I think it is fair to say day one and day two of VMware Explore could be described as polar opposites. Day one felt very lacklustre, missing the energy of a keynote speech and a full house of VMware enthusiasts with it being delayed until the second day.
The keynote speech of day two did not fail to deliver the big announcements and hype of new acronyms, products and product versions, but critically was missing specifics around release dates for products like VMware vSphere 8 like we have come to expect at these types of events.
The shine to the opening segment by VMware CEO Rangarajan Raghuram was tainted by the awkward tip of the hat to Hock E. Tan the CEO of parent company Broadcom and this did nothing to abet the concerns of the VMware fan base over the acquisition of VMware by Braodcom earlier this year.
So what did go well for VMware on day two… the delivery of a cohesive strategy and product development coined “hybrid multi-Cloud” that puts VMware back into a position of innovation it has not held since the release of VMware ESX 3.5 in 2007.
So what is Hybrid multi cloud and why is it so innovative? Lets first go back to 2007 when IT professionals were embracing VMware ESX as it enabled them to consolidate multiple physical servers onto a single Physical host. ESX worked as an abstraction layer from the server hardware enabling these new consolidated virtual servers to be run on almost any brand of server.
VMware’s new Hybrid Multi-Cloud offers a similar proposition for cloud server workloads. Virtual servers can now be managed within the familiar vSphere management platform that extends compute and storage resources to multiple cloud vendors like Azure, AWS, Oracle, IBM, Google including the traditional private on-premise.
This appears to me to not just be an extension of the vSphere product but more of a reinvention of its purpose and proposition to business digital transformation. Simply put, like server hardware brands of yesteryear IT professionals can now look to move virtual server workloads between on premise and different cloud infrastructure vendors using built in services like vMotion and Storage vMotion.
One announcement I was hoping for that didn’t come was around VMware NSX pricing. VMware NSX is the price of entry to this new VMware hybrid multi-cloud solution (HCX) and I fear current pricing will turn many potential VMware hybrid multi-cloud clients away.
Lastly today I was amazed by the extent of collaboration VMware has achieved with and most certainly amongst the different cloud vendors. To see them all in one room singing from the same hymn sheet couldn’t do anything else but leave a positive final impression for the first 2 days.
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