Another year and another VMworld attended by thousands of your peers and customers. I wanted to make sure you received all the exciting announcements, updates and links to Keynotes from the General sessions.

Fun Facts:

Executive Meetings:

722 VBC or Executive 1:1s to date
55 executive attendees at the Americas Executive Leadership Summit
44 attendees at the CIO forum

Top Breakouts from Day One and Day Two:

Virtual Volumns Deep Technical Dive
Virtualize Active Directory, the Right Way!
Enforcing a vSphere Cluster Design with PowerCLI Automation
Monster VMs (Database Virtualization) Doing IT Right
Advanced Network Services with NSX
Troubleshooting 101 for Horizon

Social:

83,298 VMworld mentions to date
352,064,347 VMworld impressions and reach (and counting!)
235 articles (original and syndicated) and blogs from top-tier general, technology and business media

Hands on Labs:

10,643 HoLs delivered (running total) breaking last year’s record of 9200!!
116,666 VMs provisioned (running total)!!
Top Hands-On Labs Attended:
- VMware NSX: Introduction and Feature Tour – 968
- Virtual SAN 6.2 from A – Z – 682
- Introduction to Horizon 7: Virtual Desktop and Apps – 592
- Virtualization 101: vSphere with Operations Management – 499
- vRealize Automation 7 Basics – 489

Daily Recaps:

Day 1 Recap Day 2 Recap Day 3 Recap

Chris Wolf Day 1 Recap Chris Wolf Day 2 Recap Sanjay Poonen Keynote Recap

General Links:

General Sessions – http://www.vmworld.com/en/us/learning/general-sessions.html

Replay of Breakout Sessions – (all) http://www.vmworld.com/en/sessions/2016.html

Deck with Summary of VMworld Announcements: here and includes:

Read the announcements: VMware Newsroom www.vmware.com/company/news.html

Watch VMworld General Session executive keynote replays: www.vmworld.com

View VMworld video highlights, slideshares, and more: VMworld 2016 Highlights on vmware.com: available Tuesday, Sept. 6: www.vmware.com/company/highlights

Product Announcements and Releases:

· IBM and VMware Expand Partnership to Enable Easy Hybrid Cloud Adoption

· VMware Unveils New Cross-Cloud Architecture™ to Give Customers Cloud Freedom and Control

· Cross-Cloud: A Common Operating Environment Across Private and Public Clouds

· The Foundation for Future Cloud Development

· VMware Extends Capabilities of vSphere Integrated Containers to Help Enterprises Embrace Digital Business

· VMware Further Simplifies Production Deployment of OpenStack Clouds with VMware Integrated OpenStack

· VMware Delivers Innovations to the Digital Workspace with Unified Endpoint Management, Windows 10 Support and Enhanced Identity Management

Key Highlights:

Introducing a New Era of Cloud Freedom and Control

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger opened VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada, this morning by telling his audience that “a new era of cloud freedom and control is here.” Gelsinger used his keynote to introduce the VMware®Cross-Cloud Architecture™. This is a game-changing new architecture that, as he says, “will enable customers to run, manage, connect, and secure applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment.”

A Strategy for an All-Digital World

Gelsinger began his remarks by describing the progression from a world characterized by a mix of traditional and digital business operations to an all-digital world. “Today,” he said, “only 20 percent of businesses are leading this digital transformation.” “The challenge for businesses worldwide, he added, is to choose which way they intend to make their own digital transformation.”

Making the End-User Experience “Consumer Simple — Enterprise Secure”

Sanjay Poonen opened today’s general session with energy and passion, describing VMware’s digital workspace strategy and the new EUC technologies announced earlier in the day. He shared our three-layer EUC strategy, all of which comes together in the new consumer simple, enterprise secure digital workspace: apps and identity, desktop and mobile, and management and security. The keynote showcased a high caliber of customer and partner stories, including: the American Red Cross, Coca-Cola, Mecklenburg County and Sprint. In addition, Sanjay was joined on stage by Salesforce’s EVP of Product and Solutions Marketing Stephanie Buscemi, and by Tanium CEO Orion Hindi.

SDDC Innovations for the Mobile-Cloud Era

Ray O’Farrell then turned to Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) innovations for the Mobile-Cloud era, hosting Mike Wittig, Senior Director of Consumer Digital Infrastructure Services, from Nike for a discussion around how our solutions (vCloud Suite, NSX, VIO, AirWatch, Horizon) are fueling Nike’s digital products and services. Next up was Kit Colbert explaining how vSphere Integrated Containers has been expanded to provide a full container stack with deep integration into vSphere and the SDDC, enabling customers to run containers in production. He also gave an update on Photon Platform and how we’re delivering on the promise of simplifying greenfield cloud native deployments.

Showcasing the Power of NSX and Virtual SAN

Rajiv Ramaswami followed, describing his personal journey towards an increasing appreciation of the power of NSX. He called out 40+ NSX customers in Las Vegas who are showcasing how NSX has transformed their businesses and he ran compelling demos on how NSX can provision and secure apps and clouds. Yanbing Li turned the spotlight to how customers can best simplify their cloud infrastructure in a Cross-Cloud world, with a focus on Hyper-Converged Infrastructure enabling a seamless path from virtualization to VMware Cloud Foundation. The key takeaways? NSX is real and on fire with >400% customer growth in the last 18 months! This is the year of Virtual SAN, with more than 5,000 customers today and the majority of workloads powered by Virtual SAN used for mission-critical applications!