VMworld 2013 in San Francisco had a record number of attendees this year – close to 23,000! It is arguably one of the world’s largest IT infrastructure conferences and has steadily grown in importance and influence over the last decade. Anything and everything related to virtualization and cloud is showcased, demoed, presented and talked about in the four days during the show, and “fanatic followers” wait with bated breadth for the latest and greatest announcements from VMware. What does this all mean?
It means that virtualization technologies have matured to a large extent and most of the world has adopted virtualization as a way of life. It also means that companies are going beyond traditional virtualization and delivering innovative solutions for the next generation datacenter, including software-defined datacenter, hybrid cloud and automation. Cloud hosting and private cloud providers have mushroomed everywhere judging by the number of booths I saw at VMworld related to these technologies and services.
At the core of it all is automation and ensuring that datcanters truly deliver IT agility through automatic provisioning of everything in the stack from compute, storage to network. While a lot has been done to automate workflows related to compute and storage, network related configurations still happen manually. The next frontier for automation will be the network as it becomes the focus for virtualization vendors going forward. Several sessions at VMworld talked about automation – “VCM5048 – Automating the Software Defined Data Center: How do I get Started” and ” VCM5269 – From Virtualization to Cloud: How Automation Drives Agility” to name a few.
Well, another VMworld has ended but the quest for virtualization/cloud nirvana hasn’t!
What are your opinions and thoughts on the latest VMworld show?
