VMware Explore 2024 - Recap

Having attended many VMware Explore events over the years, I was very interested to see how attendance, tone, and message would be presented in the post-Broadcom world. How busy would the event be? What would the quality of the content be? And how would the message land with the audience? Let’s review the keynote and expo hall and how the overall event was viewed.  

The Expo Hall 

I noted in my pre-event article that the Expo Hall was one of the main highlights of the VMware events in Barcelona. This year, my first impressions were how much smaller the hall was and the additional space between and around the stands. On the smaller front, a chunk of this is due to the loss of the EUC vendors exhibiting, but I also noted the absence of the major OEM providers (Dell, HPE, etc). It was good to see partners like Microsoft & Google in the hall, showing a bi-directional commitment to the future of Hybrid Cloud offerings. The additional space in the hall was welcomed as it has felt very crowded in previous years. It is also worth mentioning that this additional space made the hall look quiet at times, which removed a little of the ‘buzz’ from previous years. Still, lots of value can be gained by spending time in the hall speaking to the supporting vendors and the VMware teams. The experience was much more delightful. 

Keynote & Announcements 

Joe Baguley (EMEA CTO) opened the keynote with a conversation about the community and how it is a key passion of his, citing 1,600+ vExperts and over 150,000 VMUG members in over 50 countries. He then provided the overall message for this year—simplicity = Superpower, using this as the handover to Hock Tan.   

Hock started by talking about being a year on from the acquisition and his continued mission to drive ease of use of the VMware platform and admitting that maybe it’s not been everything it needed to be in the past. He touched on the point that some don’t want to pay for the VCF value and that Broadcom is a serious company that will not focus on selling bright, shiny objects but is doubling down on building the best private cloud platform.  

Hock was very clear that he believes the future is Private and that we are coming out of a 10-year hangover around the cloud Promise. He believes the pendulum is swinging back now to a private world, and the Cloud should be used for burst capacity only. 

He admitted that legacy data centre architecture is slow and hampers innovation, which is the problem VCF is solving. With 30+ million cores of VCF having been sold, we now need to drive the adoption to remove these silos and build a true private cloud outcomes 

The belief is that VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is the solution to this challenge, and the focus is on the Three C's 

• Cost 
• Complexity 
• Compliance 

So, how will VMware by Broadcom deliver on this and change the private cloud paradigm? Well, you won’t be surprised to hear that VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is the answer! But we have much more clarity now on how this will happen; it comes down to three core components. The first is the core VCF platform, which allows the Cloud Admin (what was called the vAdmin) to manage the underlying platform; the second is the services that provide a modern developer experience designed to enable the Platform Engineer. Finally, we have a suite of advanced services to provide those on-demand capabilities that you are used to accessing in the public cloud. This can be visualised in the image below. 

The full list of Advanced Services that VMware by Broadcom provides on top of VCF to deliver this full cloud experience was revealed and captured on the image below. 

One of the core messages from the keynote was the ability to support both workload and licence portability. The licence news dropped in June. The capability is described as follows: "This change allows customers to deploy VCF subscriptions and any associated add-ons to any compatible endpoint whether that’s in their own data centre, a hosting provider, a cloud service provider or hyperscaler cloud environment." 

We have seen many vendors release licence porting options over the last few years, and it’s good to see that VMware by Broadcom has followed suit. Those customers looking to decommission on-premises estates over the coming years can take advantage of not having to sink investment in software. Being able to port usage to a Public Cloud or even a partner cloud like CDW ServiceWorks. 

The first of the advanced services to gain a dedicated slot in the keynote was VMware Live Recovery (VLR). VLR was announced at Explore last year as a combination of solutions to Disaster Recovery, Cyber Recovery, Clean Room and Operational challenges around Cyber Defence. The limitation at the time was its reliance on VMware Cloud on AWS as the only target for replication and recovery. This year, we have the formal announcement that VMware is adding Google Cloud to the mix, which is great news for those customers looking for better operational resilience (think DORA compliance) or that have investments in other CSPs than AWS. It was also good to see that development is continuing for the on-premises option, allowing customers to leverage existing investments in the battle against cyber threats.   

The next advanced service to receive the keynote attention was the rebranded Data Services Manager (now called Tanzu Data Services; I am not sure I would have used the Tanzu naming here). 

In short, VMware is bringing Enterprise Support and Management to the Open-Source Database community and associated services like messaging.   

A short set of canned demos followed, taking everyone through the life cycle of deploying an application and how all the components of the VCF with Advanced Services portfolio combined to deliver this developer-ready environment. The story was that when you build on the public cloud, you expect a suite of services to be consumable on demand to enable rapid development. The image below was the final position showing how all the VMware services combined to provide this experience.  

Squeezed into the end of the keynote, we had a short section on the updated Edge Portfolio from VMware by Broadcom. Comprising of the VeloCloud and Edge Compute Stack (ECS) solutions, the message was concise: Data and infrastructure management at the edge brings new challenges to the traditional enterprise. More upstream data flows (think historically, data flowed from the centre to the edge) from smart devices and AI means we will need a network built to support this new pressure, to which VMware announced VeloRAIN. Robust AI Networking (RAIN) leverages AI/ML to improve performance and security for edge-heavy workloads.  

Combining this with VMware Edge Compute Stack (ECS) and VCF gives customers the full suite of technologies to manage and deploy edge use cases. VCF Edge offers a management option for customers with a few sites connected by reliable and always-on Networking, like offices or manufacturing sites. ECS offers the ability to manage large, distributed edge deployments that may not have always-on connectivity or need a more automated deployment model. Think about mass deployments to thousands of retail stores or disconnected locations like Cellular Towers or other smart locations.   

VeloCloud (including VeloRAIN) then enables the right level of connectivity to every location, with new 600 and 700 series boxes consolidating the range whilst bringing broader connectivity options in Q1 2025, we are expecting a new 100GB capable box that VMware expect to push VeloCloud to the top right of the Gartner MQ for WanEdge solutions. 

The final announcement from the keynote was around VMware Private AI; as with everything in 2024, you cannot escape without talking about AI. You can read my full article on the VMware Private AI solutions here. 

The message focused on the privacy and TCO benefits of running training and inferencing on top of the VCF platform. With all the platform services offering the developer experience and then the performance of vSphere to schedule resources drives VMware to claim that Private AI is 3x cheaper than public cloud options (we don’t have any data to validate this) 

Summary 

This year, it was a short and to-the-point keynote with little news to unpack that we had not seen throughout 2024. Whilst in years past, I would have been worried about this, I believe that if Broadcom are to deliver on the promises they have committed to (Simplification & Integration) for the future of the VMware portfolio, we need a period of calm and stability. If we look at the suite of advanced services already in play and the capabilities of VCF, we don’t need flashy new features; we need solid engineering and a platform that removes all that on-premises complexity; in short, a realisation of the true VCF promise - Simple, Performant, Scalable, Private Cloud.  

Closing Thoughts 

Having taken a week to digest the information from Explore and the overall message, here are my top five thoughts: 

• This year, we had a more focused event aligned with Broadcom's more serious and business outcome-driven nature. When this translates to technical innovation (VCF9), it should benefit customers who are adopting VCF. 

• The lack of shiny new is a good thing, in my opinion. VMware already has a lot of technology, and a period of focus on integration, simplification and stability should be a welcomed approach from customers. Driving value from those licences needs to be the focus. 

• Whilst the event was smaller, the customers we spoke to while in Barcelona still found value, and this was more evident from the more technical communities that attended. What was interesting is a survey that suggested 60%+ of attendees where first timers to Explore! 

• VCF 9 looks to contain a wealth of new features that should make large portions of the promises come to life. The other good news is it will be in place upgrade to VCF9 for those running VCF 5.2.  

• Outside of the Advanced Services announcements, the two core features I liked the look of most were ESXi Live Patching and Advanced Memory Tiering with NVMe. These features should make vAdmins lives easier and reduce the platform's total cost of ownership. 

If you attended the event, please do reach out with your thoughts and comments; if you have VMware investments or concerns about the future, please get in touch with our dedicated team of experts at wolfpack@uk.cdw.com, who have been empowered to provide you with the data and independent advice to make informed decisions. 

Also, look out for a follow-up article in which I will dive into VCF9 features, new licencing options and how all this aligns with the wider CDW Hybrid Cloud Strategy and our Platform of the Future model.