One man’s take on the vSphere launch

Anyone who is a reader knows that I’m a VMware true believer (I try to be pragmatic, but it’s so easy to love VMware’s products) – so I’m going to keep this short and sweet.

Details galore will be all over the place.   I’ve done a ton of write ups on the storage bits and pieces – many of which will be future posts, but all of which is going into the storage chapter of Scott Lowe’s upcoming book.

I’ll also post some video from the event later in the day so people can see it like they were there (though I’m sure VMware will post it all)

So, what’s my take?

I really do think that VMware is redefining the datacenter.   I think a few years forward – we’ll look at this idea of a “cloud OS” as a key ingredient, the glue that ties it all together.

I know many will say “why all the emphasis on scale, and all these crazy extreme workloads – that’s not me…”  The answer is that the real transformation begins with virtualizing every app, every use scale, and at every scale.   You save money every time you virtualize – even just one or two hosts.   You  become more efficient every time you virtualize – even just one or two hosts.

But you change the way you build your datacenter when you start with the premise of “I will virtualize everything”. 

This is where you see the transformational effects, where you see the largest capex and opex savings, and where you are laying the foundation

And, just like in the physical world – these different use cases have different requirements, different SLAs, different performance goals.   But imagine building an infrastructure that could meet it all?

Using that logic, what’s the point of all this scaling stuff?   It’s because our customers at EVERY scale are saying: “we want to build our datacenters like this”.  You need to have infrastructure that can do it – VMware scaling up to large manage these massive aggregate pools , Cisco scaling up the network and sever scaling - unified network and blade count and in-blade scaling, and what would it be worth without storage scaling to match (after all – for those of you that think that 200 CPU cores in your storage array is silly – these datacenters have 1000’s of cores going at compute – and compute without information to compute against doesn’t do much).   Management integration at these scales becomes critical (you can only turn “big knobs” when things are this scaled up – there is no time for micro-level provisioning models – and everything needs to be as automated as possible).

Will every customer do it day one, or need that scaling day one – no (though some will) – and it’s great to have a clear path towards a datacenter design that can support them starting small and growing to whatever they need, and being more efficient, saving money, power, cooling at every step, and transforming their operational processes to make managing the physical infrastructure orders of magnitude easier.

This all demands not marketing – but real engineering work.    

One thing that struck me – and I think it’s very true and very elemental – all the IT leaders are descending on Palo Alto, all (including us) and are falling over ourselves to demonstrate that we are shifting our roadmaps, designing our flagship products, changing our strategies, and heck, even acquiring companies (it’s an element IMO of the Oracle/Sun thing) – driven in large part what VMware – a company that is tiny relative to the giants – is doing.   That’s an indication that they’re on to something, and indication that they are leading the way.

BTW – in the “falling all over each other” category, if you want to look at the “all in” of vSphere integration that we can provide – DAY ONE, you can read the PR here and here.   No vendor (and I mean this) has more technical integration with VMware.   And by this I don’t mean squishy “designed for” integration (where a feature is suited for VMware deployments – in some cases this is truly designed for, and in some cases not – not saying those don’t matter – they do, just putting it aside for a moment), I mean DEEP API-level integration with VMware.  We have competition on Storage, and we have competition on backup, and management, and security – and they are respected competitors we do battle with successfully all day long.  But looking across the board, from vStorage, to vCenter APIs, to tools that provide visibility into UCS and Nexus which in turn integrate with vNetwork, to the ESX CIM APIs, to VMSafe – the breadth of integration is unparalleled.

Today is VMware’s day to shine – and to the VMware team from me – CONGRATULATIONS!

Here’s what think (a short video)…..   This was funny – VMware wanted short nuggets, and then after we recorded the stuff that will be on VMware.com, they asked me – so look, just say what you really think….

Comments

[tim]

It must be nice to be a VMware salesman today. :) :)