This week is VMworld, which is taking place in San Francisco. It’s good to be back at the Moscone center, but I will miss Las Vegas as I always seem to reach my step goal of over 10,000 steps per day. VMworld has been away from San Francisco for a while because of construction to the Moscone center. But I will say I do like the improvements made to the venue.
It’s always great to see old friends and connect with new ones at VMworld. The day leading up to VMworld for me, is always filled with community activities and planning my week.
I want to touch on a few of the highlights from the keynote for those that could not make it out to VMworld. I want to give you a sense of what people were saying and doing in the community lounge area as most of us watch the keynote from there.
Tech in the age of any
To kick things off, VMware announced their two recent acquisitions to help support its software vision. They acquired Pivotal Software, a cloud-native platform provider and Carbon Black, a cloud-native endpoint protection solution. It will be interesting to see how these platforms evolve with VMware over time. Folks seems pretty impressed and looking forward to what they will bring to VMware.
Tech as a force for good
Pat Gelsinger spent some time on how technology is neutral and can be used for good or bad. It’s up to us to leverage tech to make the world a better place. VMware has committed to TechSoup, which manages the only global philanthropy program that brings together more than 100 tech companies to provide technology donations and charitable offers to NGOs everywhere.
VMware vision
Any app, on any cloud, to any device with intrinsic security was the message. Along with any technologist who masters multi-cloud will own the next decade. I think that is a critical point to consider, as you position yourself for new kinds of roles in the future.
Our environments are changing, and there is more demand on IT than ever before, not only from the business but also developers who can spin-up cloud environments in minutes. Developers are always asking for the latest and greatest while IT Ops ask how we run it all? This is no better expressed with all the Kubernetes environements organizations have. To help with that welcome VMware Tanzu.
VMware announces VMware Tanzu portfolio
VMware Tanzu, is a new portfolio of products and services to transform the way enterprises build, run and manage software on Kubernetes.
Build modern apps – This is where Pivotal is leveraged for building cloud-native apps, and Bitnami is used for the packaging and deployment of those apps.
Run modern apps – To run Kubernetes, VMware is re-architecting vSphere to deeply integrate and embed Kubernetes into the stack, with Project Pacific. This will extend vSphere for the modern application workload. Ops and Dev teams will have one platform to run Kubernetes with a self-service experience. There were some interesting stats mentioned, and if I have this right, Kubernetes on vSphere ran 8% faster than on bare metal – pretty amazing.
Manage Multi-cloud, Multi-cluster Infrastructure – VMware Tanzu Mission Control is centralized Kubernetes management. With VMware Tanzu Mission Control, you will have a single point of control to manage all your Kubernetes clusters regardless of where they are running on vSphere, public clouds, managed services, packaged distributions and do-it-yourself (DIY) Kubernetes.
One thing to keep in mind with running Kubernetes is if you are looking to start down the path of Kubernetes on vSphere today, you need to start with VMware PKS. VMware PKS is VMware’s Kubernetes offering, used to deploy, run and manage Kubernetes for production across multiple clouds.
Observations and reflections
I think VMware Tanzu was the most interesting announcement during the day one keynote. There were also a number of prodcut specific like CloudHealth Hybrid, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.0, vRealize Network Insight 5.0, vRealize Automation 8.0, vRealize Operations 8.0 among others.
Let me know if you attended the event and what you thought? Do you plan on running Tanzu? or was there something else that caught your eye, let me know on Twitter.
Be sure to check out my VMworld 2018: Project Dimension post!