We are live from the Venetian Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada to cover the VMware Explore 2023 General Session keynote . This is the first keynote of this years event. We will be covering the EUC keynote in a separate blog post.
Yesterday there were a lot of conversation around the future of VMware after the UK approved the acquisition by Broadcom but this year will be all about AI.
Raghu Raghuram (VMware CEO) kicked off the keynote by celebrating the 25 years of VMware and its community and rolling a video from Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom. He mentioned that they will be investing $2b a year on VMware, $1b dedicated to R&D and the other $1b in growing the partners. While the message was delivered via a video, he was actually seating on the first row.
Now to the announcements, since this was a 1-hour keynote, it felt like a rapid fire feeding at a hibachi restaurant, my kids love it.
Summit Dhawan, VMware President is now on the stage to present the innovations highlights, starting with VMware Cloud Foundation.
Focusing on 5 innovations on the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform, the first one on deck is VSAN max, for those workloads that require very large storage environments.
The second one is vSphere Plus, a promise to enable effortless in-place upgrades, changing the upgrade cycle to hours not weeks.
The third one is NSX+, a way to define and deliver networks across on-premises and cloud in consistent and consolidated manner.
The forth innovation is enabling VCF rapid deployment and infrastructure as code (IaC) is important so new API have been developed for container and VPC creations
The fifth and last innovation announcement of this section is automation for ransomware and disaster recovery, helping to temporarily run production workloads in the cloud while recovering from an event.
VMware Cloud and VMware Cloud Services can be used not only for on-premises deployments but also across partners such as IBM cloud, Oracle Cloud, Azure, AWS, etc.
This offering has been packaged in five different bundles that customers can choose from depending on their needs.
Now onto applications and development. This is all about Tanzu and its platform portafolio.
The following is an abstract from the blog announcement “Tanzu Application Engine is designed to enable platform engineers to reuse, update, and manage a library of their Tanzu Application Space profiles to offer curated app environments that already meet current and emerging security, performance, and cost needs.”
It is difficult to manage infrastructure but as Summit said, it is harder to manage users. Summit reminded us about the main components of the platform for the VMware Anywhere Workspace.
While this be covered in more detail during the EUC keynote. Summit gave a quick taste of what we will see there. The two points touched where better insights on DEX and how AppVolumes now supports not only Horizon but also Citrix, AVD and other similar solutions.
The last announcement from Summit section was VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator, this solution enables the edge cluster workloads to pull down their configuration and policies vs having to send it down to them.
Now it is the turn to Generative AI, Raghu is taking this part of the presentation
Raghu mentioned that this technology is the next wave of innovation in the world
Raghu took some time to talk about the differences between Predictive AI and Generative AI (GenAI). In the past predictive AI has had some challenges due to the need to create ate dedicated apps and models for each specific use case. With Generative AI that mind set get broken and it is expected that productivity and speed will improve by 100X
Raghu invited Jensen NVIDIA CEO and President to come on stage to present the VMware Private AI Foundation. A collaboration between VMware and NVIDIA to accelerate the customers AI journey
Intelligent Assist brings human language interface to help IT engineers troubleshooting issues and implementing fix in faster manner
Finally, the image below shows a quick recap of all the announcements presented during today’s keynote.
Thank you for reading