VMware: Far beyond Virtualization!
Over 8000 IT professionals were present in Barcelona and over 23000 in San Francisco. This is not just a fun fact about VMworld, but a clear indication of what is happening within the virtualization market: more and more people are getting involved. VMware has been spreading its activities far beyond what they are most known for – server virtualization – for some time now. For instance: desktop virtualization has reached critical mass with over 50% of the current workplaces running on a hypervisor.
VMware Ambition: the Software Defined Data Center
Looking to the future, VMware’s goals are ambitious. Faster time to market was one of the major catchphrases to be heard all around the conference halls and breakout sessions. In the future of the Software Defined Data Center, workloads will be added on demand via self-service portals, scaled automatically, secured and monitored in a manageable and comprehensive manner.
Network Virtualisation with VMware NSX
Probably the most exciting new product to help make this ambitious dream come true is VMware NSX, which focuses on network virtualization. But, you may be wondering, hasn’t this already been achieved with vSwitches and distributed switches running on the technology of Cisco Nexus 1000V? Yes, but NSX goes a lot further, stretching the virtualization layer over switching, routing, load balancing and firewalling.
Streamlined management with VMware vCenter
Yet more interesting products are to be found in vCenter, where the Automation Center and Operations Manager have been presented as policy driven management tools to easily provision workloads to public or private clouds, manage and monitor them. On the storage side, vSAN and vFlash will help support these workloads by leveraging the local resources on the host, providing a highly available and performant solution.
Strong Dell presence at VMworld
On the Solutions Exchange floor of VMworld, we were happy to see the Dell presence grow over the years. It is now one of the biggest booths with the most exciting technology. The acquisition of Quest Software has brought Dell in pole position on monitoring virtualized environments thanks to Foglight. Last but not least, it gives us great pleasure to hear the name “Compellent” being dropped regularly by the speakers in the technical sessions. It shows that the automated tiering storage from Dell is clearly one of the main contenders in the market.
Virtualization spans the entire stack
All these products confirm my original statement: more and more people are getting involved. We can no longer think of “the VMware guy” within an IT department. We need to get our network experts, DBA’s, security engineers and storage nerds on board and aware of the Software Defined Data Center. Virtualization spans the entire stack. So get involved, it’s exciting stuff!