The first official day of VMworld is always filled with excitement and anticipation of the keynote. This year was no different with the announcement of VMware vCloud Director. For a great overview and intro to this new product, see this post from Duncan Epping of VMware's Cloud Practice.
Shortly after the keynote Dell's President of Large Enterprise, Steve Schuckenbrock unveiled Dell's vision of cloud computing in the Virtual-ERA with a discussion of Dell's Virtual Integrated System (VIS). Steve was joined by Bryan Jones who took the audience through a whiteboard session of VIS. For those wanting to learn more see this information portal on the Dell VIS solution.
As I was monitoring questions on Twitter, the overarching question was, "How is this differentiated with vCloud Director ?"
VIS is a fully open architecture, supporting heterogeneous ecosystem of servers, storage, networking, and hypervisors. Secondly, VIS has the capability to manage both physical and virtual infrastructures. This is key in providing customers flexibility in choice and bringing all the benefits realized in a virtual environment to the physical as well. We also fully support VMware vCloud Director API's to federate multiple vCenter instances in public and private cloud environments.
Steve then showed a glimpse of a new solution from the DCS team, the Modular Data Center. This solution brings a building block approach to data center containers giving customers flexibility in building infrastructure that is right-sized for their needs. While not yet a full-fledged product offering, it shows how we are putting customers first when designing solutions.
I ended my day with a behind the scenes look at the VMworld hands-on lab infrastructure. They are on track to create and destroy over 100K VMs during the conference. Check for my blog post tomorrow with a video of that behind the scenes look.