After an evening of catching up with vPeeps at the excellent VMunderground/vBrownbag party hosted at a new central venue (great work to all involved in organising).

I settled in at the Hang Space to hear the first days announcements of what’s new with VMware…

VMware’s first wave of announcements are out and we’re a brave, gooey (don’t ask), EVO, Air community of IT professionals.

There was a lot of messaging in this morning’s General Session about convergence and breaking down the silos of infrastructure, along with several announcements around extending the ECO system with integration to OpenStack, Docker and Google – its all about the API’s!

There were the usual references to premise and premises 🙂

Along with the announcement of EVO and it’s first two incarnations EVO:RAIL and EVO:RACK which promises hardware infrastructure being deployed via HTML5 from anywhere between 15 minutes to 2 hours.

What’s good to see is that there’s alignment between vendors on the simplification of IT, this is really important for VMware as they start to take their product portfolio and reduce the complexity of integration, deployment and maintenance. IT professionals can concentrate more on the integration and management of these products, while working up the stack on application/business integration within their organisations and less on fine tuning of infrastructure solution internals (trust me this is a good thing!).

Abstracting these ‘nerd nobs’ is becoming a common theme across many vendors, I’m really keen to see how Analytics will play a part, hopefully we’ll see more on this soon!

What was also interesting was the statistics of public cloud adoption where only 6% of businesses are running fully public while 94% still have some kind of private on-premises infrastructure (better start checking the spelling of this, lots of premise going on).  VMware believe this is about to become mainstream with mass adoption on the horizon and have appropriately introduced vCloud Air to respond to this wave of change.

And then of course we have EVO:RAIL, the first in the line of EVOlution in infrastructure (get it?), my main takeaway from this was not about the hardware (Dell, SuperMicro etc) or the software components (vSphere, vSAN etc), but the ‘glue’ integrating both of these things and simplifying the deployment/management of the whole stack.  It’s early days for sure, but this is the right direction and it’s only a matter of time before we see more of this style of packaged infrastructure offering.

Well that’s it for now, I can’t wait to see what’s announced tomorrow…

I’m sure they’ll be more mind bending going on!

I’m also planning to provide reviews on some of the new technology companies that make VMworld US special, along with interviews!  Stay tuned!