VMworld 2015 receives positive reviews from users

VMworld was attended by its largest crowd in history, with over 23,000 in attendance in San Francisco. On social media, the VMworld hashtag got a lot of attention as those at the show and online watched VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and others deliver keynote speeches. The announcements that VMware made this year included news about NSX, VSAN and containers.

One of the bigger announcements at the show was Photon Platform and vSphere Integrated Containers. Those two offerings from VMware will allow admins to have containers in production on-premises and that had a lot of users excited with one Twitter user calling Integrated Containers a "game changer."

Cgroups only provide CPU reservations for containers and efficacy varies based on kernel version. vSphere integrated Containers solves this.

— inkysea (@inkysea) September 2, 2015

To be honest, I like VMware's "Integrated" container play far, far more than their "Integrated" OpenStack. Actual innovation here. #VMworld

— Jeramiah Dooley (@jdooley_clt) August 31, 2015

vSphere Integrated Containers is a game changer for management of containers! #vmwcna #VMworld2015

— Adrian Roberts (@ady189) August 31, 2015

The fact that the vSphere Integrated Containers are now treated a full blown VMs, including console, etc is very nice. #VMworld

— Chris Nickl (@ck_nic) August 31, 2015

VMware also announced a new version of its software-defined storage offering, VSAN 6.1. In the latest version, VMware has rolled out some new capabilities such as multiprocesser fault tolerance support and stretched cluster, among other new hardware options. The company also opened a beta program for the next VSAN version with data deduplication on deck, which had plenty of users very happy.

Very interesting: VSAN 6.1 support for stretch clustering to provide RPO=0 at metro-distance. #STO5906 #VMworld

— Chris Gurley (@cmgurley) September 2, 2015

VSAN 6.1 is an impressive update. And dedupe is around the corner.

— Jeff Johnson (@jedijeffatl) September 2, 2015

Yes, dedupe in the upcoming VSAN beta :D

— Dominik Meier (@domei80) August 31, 2015

Vsan to offer dedupe!! Nice. #vmworld

— Nick Casagrande (@Nickcasa3) August 31, 2015

One other topic that received a lot of attention at VMworld 2015 was NSX. The latest version of NSX will provide security on both private and public clouds for virtual machines and container workloads. With some of the new features, users were paying attention to NSX again.

Load balancer in #NSX. Time to take another look. #VMworld

— James Brown (@jbcompvm) September 1, 2015

#byoi bring your own infrastructure #vmworld. Move nsx into any cloud attach your security and load balancer policies this is exciting.

— Daniel Hertzberg (@burneeed) September 1, 2015

One of the biggest issues with NSX has been the inability to test it out before investing in it. With a large price tag and companies unable to test NSX out, it has caused users to be hesitant to dive in fully.  As users watched more features roll out for NSX, the attention continued to focus on money.

Now I need to sacrifice a kidney along with my first born to afford the euc solution. Nsx, horizon, vsphere, app volumes. #VMworld

— iankoenig (@iankoenig) September 1, 2015

#vmware nsx is pretty amazing but the price is hard for SMB.

— Mark Ross (@Mrossland) September 1, 2015

@vRobM @stevegreenberg @shawnbass It (a) needs to be affordable (b) needs to be sellable. Cannot even buy NSX...

— Texiwill (@Texiwill) September 1, 2015

Coming to EvalExperience this year - 600hrs of vCloud Air! NSX & AirWatch licensing COULD come in Q4! Sweet! .@NashvilleVMUG #vmug #VMworld

— David Beasley (@vBeaz) September 2, 2015

But as you can see with the last tweet, there was some excitement. NSX will soon become part of the EvalExperience program, which is a partnership between VMware and the VMware User Group (VMUG). Now users will be able to test it out before spending so much, which could mean NSX may be implemented more frequently.

@tom_howarth @maishsk @mbroeken its was also mentioned NSX would become part of EVALExperience in future at the VMUG leader lunch.

— Craig Waters (@cswaters1) September 8, 2015

While the announcements came from San Francisco, now the focus will turn to the releases, updates and beta testing that comes out in the next couple of months.