VMware Explore 2024 Day 2 - General Session
Joe Baguley opened the Keynote and was straight in there with “it’s been a year since the acquisition”. Lots has been happening product wise with VMware, in particular the coming together of the flagship offering VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), but the Broadcom takeover is still a key topic of conversation everywhere on the show floor.
He then paid special note to the VMware communities; the 1600 vExperts globally and the 150,000 members of the VMware User Group VMUG- making it one of the largest tech communities in the world.
Joe handed off to CEO and President, Hok Tan whose focus was very much on customers looking to build their private cloud and those looking to exit the public cloud.
“The future of the enterprise is private”
Hok Tan
The VMware product line has certainly changed in the past 12 months to meet this challenge. Hok said 8,000 different product lines had been simplified into 4 core offerings. The software that we’ve “grown to love and trust” - vSphere, vSAN, and NSX - are now working together as a single platform: VMware Cloud Foundation, and he reported that Broadcom have sold 30 million cores of that product this year.
Paul Turner (VP of VCF) was up next, and in his section we saw that the vision of private cloud is a bit more flexible- incorporating offerings from over 300 VMware Cloud Service Providers who are essentially delivering “Sovereign Cloud as a Service”. There’s also allowance for a hybrid model in the VMware design with products from the main public cloud hyperscalers. With these three locations of on-premises, cloud service provider, and public cloud both workloads and VCF licenses are portable between platforms.
Training and certification is being rethought - in May this year the £3000 training course prerequisite requirement for a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) cert has been removed. Today it was announced that all the online training is free to VCF customers and partners, and there’s good news for VMUG advantage subscribers too:
Info
VMUG Advantage subscribers get a 50% discount on VCP and VCAP exams. Pass the exam and you get a FREE 3 year VCF personal license.
Register for VMUG Advantage at vmug.com
At time of writing, a VMUG Advantage subscription is $210 p.a, and VCP Exams cost $250 so this offer is incredibly good value, especially when you factor in the other benefits bundled with VMUG Advantage.
Joe Baguley returned to the stage with a string of new product announcements: Google Cloud VMware Engine now supports VMware Live Recovery which increases the flexibility of that solution. Tanzu Data Services for VCF delivers pre-tuned, highly available, managed, and supported data services to the VCF platform. And Intelligent Assist for vDefend enables conversational, natural language, abilities to your cyber-event triage.
Edge computing and AI networking (with a new product VeloRAIN) was covered- but interestingly we didn’t get subjected to the “AI All the Things” sort of message that has haunted IT events of late.
In conclusion, the announcements showed continuing progression from Broadcom. With the two VMworld/ Explore global events being in August and November, it’s always been tricky for VMware to “save” any big launches till the show reaches Europe but there’s some good nuggets here (especially for the homelab enthusiast!).
VMware’s portfolio and direction under Broadcom remains more focussed on supporting those large on-premises organisations than they were pre-acquisition, but the place they sit in the modern cloudy world is becoming more clear as time passes.