VMworld Spotlights Unified Hybrid Cloud, Containers and More

A cornerstone of the annual conference is the keynote speeches in which VMware and its partners discuss new products and general trends for the road ahead.

Carl Eschenbach, president and chief operating officer of VMware, used his opening keynote to emphasize that the company is committed to freedom, flexibility and choice for customers. At the conference, he also discussed the unified hybrid cloud.

Among the colorful characters at VMworld 2015 was Nigel McCloud, a fictitious character that was part of VMware’s opening keynote video. McCloud runs the VMware Cloud Academy and helps applications to get ready for the cloud.

VMware announced new and updated products at VMworld 2015, organizing them into three marketing categories: simplify, extend and reach.

Martin Casado, senior vice president and general manager, networking and security, at VMware told the VMworld audience he believes the app is the network. Casado used his time onstage to discuss multiple innovations in the NSX 6.2 network virtualization release.

One of the new features VMware previewed in NSX 6.2 was the ability to enable the live migration (vMotion in VMware’s parlance) of virtual machines across data center boundaries, from a private to a public cloud.

VMware CTO Ray O’Farrell was joined by Kit Colbert, vice president and CTO of Cloud Native Apps at VMware, to talk about the new vSphere Integrated Containers effort, which provides visibility and control for application containers.

Helping to enable the vSphere Integrated Containers effort is VMware’s Photon Platform that includes the Photon operating system, which is a Linux OS optimized for container deployment. VMware is also expanding Photon with a controller providing a distributed control plane and the Photon Machine compute host.

VMware and Microsoft haven’t always been partners, but at VMworld 2015, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jim Alkove joined VMware Executive Vice President Sanjay Poonen onstage to talk about how VMware is helping enable Windows 10 adoption.

During his VMworld closing keynote, CEO Pat Gelsinger detailed five imperatives for digital success: challenging the status quo, embracing the professional use of the cloud, ensuring security, automating everything and taking risks. “You must break out to remain relevant,” Gelsinger said.