I was lucky enough to have front row seats for today’s opening Keynote.
Thanks to all those at VMware for my blogger pass this year.
I also managed to grab Joe Baguley for a quick chat and a selfie with some fellow bloggers.
Jean-Pierre Brulard kicked off proceedings today and mentioned that we had a record 12000 attendees at the event. VMware also celebrated the 20 year milestone at VMware. Impressive just to think it feels like yesterday when virtualisation was being played with.
Pat Gelsinger came up next to focus on “bridging the gaps” in the IT silos.
The significance here was that disruption has happened year on year whilst businesses continue to do well by focusing on making profit.
The number that matters the most to the environment was the carbon saving that VMware has made and has now achieved carbon neutrality 2 years ahead of schedule.
Tech superpowers
Cloud, Mobile, AI/ML and Edge/IOT are the key areas of focus that Pat mentioned as the key enablers for business and technology.
The best phrase I heard was AI is the 30 year overnight success. AI is game changing and we are merely scratching the surface.
Edge is accelerating and touching every aspect of society and it was clear from Pat that dramatic changes are happening all around us at a pace that has never been seen before.
“The application is the network” and the VMware vision fits around this message. You saw it last year and the vision is still alive of any app on any device on any cloud.
Security
The next focus area was Security and that there are still flaws in the I.T ecosystem. People deploy tech all the time but security is still an afterthought. The model is shifting to intrinsic security built into every component.
Micro segmentation was talked about to prevent bad actors from horizontally scaling a datacenter. The key driver here is NSX and Pat was keen to convey the message of Security should be at the heart of every technology conversation.
With AppDefense being a part of vSphere Platinum, Pat mentioned that this is like “burgers & fries”. You always leave the restaurant with both and the emphasis here was that the VM and Security should be deployed hand in hand.
Adaptive Micro-Segmentation was introduced by tieing in AppDefense, vSphere & NSX.
Ray O’Farrell was up next with Vijay to show Appdefense in action through vSphere Platinum.
AppDefense
The demo that was showcased in the keynote showed hows Appdefense learns the behaviour of a VM through Machine Learning. This creates an application behaviour map so the policy can lock down the application by the ruleset that is trusted.
Again, Learn-Lock-Adapt, was talked about as the enabler to shrink the attack surface in the datacenter.
Cloud
My favourite subject at the moment especially when it comes to hybrid cloud and multi cloud conversations. Pat was back on stage to give a definition of hybrid cloud – Consistent Infrastructure and Consistent Operations both within a Private & Public cloud. Cue VMware Cloud Foundation as the defacto standard for the base of the fully integrated software defined datacenter solution.
Mercy Ships was showcased as a company that has moved to an integrated HCI approach to delivering I.T to remote ships in the form of VxRail.
Swiftly moving onto Public Cloud, Pat mentioned the long running VMware Cloud Provider programme made up of 4,200 cloud providers and this has tripled in the last year. Pat brought on Arvind Krishna from IBM Cloud who have played a significant part of this journey to hybrid cloud.
IBM and VMware announced the first multi-zone region offering showing the strength of their continued partnership. They also announced a new VM + Container solution to modernise apps in a secure way using IBM Kubernetes as the orchestration engine.
The next focus are was the VMware and AWS relationship showing that the trajectory is ramping up as more regions come on board to ensure that VMware would be represented globally. Of course, of mention earlier this year was the Amazon RDS on premises solution. Pat demonstrated how the views that a developer sees both on premises and off looks very similar was looking at RDS.
Project Dimension was highlighted (announced earlier this year) to show the fully managed SDDC service from VMware that can be hosted on premises and at edge locations. By using VMware Pulse IOT solution at the edge and delivering the network edge via Velocloud, these game changing technologies will become fully mature over the next few months/years.
Cloudhealth, the acquisition made earlier this year, was mentioned for managing, monitoring and operating workloads in the cloud. Currently at 3500 customers and growing and I’m sure we will see more announcements as VMware matures their offerings with Cloudhealth now on board.
Network
Pat then focused on the network and the important acquisition of Nicira. Now over 7500 customers using NSX highlighting the rapid growth of network virtualisation. With Velocloud and embedding this into the NSX and network fabric, Pat wants this to be the essential cloud networking fabric.
5G was an area that Pat said was an opportunity that lies ahead and will drive the tech superpowers mentioned above. Not sure how long it will take to get there but there is significant advantages to this new telco standard.
Applications
Pat moved onto Kubernetes and how containers should be leveraged on VMware solutions. Having an orchestration and management engine for containers is not enough and the infrastructure layer must still be managed.
The acquisition of Heptio was announced in order to accelerate the adoption of Kubernetes across the enterprise.
PKS was the next item of discussion and announced was VMware Cloud PKS where VMware run the PKS environment on AWS. More clouds to come soon but this is a major win.
PKS on VMware was the next demo by Wendy (Cloud Native Marketing) and Ray. The value prop here is that VMware manages the networking and operations.
Devices
Pat came back on stage to mention how devices are still important to consume services and data. Device proliferation is everywhere and Workspace One was the focus area of how to attacks the complexity of device management. Workspace One Intelligence can look into the OS spread and updates especially now that Windows 10 can be leveraged with the apps installed on the OS to check for compatability.
The rest…
Project Concord was talked about as the VMware Blockchain solution and VMware announced it was now released in Beta.