5.0, vCenter SRM 5.0, vCenter Ops, vShield, one other.
  • Service Providers — want to enable them left and right…both for internal offerings and also external offerings.
  • 48 Service Providers committed to vCloud Director — added many over the last year.
    • Singtel is on there…go Singapore! 🙂
    • Some regional SP’s are banding together — SingTel and Softbank for instance.
• 4:20 PM
  • SMB — Shifting gears to the smaller space — over half of IT spend is in small businesses.
  • vSphere Essentials – datacenter in a box and now with a Virtual Storage Appliance – use direct attached storage to create VSA and get SAN-based features.
  • ESXi Downloads — over 400,000 downloads per year.
  • VMware Go — SaaS service to try to target (aka get more value) out of these potential customers).
  • Lots of people using it so expanding it….in random unstated ways.
  • 2nd Dimension – Renewal of Existing Applications – New and Renewed Apps
    • vFabric is about the middleware and frameworks. 2 important elements….
      • Spring Framework and others — tc Server, RabbitMQ, ERS, Hyperic
      • New pieces of vFabric 5 are Gemfire (in memory scale out database).
        • Gemfire sits under US DoD app that tracks every single mobile asset. 60,000 updates per second, 3 times more than Visa network, tracks real time status of many aircraft in flight (check fuel in left fuel tank).
        • SQL Fire — tries to marry scalability of Gemfire with much easier programming model that keys off SQL constructs.
      • Announcement – vFabric Data Director — lots of effort goes into provisioning databases.
        • Handles backup, cloning, etc. of db’s.
        • vFabric optimized version of PostgreSQL
        • Sybase working on something similar.
        • This is really big….cut down DB deployment, optimization, etc.
• 4:30 PM
  • Cloud Foundry — open-source product available under Apache 2 License
    • Can plug in Data Services, Messaging Services, Other Services
    • Portable across clouds — Private, Public, Micro.
  • Linux came about to keep applications from being bound too tightly to one hardware architecture.
  • Cloud-based world has real danger may go back to the tight ties in the mini-computer or Unix days.
  • BUT…we don’t think Cloud should be like that…..want to win by having the best cloud.
  • What becomes the new Linux? We want to create it….both on vSphere and also on other layers.
  • Micro Cloud Foundry — USB stick version of everything Cloud Foundry — all the services that play in this space.
  • Jobs says it’s Post-PC era and we agree but….still millions of PCs so there’s a market there we’ll keep investing in.
  • That’s the View story — View 5.0 — about Bandwidth Improvements, Client Ubiquity, VoIP/Unified Communications.
  • Horizon = second part of desktop story (View = first part).
  • We’re “floating away” from the desktop using Project Horizon.
    • Need many approaches to handle this.
  • “Virtual Phone” — they’re back!!!! Phone-based hypervisors!!!
    • Protect people who download cracked copies of Angry Birds.
  • 20 years to the current desktop environment….but people under 35 don’t think that way.
• 4:40 PM
  • IT Operations yesterday, Mission-Critical Apps today, IT-as-a-Service tomorrow.
  • Carl Eschenbach coming on stage to loud music to wake everyone up, people starting to leave the keynote however.
  • 5 minutes on stage and hasn’t said much….starting to be a stream of people heading to the door.
  • Introducing 3 customers to talk about their cloud journey.
  • 1st customer – NYSE Euronext — video about the customer. This late in the keynote can’t afford a live client who might ramble too much.
    • Mission-critical applications for financial markets worldwide.
    • NYSE Technologies is a separate firm that provides services to NYSE?
    • I take that back….there is a live exec from NYSE.
• 4:50 PM
  • Steve Rupenau, Exec VP of NYSE Euronext, gets on stage wearing VMware 2011 t-shirt and red-soled sneakers
  • Multiple exchanges in US and Europe, multiple data centers in multiple countries.
  • 3 years ago started rethinking…..now see themselves as a technology company facilitating trading rather than vice versa.
  • VMware Products used by NYSE are….pretty much every VMware product.
  • 2nd customer – Revlon – intro video – 6 weeks to get server in place is now 5 minutes.
    • Previously 7:1 consolidation ratio and now up to 34:1.
    • VMware = core of our cloud, simplicity = speed, speed = competitive advantage.
    • Systems working for people, not people working for systems.
    • $70 million of cost savings from private cloud implementation.
    • Trust but verify — fully quantified by Finance department.
    • 98% of workload running on private cloud — beautiful.
    • 531 applications total in the environment.
    • Only 2 Unix servers, 3 AS/400’s in the whole infrastructure.
    • Datacenter power down 72%.
    • How measure savings between old way and private cloud?
      • SAN in a can
• 5:00 PM
  • 3rd customer – Southwest Airlines – very tough industry, built to run on $3/gallon jet fuel…now it’s much more than that.
    • Southwest CTO – Bob Young
    • 35,000 employees, 557 Boeing 737’s,
    • How using technology to drive more revenue?
      • 84% of revenue came in online — ticket booking online, aggressive social media strategy, etc. etc. So what about VMware?
      • Several years back when Bob came not virtualized at all…
      • 0% to 40% virtualized in 18 months — impressive.
      • vFabric — using Tomcat Server, Hyperic, Gemfire under the web site.
  • Panel Discussion
    • How has private cloud changed relationship with LoBs?
      • NYSE — our outside customers can outsource their “plumbing” to us….we’re providing serious services (and therefore revenue I assume) due to private cloud.
      • Revlon — globalize and grow. We’re doing that without taking more money…or even giving money back to marketing or R&D. Building trust around doing it faster, better, cheaper.
      • Southwest — business customers don’t care where it runs but has greatly improved availability and also speed.
    • How differentiate between highly virtualized environment vs. private cloud?
      • NYSE — Virtualization is entryway to private cloud, we’re at the beginning, need virtualization to do cloud.

I could write more…..but it’s 5:10 PM and it’s time to go find some excitement elsewhere!