I will try and get a live blog update for the First General session

Started with a Disclaimer – which was strange for a keynote.

Stomp kicked off the keynote beating on VMworld 2012 with drumpads in each of the letters

Rick Jackson (Chief Marketing Officer) took the stage to welcome over 20,000 participants of VMworld with another 10,000 online. He promised that a number of announcements that will come out of the conference this week. Rick continued with the upcoming sessions expected during the conference. There will be a best on-stage demo contest between the partners tomorrow, which will happen tomorrow with interactive feedback from the audience. A nice shout out for VMUG with a large presence of the green t-shirts.

He now is welcoming Paul Maritz onto the stage.

Paul Maritz reminded us that in 2008 25% of the workloads were virtualized today – it is at 60%. He thanked all the VCP’s that have implemented the technology today 25,000 in 2008 and now at 125,000. In 2008 cloud was an idea today it is a reality. He continued with the Drivers of change were processes have been moved from manual and labor intensive work to automated, paperless and optimized workflows. Paul continued about how the workplace is changing to an environment where people want to consume information everywhere on whatever device they want and he thinks that this will have a huge impact on the workforce in the next 4 years. For this to happen IT will have to transition to Tomorrow’s IT.

This can be done in 3 categories. In the infrastructure from physical to virtual. On top of that the applications and data are changing to accommodate scale. The last part is the access – on how the users are moving from a PC dominated world to a multi-device world.

Paul now introduced Pat Gelsinger and formally handed over the scepter.

Pat Gelsinger took the stage and thanked Paul for his work and Paul received a standing ovation from the crowd. Pat started to explain what he sees what his role will be in the upcoming years. He mentioned that he comes from the hardware side and now is excited to complete the journey and move over to the software side. Today we only have those extraordinary workloads which are not virtualized, provisioning has gone down from weeks in 2008 to days/hours today and looking to the future – he would like to see it happen within seconds.

He now continued about the Software Defined Datacenter(SDC). He went back to 2007 where he said that VMware had the opportunity to create the Datacenter Operating system – this is the Software Defined Datacenter. It is time to abstract it pool it and automate it – this can be done with the SDC. Pat then went onto the vCloud Suite.

He then when onto announce vSphere 5.1. Over 50% over x86 workloads are running on VMware. He then went onto the changes in licensing – and have announced the death of vRAM – which was introduced with the release of vSphere 5.0 – and making it simpler with no core limitations either.

He then went onto the Cloud OPs – with IT business management tools, best practices and services to help the enterprise navigate this change. He then announces the Cloud Ops forum.

Pat then went on to the acceptance of VMware of the fact that there is a need to address the Multi-Cloud world – with Cloud Foundry, DynamicOps and Nicira. He welcomed Nicira to the VMware family.

The transition from PC to any device received a slide with the mention of View/Mirage (Wanova) and Project Horizon.

Pat summed up his part on how VMware is making this transition possible. Before he left the stage he wanted to thank the partners and the VMware ecosystem. He then welcomed Steve Herrod onto the stage.

Steve Herrod started to go into details about SDN. It is more than being a hypervisor – it pulling all the components and making them into a virtual datacenter. He compared this to a co-location service – the Suite will be the same and even provide multi-tenancy.

Now that 60% off applications are now virtualized VMware is now focusing on the the Business Critical applications – using all the knowledge and whitepapers available.

He now moved to the new Monster VM which now supports 64 vCPU’s and over 1 million IOPs per host. He went on to a example from a company named Epic who have migrated from non-x86 hardware – to Linux virtualized workloads running on vSphere. He now went into islands and silos. The abilities to run Unified communications on vSphere. vFabric that is tuned and optimized to run on vSphere.

Big data – (the little elephant) – Hadoop. People thought that it should not run on vSphere – and he brought up Project Serengeti an open source solution to deploy Hadoop with a demo on the stage.

On to storage and availability. There was Storage pools and SDRS released with 5.0 and the work with 5.1 is the integration. Enhanced vMotion – vMotion without shared storage – multiple arrays this will be useful in the SDN. Virtual volumes are next – vVols to pair the the virtual machine with the array.

Virtual Flash will become a first class citizen that will allow better control and lastly the Virtual SAN that will abstract the storage.

He then went onto the the improvements in the dvSwitch (backup and restore, health check and others). He then went over to the vXLAN ecosystem (notice the small v). A lot of partners were mentioned with the networking partners and improvements.

And a demo of VMware vCloud Director on stage. Steve then went onto the integration of the partners into the new vSphere web client released with 5.1. He then went onto the vCloud API and the enhancements where users are building new interfaces on top of the underlying API allowing them to provide additional services such as Backup As A Service.

Next was the applications – with vFabric Application Director.

Then onto Cloud Ops, and here comes in VCOPs. vCloud Connector will become a more substantial part in the Cloud suite.

Now onto a demo on stage of vCloud director with the integration of vXLAN built into the interface and a demo of vFabric Application Director for deploying a multi-tier application directly into a vCloud environment. Next was vCloud Connector with its capabilities.

Three flavors of the vCloud suite. Enterprise customers get a free upgrade to the new suite.

Addressing multi-cloud world. A demo of Nicira to bridge the gap between the Physical and virtual world. Steve then went on to demo CloudFoundry online. Ravi went to demonstrate a very nice integration of SocialCast with vSphere and how you can use it for notifications and analytics.

Thanks for reading up till now if you are still with me.

To summarize the main points – as I see them from this keynote.

1. vSphere 5.1 announces – with multiple new features.
2. No more vRAM – licensing becomes much more simple.
3. vCloud Suite – which I will need to get more information to understand
4. The integration of Socialcast and vSphere – looks like a very nice idea – which I would like to see developed further.