Carl M. Eschenbach, VMware, Inc.’s president and COO, kicked off the general session on Day 1 at VMworld 2015 from the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

“What if we, at VMworld 2015, could enable you to run, build, deliver and secure any app, anytime, anyplace?” Eschenbach asked the crowd. He then promised, “Our goal for VMworld this year is to make sure you’re ready for ANY – any challenge or business opportunity that lies ahead.”

Introducing the four main categories for today’s session, Eschenbach claimed that the Unified Hybrid Cloud will solve the most common challenges encountered by IT professionals:

• RUN: Any application on any device. The unified platform supports traditional, Cloud native, containers and OS technologies.
• BUILD: Three ways to build — on your own, through the leverage converged infrastructure or through the hyper-converged infrastructure.
• DELIVER: Any application on any device.
• SECURE: Accelerates networking and security from data center to device.

Mike Benson, EVP and CIO, DIRECTV

Eschenbach welcomed DIRECTV, Inc. EVP and CIO Mike Benson to the stage for a question and answer session. DIRECTV’s long-term partnership with VMware is allowing the company to manage periodic huge service demand for live special events, such as the Floyd Mayweather super-fight. DIRECTV successfully leverages the VMware virtualization technologies and NSX platform to do this: “We use NSX to allow us to move from manual rigid delivery to a more software friendly delivery. On top of that it has better security in that space,” said Benson.

Speaking about DIRECTV’s merger with AT&T, Benson said that providing mobile apps and live streaming content is now a major focus of the company: “Our biggest challenge is to support the vision of mobilizing every aspect of our business — devices anytime, anywhere, anyplace.” DIRECTV is also relying on its partnership with VMware to move from traditional to software-driven network solutions. As Benson said: “We are trying to move away from traditional networks that are hardware driven to leverage more software defined solutions in that space.”

Bill Fathers, EVP and GM, Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware

Next on the stage was Bill Fathers, executive vice president and general manager for VMware’s Cloud Services Business Unit. Fathers spoke about use cases for the Unified Hybrid Cloud. He described a fundamental shift in app deployment patterns as companies start to embrace the public Cloud, saying that the “hybrid Cloud … represents a way to solve some of the toughest challenges.”

Fathers reviewed three use cases for hybrid Cloud:

1. Disaster recovery
2. Using Cloud to protect mission-critical applications
3. Application scaling 

Focusing on application scaling, Fathers claimed that VMware has solved the issue of bottlenecks at networking: “The VMware Unified Hybrid Cloud platform allows you to extend your entire network arch into the Cloud. … This folks, is the future.”

Raghu Raghuram, EVP and GM, Software Defined Data Center Division, VMware

“We are seeing the rise of hybrid application,” according to Raghu Raghuram, who took the stage after Fathers. Raghuram believes that it is not sufficient to have only private or public Cloud. “You need both, but you need more. You need a layer of common networking and a management backplane that makes one a seamless extension of the other. If you do that you have yourself a Unified Hybrid Cloud platform.”

Raghuram discussed how VMware is investing in the software-defined data center with a focus on three areas:

1. Simplify. Turn infrastructure into software, offering a private Cloud that has agility, economics and ease of consumption equivalent to a public Cloud.
2. Extend. Connect and maintain a single network for hundreds of hybrid apps and hybrid networking layer to move packets, including a top layer of application management tools.
3. Reach. Build a public Cloud with a rich set of application services from VMware and partners, allowing the customer to reach millions of end users and devices across globe.

Yanbing Li, VP and GM, Storage and Availability at VMware

Yanging Li, VP and GM of Storage and Availability at VMware, joined Raghuram to introduce VMware’s new software, the EVO SDDC manager. She described the software as a faster way to deploy a complete SDDC at scale, with rapid build for complete SDDC and automatic lifecycle management. 

Describing the specifications for EVO SDDC in detail, Li provided a live synchronization demonstration of the software’s capabilities. She claimed that: “The chief benefit of EVO SDDC is that it makes the installation and configuration of a software-defined data center relatively easy. What used to take weeks of effort and a team of experts can be accomplished in two hours. It is that simple.”

Li continued: “The beauty of this is that everything is built into software, and VMware is the only company that can do that.” Li used VMotion to move workload from the private to public Cloud on the vSphere Web Client with no down time. “It is the same VMotion we are all familiar for years, except now you are able to accelerate, compress and move the virtual machines live from on location and admin domain to another location in the public provider’s domain,” she explained, adding that the process is reversible, allowing easy and fast back-and-forth movement.

She underscored the importance of this seemingly simple demonstration: “Ladies and gentleman, you have just witnessed history. What we have shown here is the cross-Cloud VMotion capability. We have been able to accomplish this feat of moving our virtual machine across the Cloud and across between private into public data centers.”

Raghuram left the stage, as Fathers returned to join Li in a demonstration using VMware’s software to create a mobile application without writing a single line of code. Fathers summed up the demo, saying, “Basically, your developers have used a third-party capability, integrated with the hybrid platform, created a mobile app, linked it securely to data that was living on-prem in their private Cloud environment, and ‘Bob’s your uncle,’ it’s up and running.” He closed out this section of the session by reminding the audience, “The future of applications is hybrid applications, and you’re going to need a hybrid platform.”

Rodney Rogers, CEO of Virtustream

As CEO of EMC’s newest federation company Virtustream, Inc., Rodney Rogers has a deep belief in VMware’s Unified Hybrid Cloud vision. He took the stage to discuss how Virtustream is applying modern multi-tenant Cloud arch to I/O intensive mission-critical apps in the Cloud.

Describing the mechanics behind Virtustream’s xStream, he said: “What it allows us to do fundamentally is run an ultra-efficient hardware estate and ultimately control each one of the individual attributes to ensure that in a multi-tenant architecture we don’t have resource contention on the critical attribute required to run that particular application.”

Ray O’Farrell CTO and CDO, VMware & Kit Colbert VP & CTO, Cloud-Native Apps, VMware

Ray O’Farrell, CTO and chief development officer at VMware, and Kit Colbert, VP and CTO at VMware, took to the stage for the final speech of the general session for two demonstrations. First was a demonstration that showed a developer leveraging Docker to provision an application that they built out. However, in the first limited demonstration, the containers in each virtual machine were isolated, and there were problems with partial visibility, limited security and lack of compatibility with tools. The demonstration was then repeated using vSphere Integrated containers and these issues no longer occur.

“We’re making containers first-class citizens in vsphere,” said Colbert. “What we are trying to do is give the developer the speed, portability and agility that they want from containers while at the same time providing IT ops with the security, visibility and management that they require to run these apps in production.” He continued, “vSphere integrated containers provides the ability to run both traditional apps inside of virtual machines, as well as Cloud-native apps inside containers and do it side by side, all on a single platform.”

The second demonstration was of the new VMware Photon Platform. “We’re really excited about the Photon Platform,” Colbert said. “This is a new scalable infrastructure stack from VMware that is built and optimized for Cloud-native apps.” In a demonstration, Colbert showed how Photon “enables multiple application and development teams to very rapidly build out their apps in a safe, secure and scalable manner.”

Wrapping up the session, Colbert compared vSphere and vSphere Integrated containers with the VMware Photon Platform and how each serves different needs. “It’s about giving our customers options,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE