The VMworld 2017 day two keynote started with an informal Q and A session with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and Michael Dell CEO of Dell computing. Dell mentioned that this was one of the most exciting times ever in human development and that there is an explosion in intelligent devices. He went on to say, “The digital transformation is game on.”
Gelsinger explained that today AI and machine learning are big application trends but these things aren’t new. AI has been evolving for 30 years even back when he was with Intel working on the 486. The big difference is that the scale of compute and data enable much more effective AI today.
Regarding the synergy of the VMware/DELL/EMC relationship, Dell stated it was "like peanut butter and chocolate. The more we do together the better it gets.”
VMware and Pivotal announce Pivotal Container Services
The big news of the day was VMware and Pivotal’s announcement of Pivotal and VMware’s partnership to release Pivotal Container Services (PKS). Dell stated that “Containers are a direction of the future.” Then Rob Mee CEO of Pivotal explained that Pivotal works with the biggest companies in the world, they are used in 50% of the fortune 500 and that Pivotal has been working with containers for a long time. Pivotal Container Service (PKS - the K is for Kubernetes) embodies built-in Kubernetes container orchestration as well as VMware’s NSX. PKS enables enterprises and service providers to deliver production-ready Kubernetes on VMware vSphere, with complete compatibility with Google Container Engine.
Sam Ramji VP Product Management Developer Platforms Google then joined them on stage. Ramji stated that "Container adoption has hit warp speed." Google has spent the last 10 years working on container orchestration and has learned how to run billions of containers.
VMware Shows End-to-End Management for Electric Sky Pizza
VMware's CTO Ray O’Farrell wrapped the keynote up with a lengthy and decidedly too involved evolved scenario about revamping the IT processes of the fictitious Electric Sky Pizza company. While the overall process lost me at some point in the middle it was punctuated by some truly funny videos that reminded me a bit of the IT Crowd. As part of the process VMware showed how you can use vRealize Operations to add new capacity to a data center and how VMware AWS Elastic DRS can automatically add hosts. They showed how vRealize Network Insight can help with migration planning by tracking network traffic flows and then how vRealize Automation can perform the migration of VMs to VMware Cloud AWS with VMotion. They also showed how VMware Cloud Services provide consistent operations across clouds. Finally, they wrapped up showing how WaveFront and VMware Workspace ONE Intelligence can troubleshoot application problems by performing alert, analysis and resolution by linking app metrics to problem areas.