VMworld 2011: Paul Maritz’ CEO Keynote

Factoids

During Paul Maritz’ keynote presentation, when he explained that we’re at a tipping point, he gave us the following statistics:

• 1 new VM every 6 seconds
• 20 million VMs worldwide on vSphere
• A VMotion occurs every 5.5 seconds
• > 800,000 vSphere Admins, in 146 countries
• 68,000 VMware Certified Professionals
• > 1,650 ISV Partners
• > 3,000 apps

In announcing the new vSphere 5.0 he said it had:

• > 1 million engineering hours
• > 2 million QA hours
• 200 new features, including storage tiering, virtual storage appliances and auto host provisioning
• The largest VM ever, the Monster VM

Monster VM

• 32 vCPUs
• 1 TB RAM per VM
• 2 TB of disk

The New Era

Paul believes we’ve gone through (at least) three eras of computing:

• Mainframe: ’70s – defined by automated book keeping. He believes we should ring fence and eventually replace this model.
• Client/Server: ’80s-90s – defined by workstations and consumer PCs. Distinctives were GUI, C++, x86 and relational databases. These gave way to IP networks, Java, and HTML and showed us CRM, eCommerce, ERP and Data Warehousing. He’d like to modernize this infrastructure and operations to carry both existing and future applications.
• Cloud: 21st century – billions of connected devices, HTML5, Frameworks, XaaS and real-time high-scale analytics and commerce. He wants to invest in new and renewed apps for not only corporate but consumer and mobile devices that are secure and acceptable to bridge from the existing models to new models of user access.

To get there, especially in moving client/server to the Cloud, he noted that we can’t rewrite all the apps. But he’d like to see existing compute/storage/networking virtualized to create a foundation for cloud operations. To this end he (re)annouced vCloud Operations — a Cloud Infrastructure and Operations Suite — which has been around for 6 months and is the fastest growing business unit at VMware. It sits on top of vSphere and said “It is like plumbing, but necessary.” He also discussed vFabric consisting of their recently acquired Spring Framework along with a Data Fabric. GemFire (a recent acquisition) is the benefactor of this model.

He posed the rhetorical question: “What is the new Linux, if virtual infrastructure is the new hardware?”

His answer: cloudfoundry.com, a way to “shorten the time it takes to take an application from concept, to code, to the cloud using an open platform as a service.”

In the same way that VMware as a company is going up-market with management tools and suites, they’re also going wide by attracting and retaining developers. Twenty years ago the volume “platform” was Solaris, and all developers wanted to write to it, attracting the volume of applications. Now, VMware is the volume “platform” and the company wants to create stickyness with developers.

Thanks for coming along,

BillPetro.com

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