Keynote

The keynote kicks off with VMware, Pat Gelsinger, wishing VMware a very happy 20th birthday. A short video was played summarizing 20 years at VMware. The culture, the teamwork, the growth. The transformation both that VMware has gone through and that VMware has allowed the rest of us to do.

Pat then goes on to discuss how can we make the commitment to continue on this journey of innovation and continued digital transformation. He also shows his commitment to VMware, with a Las Vegas tattoo of the VMware logo on his forearm!

Bridge across silos of Innovation

Act 1 – ESX and the physical server. Data Centers shrank because of better utilization of comnpute through virtualization. Today then can grow at scale through rapid deployment of infrastructure.

Act 2 – BYOD – Being able to securely deliver applications and content to devices that employees are most comfortable using.

Act 3 – The network has evolved through NSX. NSX now also us to rapidly secure and extend networks on top of any network infrastructure.

Act 4 – Cloud Migration – Migrating from Private to any public cloud: AWS, Google, Azure, IBM.

Next Act – Multi-cloud era. Different tools teams and architectures will come together through more simplified management and automation.

Pat goes on to ponder the ultimate question asked to large businesses, People or profit? Do well and do good? We have the responsibility to do both. He then goes on to discuss Mercy Ship, a global nonprofit that builds floating modernized, high tech hospitals that provide high quality health care and life saving surgeries to rual and under developed parts of the world.

Global Impact – saved over 540 million tons of CO2 emissions through virtualization of workloads over the 20 year history of VMware.

Ranked #17 in Fortune’s Change the World list of organizations that have global impact.

Tech Superpowers

– Cloud – Unimaginable Scale

– Mobile – Unprecedented reach. Apps reach half the world population.

– AI/ML – Bringing intelligence to everything. Breakthroughs in Healthcare. Just scratching the surface.

– Edge/IoT – Connecting physical and digital worlds.

Each a superpower in their own right but they all work together and reinforce each other.

Any Cloud. Any Application. Any Device.

Any Cloud

Two paths: hybrid cloud and public cloud. Each driven by unique requirements. Private driven by business decisions, public by developer needs.

VMware Hybrid cloud creates a seamless path from private cloud to public cloud.

Rule of the cloud: Ruthlessly automate everything!

Hyper-converged and vSan are the heart of VMware Cloud Foundation.

VMware on AWS – 1 year anniversary

Pat brings out Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. See it in use across verticals. Number of customers using the offering is doubling every quarter. Primary use case Are customers looking to migrate on prem applications to the cloud. Secondary use case is Disaster Recovery.

Expanding global reach of VMware on AWS

By the end of next year VMware on AWS will be available where ever AWS is, including Amazon’s Gov’t cloud.

Amazon Relational Database services. Customers have been asking to move Amazon RDS to on prem environements. Announcing today Amazon RDS on VMware on prem environments. Available in a few months on all major databases, SQL, Oracle, MySQL, etc.

VMware Cloud Verified Partners list is growing.

Project Dimension tech preview.

Pulse 2.0. Scales to support 500 million devices.

Also announcing initial availability of VMware Cloud Automation services.

in the middle of the Any Cloud is the network.

A lot done in networking. NSX the standard in SD Networking.

From data center to centers of data.

Pat invites VMware CTO, Ray O’Farrel to the stage for a demo.

Demo of VMware Cloud on AWS. New: Bulk migration in HCX. Complete vMotion migration with no downtime.

Elastic DRS – growing the infrastructure to accommodate the workloads.

VMware monitoring and trouble resolution. Patch management and updates/upgrades.

Project Magna – Deep AI/ML to optimize performance across on prem and Cloud infrastructure. True automation of the infrastructure so business can focus applications. “Self Driving” data center.

Any Application

Best practice for running containers: Run them on a virtual machine.

VMware is looking to be the enterprise grade standard for a Google Kubernetes with VMware PKS.

Ray is brought back on stage with Wendy to do a demo of VMware PKS running Kubernetes of vSphere.

The demo illustrates developer going into the Kubernetes admin portal and adding a new name space and then on the back-end NSX is automatically brings up the associated logical networking router and switch.

Next demo by Ray on ML of sorting images on Kubernetes using Nvidia vGPU. Spare vGPU not in use during off peak VDI time.

Introducing Project Concord. Block chain for the enterprise.

Any Device

Engaged Employees are the heart of digital transformation for companies. Devices have their siloed management applications. This exactly how Pat runs VMware.

VMware Workspace One is the answer. Also announcing Dell Provisioning for Workspace One.

Scenario: Dell drop shipped laptop to new employee. Just give new employee their credentials and they can begin working right away.

Ray is back out for another demo of Workspace One. Using Workspace One to manage upgrade of deployed Windows 10 machines and finding out why they have all been upgraded to same version of Windows 10.

I know there’s tons of details I’ve missed. The presenters talked much faster than I could type away on my phone and all the while trying to snap photos. I’ll revisit this article and fill in all the gaps as soon as I can.