VMworld 2018 Live Blog: Day 2

Welcome to the VMworld 2018 US Monday General Session live blog!

Monday General Session

Note: This was originally published as a live blog. In the course of migrating to a new hosting platform, the live blog entries have been converted to a list. Newer entries at the top, older entries at the bottom.

• Pat believes technology can help eradicate chronic diseases, lift people out of poverty, deliver education to every child on the planet, and reverse climate change.

  And with that, the general session is over.

• Pat’s wrapping things together using the "tech superpower" theme again.

• In the demo, a VM is behaving in a new way that’s not typical. AppDefense learns that this is an expected behaviour, and adapts automatically, allowing the solution to continue to work. Hence, "adapt".

• AppDefense can lock down VMs based on learned behaviour. The "learn" and "lock" security requirements. Now, how to "adapt"?

• The AppDefense dashboard shows up right in the vSphere Client. It provides immediate visibility into VM processes and how they interact with each other. This allows AppDefense to learn the "known good" behaviour of the VM workloads.

• We’re a little over time, but the demos must go on!

• Introducing Adaptive Micro-Segmentation, through integration between NSX and AppDefense.

• VMware says security solutions should Learn, Lock, and Adapt to security threats.

  vSphere Platinum, a new vSphere version, has AppDefense built right into vSphere.

• NSX makes protecting east-west practical.

• Most security is north-south, and most attacks are east-west.

• AppDefense for compute, and NSX for network, are VMware’s solutions to improve security posture.

• Final topic of the general session is security. Best for last?

• VMware helped them improve the IT services and keep their services secure and running.

• Final customer video is of the Make-A-Wish foundation. They went through a full web site crash, preventing Make-A-Wish from being available online.

• The "big deal" is that the demo is being done entirely on ESX for Arm 64-bit architecture.

• This is an edge-style example. vSphere FT is being used to protect a VM between the wind-turbine hosts. Pat comes out and asks, "What’s the big deal?"

• Next demo is of a wind-turbine farm, represented as hosts in a vSphere cluster.

• Workspace ONE’s automated patch testing was able to predict that a new patch would only work 87% of the time. It also highlighted the likely root issue. Based on this assessment, the issue can be flagged and raised to the appropriate team automatically. This allows the update to be scheduled, pending a fix from the notified team. As soon as the fix is made, the blocked devices (those that are predicted to fail the patching process) can be updated safely.

• Pointing out the increased frequency of security updates for modern Windows operating systems, Workspace ONE can automate patch testing so you can safely and securely get updates out the door more quickly.

• Now a Workspace ONE demo, showing the management of Windows end-user devices.

• User experience is to drop ship a new device to the user, provide them with their company credentials, and Workspace ONE does the rest.

• Dell provisioning for VMware Workspace ONE is now available.

• It’s no longer just "I’m a PC" or "I’m a Mac", there’s much more variety and complexity in the managed device space. Workspace ONE is VMware’s solution to help deal with the noise.

• Pat’s returning to the stage for the managed device section of the presentation.

• Project Concord, announced today, is "not just another blockchain implementation". With focus on performance and scalability. Currently available on GitHub.

• It wouldn’t be a technology keynote in 2018 without mention of blockchain.

• The demo is of moving the image processing VM to a new cluster, where it can take advantage of vGPUs. The image process is visually represented in the background behind Ray, showing that it appears to run more quickly after migrating to the new cluster.

• The example workload is a VM using machine learning and image processing, enhanced via vGPUs.

• Ray’s using vROps to view vGPU workloads.

• NSX and Kubernetes (via PKS) work together to automate tasks.

• I’m pretty sure that was Chad Sakac cheering loudly from the audience for Pivotal’s PKS solution during the demo.

• A Kubernetes & NSX demo is underway.

• Wendy Cartee, Senior Director, Cloud-Native Marketing, takes to the stage with Ray. Mr. Gelsinger takes a break.

• VMware’s committed to support all of the major Kubernetes deployments.

• VMware PKS is the solution that VMware wants to set as the standard for using and managing Kubernetes in the enterprise.

• VMware’s working with Google and Pivotal to address those questions.

• How do you secure, network, monitor and manage storage for Kubernetes?

• Of course Pat’s espousing that the best platform for containers are VMs. He’s citing Google and all major clouds as using VMs to run their containers.

• Kubernetes has become "the consensus way" to manage containers.

• The AI/ML features are part of Project Magma.

• The SD in SDDC can go from software-defined to self-driving with AI and machine learning.

• A custom availability zone would show up in AWS that represents the customer’s deployed on-prem instances of Amazon RDS.

• As mentioned earlier, they’re showing Amazon RDS instances running in the customer’s location. Could be for a couple reasons, such as redundancy, or concern about network connectivity to the cloud.

• Since this is a VMware-managed service, VMware keeps their services up-to-date. The customer doesn’t have to spend cycles on that kind of routine maintenance.

• Project Dimension, mentioned earlier in the session, can be used to "stretch" the VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure into the companies on-prem locations to support edge workloads.

• Elastic DRS which, I believe is unique to AWS, is now being shown.

• VMs shown vMotion’ing from on-prem to VMware Cloud on AWS.

• It’s nice to see the new HTML5-based vSphere Client being used during the demo.

• The demo is of VMware Cloud on AWS.

• Ray O’Farrell joins Pat on stage for the demonstration.

• "You shouldn’t believe me, only what we actually show [at keynotes]." – Pat Gelsinger

  Queue the demo…

• VMware NSX is "10x larger" than nearest software-defined competitor.

• Right in the middle of an Any Cloud approach is the network.

• Dell Technologies today is announcing a cloud marketplace.

• VMware Cloud Automation Services (formerly Project Tango) is being annouced, and complements the CloudHealth Tech acquisition.

• CloudHealth Technologies support multiple clouds. VMware’s committing to evolve CloudHealth into a VMware branded offering. They want to make it the definitive cloud management solution.

• VMware’s acquired Cloud Health Technologies.

• Cloud also has operations problems (not just on-prem).

• Pulse 2.0, announced today, can be consumed as a service. Pulse has been scaled to support 500 million devices.

• "Edge is a decentralization force." – Pat Gelsinger

• Project Dimension, now in tech preview, embeds VMware Cloud Foundation in an on-premises hardware. Hardware partners Dell EMC and Lenovo are working on solutions.

• VMware Cloud Verified, announced last year, is a program that certifies partners as being able to run VCF. ~1700 members in the program, with IBM being called out as a standout example.

• Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS) can be used with VMware on-prm workloads. Replicas can be deployed on premises. Online backups can be either on-prem or in AWS. Available in a few months, and will support a number of popular database types.

• PKS can now be used with VMonAWS.

• Today VMware’s announcing VMware Cloud on AWS version M5.

• Australia is one of the most virtualized places in the world. I recall this being true back in the early days of ESX.

• Quick catch up to the live feed:

  • Pat’s showing off his VMware "bad ass tattoo".

  • VMware has gone through a series of "ages" or "eras".

  • #17 on Fortune 2018 Change the World list.

  • VMware enables "Tech superpowers".

  • Mr. Geslinger loves to tell his Intel 486 stories, and he has good reason to!

  • Edge/IOT still has lots of work to do to make it a standard feature in the enterprise.

  • Aside: The stage this year looks like it wouldn’t be out of place on an episode of America’s Got Talent.

  • VMware’s vision is still "any device, any app, any cloud".

  • "Edge and telco are becoming clouds".

  • 80% virtualization in data centres. Only 10% of telco is virtualized. You can see why VMware sees this as a market with potential.

  • As many have predicted, the message regarding cloud is multi-cloud. "Every business is on a multi-cloud journey."

  • VMware’s definition of hybrid cloud is public and private cloud workloads working on top of a VMware Cloud Foundation.

  • "Ruthlessly automate everything!"

  • Fasted way to get to VMware Cloud Foundation is through Hyper-Converged Infrastructure.

  • Claim to have the largest amount of HCI software revenue.

  • 5 billion people world-wide do not have access to medical surgery. VMware’s customer delivers aid to poor communities, for example in Africa.

• VMware 20th anniversary video montage.

• It’s VMware’s 20th anniversary. They were founded in 1998.

• 23,000+ employees at VMware.

• Pat Geslinger takes to the stage.