VMworld 2018: Project Dimension
VMworld 2018 is taking place in Las Vegas again this year. I do enjoy Las Vegas because of all the walking, which helps me finally meet my fitness goals by getting over 10,000 steps. VMworld will be busy as I try to get involved in as many community activities as possible before, during and after the show.
Here is a little inside baseball, one of the things I like to do is hang out by the registration area and pick out the faces of folks I know and greet them before they have a chance to get lost in the week’s activities. That five to ten minutes of chatting is a win in my book.
When recapping the keynote, I like to highlight what, I think, would impact the community the most and what has the community talking, or excited. I enjoy watching the keynotes from the community lounge because you can see how people immediately react to the news. It gives you a good feel for whether VMware is on target with their message or a little off.
Celebrating 20 Years of VMware
VMware celebrated their 20th anniversary, and the team had an excellent look back video highlighting their significant accomplishments. VMware was established in 1998, and many of us have grown with the company and its products. If you are interested, here is the 1997 paper several founders wrote that started them on their journey.
This video will give you a sense of how VMware has grown.
WMworld 2018: Celebrating 20 Years of VMware
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced on stage Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on VMware. Amazon RDS on VMware is a service that will make it easy for customers to set up, operate, and scale databases in VMware-based data centres and hybrid environments and to migrate them to AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS. This one did not get me excited, but others in the audience were super excited to see this. Let’s see how this if they talk about this at VMworld 2019.
VMware Cloud on AWS
Keeping with the AWS theme, VMware Cloud on AWS announced it would be available in all AWS regions by the end of 2019, including AWS GovCloud.
It was interesting to hear from Andy Jassy and how MIT was able to move 3000 VMs to VMware Cloud on AWS in 3 months vs years.
Project Dimension
Currently, in tech preview, Project Dimension will extend VMware Cloud to the data centre, branch offices and the edge. Project Dimension will combine VMware Cloud Foundation, in a hyperconverged form factor. VMware Cloud was a managed service to deliver an SDDC infrastructure as an end-to-end service, operated by VMware.
Project Magna
Project Magna will make possible a self-driving data centre based on machine learning. It is focused on applying reinforcement learning to a data centre environment to drive higher performance and efficiencies. Project Magna is what I’ve been expecting for several years. We have an autonomous data centre, learning and making all the decisions for you. Almost like a ‘siri’ for the data centre.
Project Magna relies on artificial intelligence algorithms to help connect the dots across massive data sets and gain profound insights across applications and the stack from application code to software to hardware infrastructure, to public cloud and the edge.
Virtualization on 64-bit ARM for Edge
One thing that got many people excited was when VMware demonstrated ESXi on 64-bit ARM. This is a new space for VMware, I suspect, and with the edge getting a lot of coverage, this will undoubtedly be a growing area.
VMware vSphere Platinum Edition
The Platinum edition will combine vSphere’s native security capabilities with VMware AppDefense – and be fully integrated into the hypervisor. Using machine learning and behavioural analytics, this will enable virtual machines (VMs) to run in a “known good” state. To provide a fast path for on-premises vSphere customers to get started with VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), customers that purchase a minimum of five vSphere Platinum Edition licenses will also be eligible to receive credits that can be applied against the service.
CloudHealth Technologies
VMware did announce the acquisition of CloudHealth Technologies, which provides a cloud operations platform across many of the hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Controlling and monitoring cloud costs is always a challenge, especially in a multi-cloud world.
I hope this gives you a sense of some major announcements everyone is talking about. Here are some links to product-specific releases during VMworld 2018, VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0, vRealize Automation 7.5, vRealize Suite 2018 and vSphere 6.7 Update 1.
Please let me know what you thought were some big announcements that you are excited to implement. Chat with me on Twitter, and thanks for reading!
Be sure to check out my VMworld 2017: VMware Cloud on AWS post!