So I guess there’s no better time to dust off my keyboard and get back to blogging than talking about VMworld and what was announced during the Day 1 General Session!
This year it’s a bit funny as I’m no longer blogging as an outsider as I now work for VMware…. so without breaking any NDAs I’m just going to talk about what was announced during the keynote!
I’ve been reading a lot of tweets and comments mentioning about how flustered Pat Gelsinger looked on stage during the keynote, but considering all that’s happened within the past week or so you could probably forgive him for not practicing his presentation – especially given he probably had it re-written by marketing a few days ago post the Pivotal and Carbon Black acquisitions!
So first up… VMware Tanzu, a portfolio of products and services to transform the way the world builds, runs and manages software on Kubernetes!
Over the past year or so, VMware has really thrown their weight behind K8, acquiring a number of companies they saw as key to growing the services they could offer around containers. The acquisition of Bitnami and Pivotal now provides a platform to build, package and deploy modern applications on Kubernetes.
But the exciting announcement is what they are planning for vSphere – a re-architecture of vSphere with Kubernetes embedded as its control plane, Project Pacific (Tech Preview)! This is probably the biggest evolution of the ESXi hypervisor in decades (since the transition from VI3 to vSphere)! Now you can run containers and VMs side-by-side which means modern apps can run in containers yet link in to legacy VMs all being managed by the same vSphere client. A Single and Consistent platform for the future! You can read a Technical Overview of Project Pacific here.
The third piece of Tanzu is Tanzu Mission Control, a SaaS solution offering a single pane of glass control platform that gives admins and developers visibility and the ability to manage all their Kubernetes clusters, regardless of where they reside – ensuring that customers gain that consistency and governance by leveraging a policy engine to provision a kubernetes environment.
Next up was a product launch I’ve been following very closely (for obvious reasons) – CloudHealth Hybrid! This new service will extend the same rich cost optimization, governance and security functionality that CloudHealth delivers to public cloud environments, to VMware hybrid cloud environments – namely VMware Cloud on AWS! It’s been something a lot of customers and partners have been asking for since VMware acquired CloudHealth almost a year ago. CloudHealth Hybrid will bring together the functionality of CloudHealth Data Center and the functionality of VMware vRealize Business for Cloud (vRBC) and Cost Insight into a single standalone SaaS offering. CloudHealth Hybrid will provide a single platform with visibility into cost, usage, and performance of all hybrid cloud resources – and we’re looking at a GA in Q3!
Last up was the expansion of VMware’s Hybrid Cloud solutions…. if you haven’t already realised, it’s all about Hybrid Cloud these days! =P
- VMware Cloud Foundation is the key building block for the hybrid cloud, providing the full SDDC on AWS, Azure, Google, IBM Cloud and numerous other cloud partners.
- VMware Cloud on Dell EMC was announced as GA – deploying vCF on Dell EMC VxRail (my favourite HCI solution!!) – in fact my last blog was about DTW and I wrote a bit about it already (so go read that post)…
- VMware Cloud on AWS got new HCX capabilities – enabling push-button migration and interconnectivity between VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs running in different AWS Regions and new Elastic vSAN support further improves storage scaling.
- We got new versions of vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation (vROps 8.0 and vRA 8.0) giving customers self-driving operations and hybrid cloud automation.
To round it all up, we heard about Digital Employee Experience and some new features in Workspace One to help put the employee at the heart of everything a business does. As well as a short message about how VMware + Carbon Black + Ecosystem = Better Together… VMware’s Intrinsic Security! (Workload Security – vSphere + Carbon Black, Workspace Security – Workspace One + Carbon Black, Network Threat Security – NSX + Carbon Black, Cloud Security – Secure State + Carbon Black)
Roll on Day 2…..
The Virtual Unknown 