“With Project Pacific, we are brining the largest infrastructure community the largest set of operators, the largest set of customers directly to the Kubernetes. We will be the leading enabler of Kubernetes.” -Pat Gelsinger

The big announcement of the show was the acquisition of Pivotal Software and Carbon Black.

I mentioned in my previous video that I thought the show was well attended. Part of this could be because they moved the show to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, which isn’t as large and sprawling as their Vegas shows had been. I also heard comments that there were a lot of VMWare employees in attendance to help boost the numbers. While that may be true, the booths were all pretty packed and there was a lot of good conversations happening. I don’t think the vendors who had booths were disappointed. 

It is worth mentioning that I have heard of other trade shows that have been struggling to drive attendance. One of the reasons I do these videos is because many of the folks in IT have seen their budgets to go to shows and for education cut. I feel by doing these videos, I can bring some of that information to my fellow IT folks.

Kubernetes is emerging as a standard, and this is central to VMWare’s new project Tanzu. Tanzu is going to be a portfolio of products and services for building software utilizing Kubernetes. Tanzu has components to build, run , and manage these applications, and focuses heavily on the entrerprise market.

Project Pacific was announced to integrate Kubernetes into vSphere. VMWare had dipped their toes into the Kubernetes waters with PKS, but now they are going all in with the vSphere integration. This gives enterprises the ability to manage their virtual machines along side their containers, which could be very powerful.

Pat Gelsinger talked about a lot of things during the keynote, but one controversial point that Pat made was that 95%+ of bitcoin uses are illicit or criminal and that they use almost a household worth of energy per transaction. I don’t know what the actual statistics are, but he is not entirely wrong, people do use bitcoin to avoid the scrutiny of fiat currency, and it does consume an irrational amount of energy. It will be interesting to see what comes from VMWare’s enterprise distributed ledger product.

Another interesting development was that VMWare will be integrating NVIDIA’s Virtual Compute Server or vComputeServer on VMWare Cloud on AWS. This allows the virtualization of GPU instances like one would virtualize CPU. This will give enterprises new ways to more fully utilize their resources.

There were the assortment of infrastructure companies on hand, as well as companies more focused on cloud based solutions. Kubernetes was a big focus of the show and I am curious to see how VMWare’s deep embrace of Kubernetes is going to impact these smaller companies providing Kubernetes solutions. It would not be the first time VMWare has cannibalized its ecosystem around products they view as strategic for the company.

One area that I find very compelling is in the composable  infrastructure space. This has been popularized by HPE’s synergy products, but there is a lot of interesting work coming out of the Open Compute space and from other composable infrastructure companies like Liqid. I will have an interview with the Liqid folks coming up soon, so keep checking back.

There was also a lot of talk about edge computing and 5G. Certainly, 5G is poised to open up a lot of interesting innovation on the edge and to make computing far more pervasive. 5G promises to bring a lot more throughput, density and support for a massive amount of connected devices. There were quite a few examples of 5G/Edge technology on display.

All this is to say that it was a great show, and it looks like VMWare is getting its mojo back. It is great to see them branching out into new territory, and I look forward to seeing what they end up doing with this new opportunity.