Wow, so the General Session on Day 2 of VMworld 2017 Europe sure kicked off with a bang! There were some big announcements and it was an awesome day for IBM and VMware!

Announcements

After the Big Welcome, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger talked us through his vision of where not just VMware was going, but where the industry was going with cloud. He talked about “moving to the edge”, with data and services moving out of the data centre.

So you can imagine my surprise when IBM Senior Vice President David Kenny joined Pat on the stage … you could just tell something big was coming!

First was the announcement of IBM’s partnership with VMware for the new VMware HCX offering!

“VMware HCX technologies provide a high-performance, secure and optimized interconnect that enables large-scale app mobility between on-premises vSphere platforms and one or more VMware Clouds. HCX technologies abstract multisite resources and presents them to the apps as one continuous hybrid cloud, providing infrastructure hybridity.”

The second announcement surprised me a little – IBM, VMware and Dell have a partnership announced, which will see Dell EMC and IBM to Offer VMware Solutions on the IBM Cloud.

“IBM and Dell EMC today announced an agreement to help accelerate cloud adoption by providing Dell EMC’s commercial customers access to VMware solutions on the IBM Cloud. As part of the relationship, IBM has added Dell EMC infrastructure products into the IBM Cloud, and expands VMware solutions. Customers can now move workloads to the cloud while continuing to leverage the benefits of Dell EMC infrastructure and the VMware platform.”

This took me by surprise a little, as IBM’s long-term partner for server solutions has always been Lenovo.

I’m clearly going to have to read up on this one!… both announcements for that matter!

Other speakers (“Storytellers”)

Beyond the Big Announcements, there were also a number of guest speakers, talking about their experiences and how they leverage VMware technologies in their business.

There was the familiar name of Amdocs, as well as Swisscom, Liberty Global, and Société Générale. The last story tellers were the team behind the East African Farmers Federation and their innovative eGRANARY application – really fascinating to hear what they have done, the challenges they had to overcome, and what they have done to revolutionise the lives of the farming community!

Security

The other theme that factored strongly throughout the General Session was Security, where Pat discussed that, when spending on Security is the highest single technology budget item, only to see us continue to fall further behind, be feels that “we, the tech industry, are failing you”. An honest and frank viewpoint.

Of course he then did continue to show how VMware recognised this challenge, and articulated what VMware is doing about this. Innprticular he re-iterated the importance of the new VMware AppDefense offering that was announced at VMworld 2017 in Vegas. I’m proud that this too is a new partnership with IBM!

“VMware AppDefense Moves the Industry Towards a Security Model That’s Intrinsic, Intent-Based, and Application-Focused.” … “AppDefense plans to integrate with IBM’s QRadar security analytics platform, enabling security teams to understand and respond to advanced and insider threats that cut across both on-premises and cloud environments like IBM Cloud.”

Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) featured twice in the General Session.

As we entered the room for the General Session, a digital artist was drawing, in real-time, a new are piece using a pretty awesome VR rig that was installed on the stage.

Watching this performance brought back memories of Minority Report, and it struck me that we are perhaps not as far from that distopian future as wemight otherwise have thought!

The second VR performance was when Alan Renouf (of PowerCLI fame) joined the stage and asked Pat to don the VR headset. Alan then went on to talk Pat through the use of a “Virtual Virtual Datacenter”, a project that will be soon added to GitHub for community contribution.
I have to say, this was pretty awesome!

Other Sessions

Having concluded on the General Session, I attended a few other sessions. One that stood out was the 10th Birthday celebration of PowerCLI, presented by  Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens . It was inspiring to see the community that has grown around PowerCLI in the last 10 years.

The last session of the day for me was an IBM and VMware partnership meeting. Another well-invested couple of hours, but alas I shall have to leave you guessing what we discussed… some things are not meant for the public disclosure 😜

tl;dr

Day 2 was awesome, some really interesting announcements, and some great sessions … what else did you expect from an event such as this?!

Was Day 3 any better?  Click here to find out!