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Today’s General Session is where the VMware CTO, Steve Herrod did the keynote all based around the theme of the conference, It’s your cloud, own it. One of his quotes was “The cloud is here, the cloud is changing IT and this is due to you”. I felt it was a bit strange not to kick off the conference with this keynote and only have it in the afternoon. There are 7100 people at VMworld Europe up by 1000 from last year.

Steve then talked about the VMUG group which now has 65000 members worldwide. It seems VMware is getting serious about supporting the VMUGs around the world which is good but this does have the side effect of taking away some of the independence of the VMUGs.

Next up was the announcement that Mr. Scoop Sloof had already, well scooped, that VMworld 2012 will be in Barcelona on 16-18 October 2012.

Then the keynote went on about how people are getting fussier with their requirements, needing multiple devices, universal access with high expectations. The post-PC era was talked about, pretty similar to what VMware has been talking about since VMworld Vegas. View 5 was demoed, thin-app factory as well which looked really cool to be able to very easily take an application setup file and convert it to a thin-app package. Horizon app manager was demoed again and Steve talked about adding View desktops and mobile access. Octopus was next, enterprise DropBox with policies such as file expiration dates and being able to share with specified external domain names so you can share files with another company securely. Octopus can be hosted internally or externally so Octopus will be sold as private or public cloud ready. I really like the idea of Octopus, managing file servers is just so PC-era!

Next up was announcement time. SMBs were handled first with additions to VMware Go which is a quick and easy way to get started with virtualisation. You can use the IT Advisor where you can pick a Windows physical host and convert it to ESXi and then make the old Windows Server a VM on the host. Also mentioned was the VSA for aggregated local storage on ESXi and presenting it as mirrored shared storage so you can take advantage of vMotion and HA.

Performance was up next saying that there needs to be guarantees to ensure performance along with availability and security and VMware is delivering on all these.

Then the big management announcements where next VMware announced vCenter Operations Management Suite which I blogged in depth about which is the solution for Infrastructure Management. Also announced was Application management with The vFabric Application Management Suite which is VMware embracing devops and allowing easier ways to manage developer application releases into any cloud, yes, not necessarily just VMware ones.

Last was an interesting one which is The VMware IT Business Management Suite which is taking management really far up the chain and providing an easy way for CIOs to get access to all your IT information to make better cost decisions. The suite will include three modules, IT Finance Manager, IT Service Level Manager and IT Vendor Manager.

So, a lot of the keynote was the same as Vegas.  The use case scenario demo is still impressive, any device, any location, true cloud computing from an end user perspective.

The management announcements are also important, nothing quite as fancy as a new vSphere, but management is where VMware realises it can be better than others in the future when the hypervisor is a commodity.