VMware Explore 2024 The Future
The vCommunity
First up the community surrounding VMware (by Broadcom) is still going strong. There’s still a great number of enthusiasts of the product who come together online and in-person to help each other out, support the product, and look at new and interesting ways to use it (as well as stick a lower-case v in front of everything they can). The community events, the community-driven sessions, and the community interactions were all key points of the event with good attendance and a lot of talk. Joe Baguley and Hok Tan both called out the VMware communities in their keynote and there’s definitely corporate support for that to continue.
The Broadcom Direction
I’d love to be proven wrong on this, but my impression from VMware Explore is that the vision of Broadcom, now more refined and clearer after a year post-acquisition, doesn’t really include the small customers from the past. Accept this as the new direction, and it’s fine, but it’s definitely disappointing if you have been using vSphere on a budget for years.
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the flagship subscription Which includes vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and the Aria suite, was all over the show but there was almost no mention of the other SKUs- vSphere Standard, VMware vSphere foundation (VVF) and the brand new vSphere Enterprise Plus. In fact the only session I saw which covered these wasn’t from a Broadcom speaker but on the community theatre, so kudos to Matt Heldstab for noting that these products exist (YouTube session link). These other (theoretically) more budget friendly options do still exist, at least on paper, so it would have been nice to see some proper coverage of them at the event.
Having said that, the new direction does greatly simplify the offering. From a purchasing perspective you’ll no longer have to try and reconcile 15 different license types which all seem to be for the same thing. And from a support point of view there’s no longer going to be the “you need this version to fix that” or “click here, oh - you don’t have that option…” which we would sometimes see with the previous hundreds of purchase options available
I think VMware by Broadcom will thrive, but it will definitely be a leaner operation focussed only on the large enterprise and not the premium hypervisor for all that we have known for so long now.
No End-User Computing
Broadcom split off the EUC business from VMware not long after the acquisition and that company is now established as Omnissa. This meant there was no more Horizon at Explore, and this meant a section of content, and some exhibitors, that we would have been treated to in the past was not present this year. This difference was known well in advance, so it didn’t detract from a great show. The halls and expo were bustling all week, even Thursday morning was busier than I expected, and I got a generally positive vibe from everyone I spoke with.
Private Cloud
It was all about the Private Cloud at this years Explore. That could be on-premises, but there was plenty of content around hosting your private cloud with a cloud partner- including with the Hyperscalers. Microsoft had a big presence and multiple sessions giving the low down on Azure VMware Solution, and not just as a DR/BC target or as a migration-to-public-cloud tool. The private sovereign cloud, but owned and operated by you- even if the datacentre is owned and operated by someone else- is definitely an option. Private Cloud doesn’t just mean on-premises any more.
Next Year
As for Explore 2025 that’s still wide open. There was none of the usual “see you in Barcelona next year” or publishing of the dates that we’ve come to expect from previous Explores and VMworlds. It would be a shame if this was the end, Explore may be one of those Shiny things that are being stopped under the Broadcom’ banner, but it has long been a focus of that global community which supports the platform. The world didn’t end for Microsoft when TechEd Europe vanished a decade ago, but we still miss it. I hope Explore makes a return in 2025.