VMworld Europe 2019 – Barcelona

VMworld Europe 2019 in Barcelona was an exciting week! Full of important news, updates, previews and releases from the vendor. There was a lot to take in with a good number of exciting updates, acquisitions and announcements.

This update provides some insight into the wealth of information VMware provided in Barcelona …

Project Pacific: The next evolution of vSphere

Project Pacific is the biggest evolution of vSphere in a decade, according to VMware. Project Pacific is rearchitecting vSphere to deeply integrate and embed Kubernetes for all modern apps on a single platform. This allows you to be at the cutting edge of technology through Containers as a Service

Kubernetes and Containers as a Service

Kubernetes and containers were a key focus area at VMworld with VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger excitedly talking about Kubernetes, Project Pacific and Tanzu. Kubernetes originated as a developer platform for building, deploying and running modern applications quickly and efficiently. VMware has taken this concept and announced a roadmap for a new Containers as-a-Service solution.

The service allows you to create customised VM templates and enables tenant users to deploy fully functional Kubernetes clusters as self-contained vApps. Using the Container Service Extension as a control plane facilitates the deployment of the feature-rich Enterprise PKS, to CSE standard to Project Pacific.

Tanzu Mission Control

Tanzu Mission Control is purpose built to help manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across multiple locations and clouds from a single point of control. VMware discussed the concept of modern apps being developed in Kubernetes as vApps. Kubernetes is supported natively on all major cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure and GCP and with Kubernetes being integrated into vSphere with Project Pacific, Tanzu Mission Control gives users the single management pane to manage their modern Apps centrally no matter if they are in one place or across multiple clouds.

NSX-T

With the release of NSX-T Data Centre 2.5, VMware has decoupled the security in NSX from the hypervisor. This gives the benefit to support cloud-native applications, bare metal workloads, multi-hypervisor environments, public clouds, and multiple clouds. One of the biggest new features to 2.5 was NSX Intelligence, a distributed analytics engine that provides continuous data centre visibility for network and applications helping deliver a more granular and dynamic security posture and streamline security operations.

Building upon its success of NSX Cloud, VMware introduced a new Deploy and Operation mode referred to as the Native Cloud Enforced mode. This mode provides a consistent policy model across the hybrid cloud network reducing overhead by eliminating the need to install NSX tools in workload VMs in the public cloud.

Distributed Intrusion Detection and Prevention will be added to the NSX service-defined firewall offering rich capabilities to protect applications on east-west network traffic across private and public clouds.

Carbon Black

At VMworld US 2019, VMware announced the acquisition of Carbon Black to add to their new cloud security portfolio. Carbon Black created an innovative cloud-native security platform with a smart, lightweight agent and an AI/ML-based Data Lake in the Cloud that provides comprehensive protection of endpoints and defence against a variety of threats

The combination of Carbon Black’s solutions with VMware’s security products including AppDefense, Workspace ONE, NSX and SecureState, creates a modern and highly differentiated intrinsic Security Cloud Platform for Any App running on Any Cloud delivered to Any Device.

VMware extends Carbon Black’s Security Cloud, with areas of telemetry that VMware and partner solutions collect, across both companies’ products, enriching its data lake, security graph and Machine Learning algorithms, to best protect customers.  The addition of Carbon Black accelerates VMware’s vision for intrinsic security across the most important security control points – Network, Endpoint, Identity and Analytics.

Workspace ONE

VMworld 2019 also had some interesting announcements about the digital workspace. One was around Workspace ONE, focusing on creating better employee experiences from onboarding to day two and beyond to finally offboarding.

The key note started with the Intelligent Hub, offering employees an app-store-like experience for delivering apps and modern services, such as notifications and people search. Mobile flows were also announced to provide one-click actionable workflows, for example to approve a day off. VMware also announced the self-service virtual assistant, which is powered by IBM Watson AI. Employees can easily complete IT and HR related tasks by asking questions via text or voice and receiving guided answers. Workspace ONE is the first digital workspace platform to integrate an AI-powered virtual assistant.

VMware also announced a partnership with HID Global, a leader in physical access control systems. This partnership allows employees to use the Intelligent Hub app on their personal or company-owned mobile device to gain entry to buildings without the need of a key card.

On the Microsoft side VMware announced a new partnership where Workspace One will integrate with Microsoft’s replacement for SCCM and Intune Microsoft Endpoint Manager to allow customers to take advantage on the strengths both solutions can offer.

Horizon

Moving on from modern management to virtual apps and desktops VMware announced that by 2023 30% of users will be accessing their desktops ‘as a service’. To prepare for this VMware announced an evolution in how you deploy and manage your virtual desktop from on-premise to the cloud giving you the flexibility to move workloads to a hybrid or multi-cloud environment through a new Horizon cloud management control plane, so you can move workloads to different clouds dependent on cost criteria, data sovereignty criteria or personal cloud preference. Allowing you to deploy on-premise, AWS, Azure and in the future GCP and Oracle and treat that as one unified environment.

The keynote moved on to focus on Horizon on Azure. This is ideal for customer who use Azure as the cloud. VMware discussed how Horizon would allow you to manage a hybrid deployment of both on-premise and cloud from the same management plane, enhancing user environment management, flexible desktop options and configurations and real time audio, video and peripheral support.

To add to VMware’s on-going partnership with Microsoft they announced support for the new Windows Virtual Desktop, which gets released into tech-preview this quarter.

VMware Cloud now available on Dell EMC

The announcement of the availability of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is a huge step forward for on-premise data center and edge deployments. VMware Cloud is now pre-installed on Dell’s VXRail platform as a pre-deployed solution. A fully configured SDDC readily and easily to deploy. The solution is a secure and scalable IaaS offering, combining public cloud benefits with on-premise infrastructure – Data Centre-as-a-Service, delivered by Dell.