Today’s a big day on the VMware campus in Palo Alto.  Our early-morning¹ live webcast just ended, wherein we launched vSphere 5, vCloud Director 1.5, and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite.  Full details are available at the post VMware unveils vSphere 5 and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite at the VMware Console blog, which is the blog of our executive team².

Aside from the sheer awesomeness that is contained in these announcements, I learnt a few things this morning about this release that make me totally proud to be at this company.  This is the largest coordinated launch of software that VMware has ever done, with more than 1 million engineering hours and 2 million QA hours going into this release alone.

There’s been a lot of effort put into getting workflows right.  It’s not about automating steps, it’s about eliminating steps whenever possible.  For example, in the new vCloud Director 1.5, using linked clones means that you can provision VMs in about 5 seconds.

I’m sure that there’s going to be a lot of articles about these new announcements today.  @vmware is probably the best aggregator of them, although I’ll also point to Duncan’s 5 is the magic number post that lists five of his favorite topics around our announcements.  And, of course, it wouldn’t be a VMware announcement if there weren’t an accompanying video. This one is a five-minute overview of what we announced today, all filmed on our campus: