VMworld 2017: VMware Cloud on AWS
Welcome back to Las Vegas everyone for VMworld 2017, a gathering of community, IT enthusiasts and folks attending for the first time. It’s always nice to see people in person that you have connected with over social media and begin to build those deep relationships. Thank you for taking the time to chat with me and I look forward to seeing you at VMworld 2018.
As I often do, I am going to recap some of the major announcements from VMworld that has the community talking and some that I think you should keep a close eye on. I’ll also sprinkle in links to specific product announcements, so you can explore the topic much deeper.
Building on the VMware vision of Any Device, Any App, Any Cloud with Intrinsic Security, here is where the announcements fits into that vision.
Customers can now run their VMware software in the AWS cloud – it’s GA. Known as VMware Cloud on AWS, it’s powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, which integrates vSphere, vSAN and NSX with vCenter as the management console. VMware Cloud on AWS runs on elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure. This service will be initially available in the AWS US West (Oregon) region and will expand to AWS regions worldwide in 2018.
vRealize Automation also supports VMware Cloud on AWS by automating workload provisioning and deployment; vRealize Operations delivers proactive performance management, capacity optimization, and unified visibility; and vRealize Business for Cloud tracks and manages costs, accelerates planning, and drives business alignment. My guess is you can expect as the service matures that Other VMware solutions, including VMware Site Recovery Manager, will follow in the future.
“With the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS, for the first time customers can operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment that combines the VMware software they love with the unmatched functionality, security, and operational expertise of the AWS Cloud,”
Andy Jassy, chief executive officer, AWS.
VMware Integrated OpenStack
VMware Integrated OpenStack 4 (VIO) is based on OpenStack Ocata and provide support for containerized applications. Integration with vRealize Automation – vRealize Automation customers can now embed OpenStack components in blueprints. They can also manage their OpenStack deployments through the Horizon UI as a tab in vRealize Automation. You can expect it to be available as a standalone product later this quarter.
VMware Cloud Services
A whole suite of products that help you gain end-to-end visibility into cloud usage, costs, network traffic, metrics monitoring, and analytics. I will add them here and include a description taken from the VMware new release.
- VMware AppDefense – Data center endpoint security solution that protects applications, provides threat detection and response capabilities.
- VMware Cost Insight – Cost monitoring and optimization service for public and private clouds that helps IT analyze cloud spend.
- VMware Discovery – Inventory service for cloud visibility and tames shadow IT by bringing together inventory information and cloud accounts.
- VMware Network Insight – Network and security analysis service offering purpose-built for public clouds and software-defined data centers.
- VMware NSX Cloud – Service that provides consistent networking and security for applications running in multiple private and public clouds.
- Wavefront by VMware – Metrics monitoring and analytics platform that handles the high-scale requirements of modern cloud-native applications.
Pivotal Container Service (PKS)
Working with Pivotal and Google, (PKS) delivers a simple way to deploy and operate production-ready Kubernetes on vSphere and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This offering is expected to become available in calendar Q4 2017, and ship as a standalone product able to integrate with Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) infrastructure.
The initial release of PKS will feature Kubernetes via BOSH, VMware NSX, and a jointly developed version of Open Services Broker API that allows easy integration of GCP services into PKS applications. PKS is supported by Pivotal and VMware, PKS will be best suited for large- to mid-sized enterprises as well as service providers.
VMware AppDefense
Flip the security model on its head and start thinking about detecting for intended state (Good state) vs Bad State. Using your virtual infrastructure to monitor running applications against their intended state, and can detect and automate response to attacks that attempt to manipulate those applications. They mentioned on stage that they tried this against wannacry and other ransomware software, and it was very effective.
VMware Skyline
VMware Skyline, a proactive support technology. Install the Skyline Collector, and the appliance will automatically and securely collect product usage data and conduct environment-specific analysis of configuration and performance. The information collected will be transferred to VMware’s technical support engineers over an encrypted channel, and help proactively resolve potential problems with improved response times. This is a cool product that they did not touch on that much during the keynote, I’m interested in seeing how it works.
There you have it, I’m sure I missed some things. Please let me know what you thought about the announcements and what you are excited about. You can ping me on Twitter, and thanks for reading!
Be sure to check out my VMworld 2016: VMware Cloud Foundation post!