At today’s VMworld keynote the subject was end user computing. The start was all the work being done with VMware view to enable virtual desktops to execute anywhere it needs to be. VMware has some special graphical functionality to enable View to interact even better with today’s touch screen UIs, allowing cut and paste between View desktop application on Android tablet to a native tablet application – pretty impressive.
Next, VMware discussed Wanova Mirage application which provides for centralized management of live desktops. The demo onstage had a laptop running Windows XP upgraded in real time (with Restart) to Windows 7 (just in time to move up to Windows 2012). Then the demonstrator tripped and destroyed his ancient laptop. Mirage had synched an image of the laptop and was able to bridge the image to a virtual desktop which enabled the use of View on his Galaxy tablet to show the presentation he was updating on his laptop. Next, the end user showed up with a Mac Air laptop and Mirage was able to extract the desktop image and have it run under VMware FusionPro natively on the Mac Air laptop. Apparently Mirage maintains a synchronized version of the desktop as it changes and enables it to run/deliver it anywhere it needs to be used.
VMware has been talking about the new Mulit-Device world for a while now and this vision is being delivered in their Horizon set of applications. They showed an alpha version of their Horizon Suite which joins Horizon App manager, Horizon Data (Project Octopus, Dropbox for enterprise data) collaboration data sharing, and Horizon Desktop. It seems to me as an attempt to move vCloud director like management services to desktop users. Unclear to me how this interacts with View and Mirage but it seems to be the next evolution.
With the alpha version Horizon Suite, they showed how easy it would be to create a new Horizon user and also how easy it was to add applications to the Horizon Apps manager that every user would be able to download or optionally could be pushed to all desktop environments. Apparently, desktop apps become vApps in this environment and can be pushed or pulled into any Horizon managed desktop environment.
They had previously showed how a Horizon virtual machine running on Android phones would enable the Enterprise app to run on mobile phones but today they also showed how a Horizon Encapsulated Application would run on an iPhone. It showed an enterprise email client running on the iPhone. The user had to login to access their email. Also it showed an attempt to cut and paste from the enterprise application to a native iPhone app and it generate a stock statement that pasting from enterprise (Horizon encapsulated) iPhone apps was prohibited. The new app that was added to desktop support was able to be downloaded onto the iPhone and was immediately available as an iPhone app as well as a desktop app.
The end of the 2nd day keynote was a sort of Diamond Sponsor Hunger Games where each vendor got 4 minutes to present anything they wanted to show. Cisco showed a package called LISP which with tunnel routers would enable Vmotion across continents, not exactly sure what Dell showed, but EMC demoed the new VMware Virtual Data Protection capability (Avamar light embedded into vSphere), HP demoed their 3par storage capability to configure VMs, NetApp showed cluster mode capabilities how a customer was able to create a Vsan in seconds, how that data could live on long after its underlying storage was gone.
NetApp won the demo wars. VMware made charitable contributions to each of the vendors favorite charities.
That’s about it for day 2’s keynote, stay tuned for more…