So the great thing about VMworld US is that they live stream the General Session for the rest of us who can’t make it over to Vegas… whilst you can’t get the whole VMworld US experience just by watching the GS live stream, at least you get to hear the same news as those in Vegas.
Pat Gelsinger opened up the GS by showing the world his bad-ass “VMware” tattoo… not quite sure if it’s real – many commenting on VMware’s tweet that the tattoo gun doesn’t look like it has ink in it… =P
https://twitter.com/vmwarenews/status/1034109813129535488
A nice little montage to celebrate the 20th anniversary of VMware… 1998… long time… From Server Virtualisation to EUC to Network Virtualisation to Cloud and now Hybrid/Multi-Cloud.
VMware’s Vision is still the same – Any Device, Any App, Any Cloud… and we’re told businesses are still on a multi-cloud journey! The thing is, so many companies have a ‘cloud’ strategy, but many just can’t execute that cloud adoption because they are stuck trying to migrate workloads off their traditional DC into the public cloud!
This is where VMware stands apart with their partnership with AWS and their Cloud Foundations solution! Move your on-prem DC to a SDDC and then “ruthlessly automate everything!!” =)
Project Dimension was quickly mentioned as a Tech Preview that will extend VMware Cloud to the data center, ROBO and edge. It combines VMware Cloud Foundations with HCI and a VMware Cloud managed service to deliver an SDDC solution, end-to-end, operated and supported by VMware. The solution will simplify cloud deployments handling all aspects of configuration, security, and management – leaving customers to worry-less about infrastructure and focus more on their business innovations!
There were a few nice VMC on AWS announcements…
- firstly the rollout of its services in Sydney to serve APJ
- secondly that vSAN will be using Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) allowing customers to independently scale compute and storage requirements (and effectively allowing users to deploy storage-dense workloads)
- thirdly Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware making it easy for customers to set up, operate, scale and migrate Relational DBs on-prem and in VMC on AWS.
It’s amazing how far the partnership has come in a single year!
Roadmap for further rollouts:
More here: https://cloud.vmware.com/community/2018/08/26/vmware-cloud-aws-charging-ahead/
Finally there was an announcement of the acquisition of CloudHealth Technologies… From what I can see, CloudHealth Tech delivers a SAAS platform that offers Cloud Operations across AWS, Azure and GCP – it helps customers to analyze, manage cloud costs, usage and monitor performance across multi-clouds. This looks like a CMP on steroids and should complement VMware’s existing CMP and SAAS offerings (vRealize/Cloud Automation Services and Wavefront). CloudHealth will become ‘the’ Cloud Operations Platform of choice for the industry…. allowing customers to control, analyze the costs, compliance and performance of their compute environments across on-prem and public clouds!
To end it all, VMware’s CTO – Ray O’Farrell – came on stage to demo several of the new announcements and new products:
- Migrating workloads from on-prem to the cloud – demo’ing bulk migration of an entire data centre using vSphere replication and then vMotion – with no downtime!
- Project Dimension showing how cloud services can be ‘stretched’ between VMC on AWS and a customers on-prem DC. Also how both on-prem and edge infrastructure can be monitored as part of VMware’s managed service.
- Short Amazon RDS demo showing the service running on-prem and in AWS.
- A mention of something called Project Magna which leverages AI and Machine Learning to self-optimize a virtual environment…. changing the SD in SDDC from Software-Defined to Self-Driving!
- A demo of VMware PKS showing the integration of NSX with PKS and how you can automate security of kubernetes.
- A nice demo showing vROPs monitoring workloads requiring GPUs and the new feature of vMotion for GPU enabled VMs (a limitation previously of Horizon/vSphere)
- Blockchain is everywhere!! Project Concord is an open source infrastructure for Enterprise Blockchains focusing on performance and scalability.
- Dell EMC’s new factory-provisioning service for VMware Workspace ONE, where devices will ship ready for integration as end-points.
- Workspace ONE intelligence, advising IT operations of problems with incompatible applications and patches (automate patch testing to predict whether a new patch will work).
- A demo to show the support of ESXi on 64-bit ARM platforms.
And to close the GS, two major annoucements around security, one for compute and one for Network…
- Firstly – vSphere Platinum, packaging AppDefense with vSphere ESXi. This new offering will have AppDefense built in which uses machine learning and a variety of other inputs to baseline known good states of a VM. AppDefense can then act on deviations of that baseline, executing automated actions – such as changing firewall settings, alerting, offloading for deeper network packet inspection.
- Secondly – Adaptive Micro-Segmentation, integrating AppDefense and NSX. Security solutions should “Learn, Lock and Adapt” to threats… AppDefense will offer the dynamic learning and adaption looking into the VM and applications, NSX will offer the Lock.
And with that…. I end my summary of the first day’s GS…. =)
EDIT: Day 1 General Session is now available for replay: https://www.vmworld.com/en/us/learning/general-sessions.html
The Virtual Unknown 