Today was day 1 of VMware and I had a blast, even though I was only able to attend for part of the day. I flew into Vegas this morning instead of spending the night last night. I didn’t hit any sessions today, but I did catch the keynote which was given by Paul Maritz the CEO of VMware.
The keynote was interesting, but didn’t provide a whole lot of new information. Paul officially announced that vSphere 5.0 was released along with VMware View 5.0.
vSphere 5.0 is the third new major annual release of the vSphere product. 2009 had vSphere 4.0, 2010 had vSphere 4.1 giving 2011 vSphere 5.0. vSphere 5.0 has 200 new features (which weren’t listed). VMware has put 1 million man hours into building the new vSphere 5.0 platform and another 2 million man hours into testing the new version.
There were a few pieces of information which were talked about as far as new features which were basically boiled down to a few key points. The first is probably the most important as with vSphere 5.0 VMware expects that they will be able to run almost every production workload. Virtual machines running under vSphere 5.0 can now have up to 32 vCPUs and 1 TB of RAM each. VMware has added in some storage load balancing features that I’m really hoping that I can learn more about as the week continues as well as the automatic storage tiering which looks very interesting. There is also a storage load balancing feature which I’m quite interested to learn more about.
There were some interesting stats which Paul talked about as well. There were 19000 attendees which actually made it to the conference. There were over 20000 people registered but some people got stuck on the east coast thanks to the weather. Some additional stats include that analysts currently estimate that worldwide there 50% of production workloads are running under a hypervisor today. This means that every 6 seconds a new VM is built (which is faster than people are being born). It is estimated that there are over 20 million virtual machines running under VMware’s hypervisor platform. If these hosts were put end to end they would be twice the length of the Great Wall Of China. More machines are being moved from host to host via vMotion than there are airplanes in the sky.
Needless to say there is a lot of great information which I’m hoping to learn and share with you.
Denny