Thoughts from the VMworld Keynotes

The VMworld keynotes are carefully constructed and orchestrated in order to convey a few specific messages. The partner keynote on Sunday was essentially a sneak peek of what was presented on Monday and Tuesday at the public keynotes, so we fortunate partners got to sit through the same material twice. After a couple of viewings what key messages managed to stick in my brain?

Firstly VMware now have a new strategy theme – “One cloud, any application, any device”. When I heard this my initial impression was that it was reminiscent of the Microsoft theme of “Cloud first, mobile first”. For Microsoft this was a declaration that they were prioritizing R&D and product investments in Azure and Office 365 instead of legacy on premise server products. For VMware it seems to be more of a marketing pitch for newer lines of business with NSX, vCloud Air and AirWatch.

The One Cloud strategy is not in any sense a reprioritization or retreat from on premise infrastructure deployment. VMware is still very much pushing the idea of hybrid cloud expanding out of the on premise private cloud. The “One Cloud” reference is VMware on premise expanding to a VMware based public cloud as one cloud, it is defiantly not a multi cloud or “Any Cloud” strategy.

VMware may have created a new Cloud Native Applications business unit but it is unlikely that we will see any mainstream VMware products being released as cloud only services. So far we have seen limited releases of the vRealize tools as essentially hosted cloud services, but functionally similar to the on premise versions. VMware just announced SRM as a hosted service, but so far I have not seen anything equivalent to something like Microsoft’s Operations Management Suite which leverages Azure analytics and machine learning and could never be deployed as an on premise application.

VMware demonstrated a new capability with vMotion to vCloud Air. They also announced the ability to extend the vSphere 6 Content Library and vRA blueprints to vCloud Air. All very nice, but nothing really unexpected here. What they are telling us is that they have upgrade the vCloud Air platform to vSphere 6 and implemented NSX with some of the new features of 6.2. I am not denigrating the work that must have gone into this, but this capability was pretty much taken for granted. It has always been an anachronism that vCloud Air was stuck on VCNS, after all NSX has been out for almost two years.

The other new announcement was the Evo SDDC Manager product. This must have been very recently renamed from Evo Rail, as the stickers in the solution exchange still have the Evo Rail label. VMware are still pitching Evo SDDC as a Hyper Converged solution, but have now somehow released Evo SDDC as a software product? How does that work?

The only explanation for this is that VMware does not have currently have enough hardware partners signed up for Evo SDDC yet. At this stage only Dell, EMC and QCT have announced support for Evo SDDC. Cumulus announced in a press release that their product was part of the Evo SDDC solution, so that is going to limit potential hardware partners. HP recently announced a partnership with Cumulus but also announced they were dropping Evo Rail, so potential future HP support of Evo SDDC is really impossible to predict. I can’t think of any other vendor that could potentially meet the Evo SDDC storage, network and compute requirements with their current product stack.

It is important also to note that in the fine print in the press release VMware have stated that they expect that Evo SDDC will be available in H1 2016. So this announcement is certainly not an announcement that Evo SDDC is actually available and ready. Also no announcement on an upgrade of Evo Rail to version 6 products.

There was nothing else in the keynotes related to cloud that had not previously been announced. The most interesting new stuff that VMware talked about is the Photon Platform, but this post is long enough and Photon really deserves it’s own post, so I will leave it here for this one.