VMware CEO’s ‘State of the Virtual Union’ Keynote: 10 Takeaways

by Sean Michael Kerner

VMworld 2013 is Pat Gelsinger’s second as VMware’s CEO. At the 2012 event, the baton was passed to him by outgoing CEO Paul Maritz, who now heads VMware spin-off Pivotal.

“There are more people, more apps and more data, placing huge demands on the infrastructure that you deliver,” Gelsinger said. “These trends and the pressure on IT are requiring you to build the future, mobile cloud era, but it also demands that you liberate resources from the client/server world.”

Gelsinger stressed throughout his keynote that VMware’s strategy is driven by three key imperatives: ubiquitous virtualization, automation and hybrid cloud. “We’re not done until every app, every database, every big data application and every physical server becomes replaced by virtual infrastructure,” Gelsinger said. “That is our passion, and we will continue to drive compute virtualization until it is 100 percent virtualized for the data center.”

VMware calls its approach to data center virtualization the software-defined data center (SDDC). It’s a strategy that includes automation, operations management, storage compute and networking. At VMworld 2013, the new productions include vSphere 5.5 for server virtualization, NSX for network virtualization and VSAN for storage virtualization.

Perhaps the biggest announcement of the VMworld 2013 event was the official launch of NSX. NSX is the network equivalent to what VMware ESX is to servers, as it enables physical network resources to be carved up and controlled as virtual instances.

VMware is aiming to grow NSX by making it a platform with which partners are able to integrate. The partner integrations can extend NSX’s capabilities for security, application services and network switch integration.

Martin Casado, CTO for Networking at VMware, joined Gelsinger on the keynote stage. Casado came to VMware by way of the $1.26 billion acquisition of his company Nicira in 2012. Casado helped to pioneer the entire software-defined networking (SDN) movement while at Stanford University.

Also joining Gelsinger on the keynote stage was Bill Fathers, senior vice president and GM of the Hybrid Cloud Services business unit at VMware. During the keynote, Fathers and Gelsinger announced the formal general availability of the vCloud Hybrid Service. The service previously had been available in a limited beta since May of this year.

VMware is initially delivering the vCloud Hybrid service from its own data centers in California, Nevada, Dallas and Virginia. The effort will be complemented in the coming months with additional data centers in Chicago and New York from VMware partner Saavis. Coincidentally, VMware’s GM of Hybrid Cloud, Bill Fathers, is a former president of Savvis.

In one of the more lighthearted moments of Gelsinger’s keynote, he gave the audience the results of an informal survey VMware conducted on how virtualization and IT professionals see themselves. Some saw themselves as masters of the universe, dragon slayers and champions, while others saw themselves as martyrs.