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Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld Europe 2015 coverage:

• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day –1 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 0 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 1 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 2 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 3 Buzz

I suppose you could say VMworld for most attendees (partners were having their 1st day yesterday) kicked off with the General Sessions.

The keynote had  fair amount of content common to the VMworld US keynote with some local changed information.

There was no point live blogging as a lot of the content has been covered previously so well by Scott Lowe.

Jean-Pierre Brulard, SVP and GM for EMEA started the show off.

10k attendees, 96 countries, 2.3k VMUG members.

He mentioned Destination Give back which is a VMware Foundation charity programme focussed on children, education , health, environment.

A last minute addition was a video message from Michael Dell saying the combined company will delivery cutting edge technology (sorry about bootleg video, not mine!).

Carl Eschenbach, president and COO was up next:

The point of today’s general session was to highlight VMware’s vision of the future which is all about One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device. (note its not Any Cloud!). This is all about bridging on-premises private cloud with managed public cloud from a vCloud Air Network partner or pure public cloud with vCloud Air itself. Interestingly this is some change in messaging from before as the vCloud Network partners are not being considered public cloud offerings but rather managed cloud, somewhere in the ether between private and public, a very broad area as partners can have very different offerings. I presume creating this new category is so the partners don’t feel they are competing against vCloud Air (which they still are). What does it mean for partners who want to be seen as Public Cloud providers or can that only be reserved for vCloud Air, AWS and Azure like clouds?

The new term for this all is “Unified Hybrid Cloud”.

The theme of VMworld this year is “Ready for Any” which is about VMware being able to offer products to create the software defined data center, including mobile and EUC to deliver the One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device world that they believe you are looking for. Basically VMware is saying, we are here, ready for any app.

vCloud NFV was announced which is NSX for Communications Service Providers. You can read more http://www.vmware.com/industry/telco/overview .

Customers were then brought on stage, who gushed enthusiastically about all that VMware does for them!

We had Juan Manuel Moreno from Telefonica (big telco) and Jan Oostrom from Novamedia (charity/lottery company).

Carl then went on to talk about how VMware is creating a system for Build, Run, Deliver, Secure, very deliberate DevOps naming but encompassing all deployment. VMware has to go all-in on courting developers for the cloud native apps world so interesting how they are renaming current infrastructure processes to be DevOps naming friendly.

Ray O’Farrell on stage next setting the scene for Cloud Native Applications (CNA), I had seen his presentation at IP Expo last week.

Ray then brought on stage Kit Colbert, CTO of CNA (one of the best VMware execs IMO). Same content as VMworld US but some more information, they will be open sourcing parts of the Photon Controller which is the orchestrator. This lets you for example set up a Kubernetes cluster with a single API call to the Photon Controller which means developers can very simply set up massive container clusters very easily without having to deal with infrastructure.

Something I had learned yesterday was reinforced. The importance of having the Photon Controller is about taking the scheduling, storage , networking and security of ESX which is industry leading but use it to run containers. CoreOS for example has hardly any of these features, is missing key storage and networking extensions and ESX is one of the best schedulers around. containers are like VMs, they suffer from resource contention and need to be managed, ESXi to the rescue as a much better container host than native!

Raghu Raghuram, the SDDC division boss, was up next, same content as VMworld US

Yanbing Lin was up on stage going through EVO:SDDC which she talked about at VMworld US (I was wondering when we would see it but there is one on the show floor to see). She also announced vRealize Automation 7 which has been extended with more cloudy goodness. A better, simpler .OVA based deployment (at last!).

Read more : http://vcdx133.com/2015/10/13/vmworld-announcement-vra-7-0/

vRealize Business 7.0 has also been announced

Read more: http://vcdx133.com/2015/10/13/vmworld-announcement-vrb-7-0/

vRealize Automation, as the VMware enabler for private cloud is terribly complicated to set up and manage and so needs as much simplification as possible as with VMware’s vision of moving workloads from private cloud to public cloud, you sort of need to have that private cloud first, hence the need for vRealize Automation.

The General session was streamed live and recorded, here for your viewing pleasure: