2018 marks the 20th anniversary of VMware. 12000 attendees have joined this years European conference in Barcelona. From an economical and technical perspective the last years have been a real success for VMware. During the annual European conference VMworld, Pat Gelsinger who is VMware’s CEO for 6 years, gave an outlook on the companies’ present and its future.
Bridge across
Listening to Pat Gelsinger the core message of VMware’s core strength is pretty clear. Bridge across things.
- Act 1 bridge across Servers (vSphere) [and Storage]- vendor independant (Lenovo, HPE, Dell)
- Act 2 bridge across devices (Workspace One) – vendor independant (Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Google)
- Act 3 bridge across networks (NSX) – vendor independant (Cisco, Juniper, HPE)
In this more and more complex world, where companies, products, services are newly created every day. Bridging the artefacts that are created out of the silos is core to VMware’s success. And will be in the future [Briding across network]. I really enjoyed the interview in Las Vegas Pat Gelsinger gave to the cube. Check it out here.
Business Dilemma:
One thing I really like about VMware is its message about their social responsibility. All companies talk about it, VMware is one of the few I would trust with this message. Why? Following Pat Gelsinger for a few years on Twitter and hearing to his talks within smaller session I have realized that he is someone trying to do good (Sample: ‘VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger Will Climb Mt. Kilimanjaro To Build High School In Kenya‘)
I am realistisc, in the end it’s all about money to be successful and survive in the economic landscape, but still company have an option: Do well vs Do good
Pat Gelsinger shared his vision that tech is a force for good by giving us a sample how VMware technology helps Mercy Ships. A non-profit organization to make safe affordable surgery available in developing nations.
Besides that VMware achieved a goal of saving over 500mio tonnes of CO2 emissions due to their products (… and than bitcoins arrived). VMware’s Global Operation achieved the goal of carbon neutrality.
The Superpowers of Tech
- Cloud
- Mobile
- AI/ML
- EDGE/IOT
All of the superpowers reinforce each other. More devices create more data, more data means more AI outcome and required processing power. All of those ‘superpowers’ affect VMware’s bridges in one or the other way.
Security is broken
In the industry spending on Security has increased at the same time as the number of breaches have increased. Today we have too many Security products Pat Gelsinger said. New models for security are required. Basic Security mechanisms must be integrated with every solution, reducing the attack surface by design.
Learn and Lock down the infrastructure, shrink the attack surface but remain adaptable to changes. AppDefense is natively integrated with vSphere within the vSphere Platinum.
One year after announcing App Defense Ray O’Farrel, VMware’s CTO, gave a demonstration about vSphere Platinum. AppDefense, which is included in vSphere Platinum learns Application Topologies, behaviours and compares it to ‘well-behaviour’. How do we learn good behaviour if something has been screwed up already when the journey with AppDefense is started? Application processes are analyzed and compared to a central database.
If an application is behaving different from the learned behaviour -> Act via NSX.
Hybrid Cloud
Multi-Cloud Journey
Nearly every business today is on a cloud journey. Hybrid Cloud is driven by IT Ops, while the Public Cloud driven by developers.
VMware Cloud Foundation is VMware’s recipe to get a consistent Cloud experience. Today, Cloud Foundation 3.5 is being released (more infos here). The storage capabilities within Cloud Foundation is using vSAN that has over 15000 customers today. vSAN is definelty a success story.
To deliver a hybrid cloud, VMware is offering the Cloud Provider Program that has around 4200 Cloud Provider in 120 Countries. VMware Cloud Verified Partners take advantage of VMware’s SDDC Stack. If you are a Service Provider and want to get started within the hybrid cloud world, Cloud Provider Pod might be an answer for you.
Cloud Verified IBM Cloud
IBM’s Cloud solution serves 1700 clients today and is going to offer services with an availability of 99.99% within their new persistent multi-zone region cloud offerings (wow -> a lot buzzwords :-). I really hope to catch up some technical details about the underlying VMware technology during this weeks conference.
VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (VMWonAWS)
Announced already during this years US conference, Pat Gelsinger talked about bringing AWS’s Relational Database Services (RDS) into the hybrid cloud world. For the developer perspective, the VMware environment looks like a new availability zone, while for the vSphere guys among us RDS instances (e.g. Microsoft SQL) is just a regular workload, managed as we are used to it (on- or off-prem).
Project Dimension or VMware Cloud Foundation as a Service
Fully managed based on VMware appliances. With today’s VMworld the beta program has been started. Sign up for the beta.
Project Pulse
Pulse IoT 2.0 scales 500.000.000. With today’s VMworld the beta program has been started. Sign up for the beta.
Public Cloud
Three consistent voices from the customers. VMware wants to achieve a single view across the whole Cloud Infrastructure.
- Cost
- Compliance
- Analytics
CloudHealth technologies
CloudHealth technologies has been acquired. Bridging across Public Clouds by offering a single interface with quick and easy insights into the workload running in public clouds on Azure or AWS.
Core features
- Cost analytics across different clouds, workloads, organizations
- Cost optimization
- Create visibility across mutli cloud solutions
NSX
Network is the key in a multi-cloud, multi-site, multi-edge (however you like to call it) environment. Today 7500 customers are using NSX. As you might have heard before NSX is not just a single product. NSX is a suite that powers the Virtual Cloud Network. VMware observes a transition from Data Centers to Centers of Data that need to be connected, operated and secured together. The NSX portfolio offers a lot of solutions to establish that in an efficient way (NSX-T, NSX SD-WAN, AppDefense).
Site Recovery with VMware on AWS
I like this quote by Pat Gelsinger a few months ago where he mentioned that in ideal world, customer do not have to put upfront invest into disaster recovery scenarios anymore. The hybrid cloud is a key element here and Ray O’Farrel demonstrated the integration of vSphere on-prem with all the elastic functionalities of VMware on AWS. Need more hosts? -> Elastic DRS will add new hosts into minutes, need more storage? Elastic vSAN is the key. Great stuff, really….
Elastic vSAN on VMware on AWS
With the announcement of elastic vSAN, customers using VMware on AWS are able to use AWS elastic block storage services (EBS) for the backing of vSAN. Elastic DRS and Elastic vSAN are offering interesting opportunities for Site Recovery scenarios where
Telco Cloud
Public Cloud Services are running nowadays 90% virtualized workloads, while the same number of virtualized workload in the Telco field is at around 10%. Besides that, the size of the telco market is around 80% of the size of the ‘regular’ infra/cloud market. There is a huge potential for VMware. The development of 5G wireless networks offers a create opportunity to use VMware SDDC stack as the underlying platform.
Any Application
Kubernetes
While the usage of container and its automation is increasing the challenges of traditional workloads still remain also in a container or cloud native world: Security, Operational Models, Automation.
VMware strategy for running on containers is based on (of course) virtual machine. Acquisition of Heptio. Heptio has been founded by two Kubernetes-Co-founder. What is Kubernetes? It’s all about automation and availability of Containers strongly influenced by Google’s own Borg system.
What is VMware Cloud Pivotal ‘Kontainer’ System? A fully deployed Kubernetes environment based on VMware’s technology. Combined with NSX-T dynamic created network and its policies are part of the product.
At this years VMworld VMware also announced PKS managed services running on AWS (and other Clouds) coming soon.
Any Device
The four super powers of tech are having a heavy impact on the devices used by people and employees nowadays. Having engaged employees makes a difference in gaining corporate productivity. The modern world created chaos with having too many devices (mobile, laptops, wearable). IT divisions must be released from managing all of this employees devices in a complex fashion.
Workspace One is VMware’s answer to to this chaos. Demonstrating Workspace One Intelligence VMware shows how Windows 10 Applications and Update Management can be simplified and stabilized tremendously. Workspace One Intelligence is telling the admin which Device/Application combination is causing problems during certain updates. How is this ‘compatibility’ information gathered? Telemetrics of test-rings and machine learning (what else :P).
Integrated with Service Management tools like Jira, Workspace One Intelligence automates can automate certain actions to solve the complexity in a simple way.
Project Concord
VMware is offering blockchain as a service. Blockchains are negatively branded nowadays. Having a talk with some professional in the field I have learned that the way blockchains can be used to safely store data in a distributed way makes it really really interesting for many companies / use-cases. With VMware’s Project Concord VMware is maintaining an open source blockchain technology that will also be able to be consumed as a service.