So, this is VMworld 2018 and allthough it is just starting today for the Keynote and a lot of sessions, we have already done a lot. This blog will cover the general session, but also a smal recap of the day before.

Yesterday we started of early with an NSX Executive Breakfast. In a small session, with some nice food, we were informed of all things Virtual Cloud Network.

On stage were:

– Chris Hill ( from the PSO organization)
– Tom Corn (the AppDefense man)
– Sanjay Uppal (the man who started Velocloud)
– Shawn Toldo (Vice President, WW Solution Partners at VMware)
– Tom Gillis (Head of the NSBU)

We have heard a lot of information about how NSX is booming and that the developments on all products in the portfolio are being developed in a great way. Good discussions about how we, as partners, can leverage VMware to further spread the NSX-word.

After the NSX breakfast we had a meeting with Madhura Limaye (Senior Product Marketing Manager at VMware) and Francis Chow (Sr. Director, Strategy, Planning & Operations, Storage and Availability Business Unit) about developments with vSAN and to have a discussion about positioning vSAN at our customers.

The afternoon was filled with an NSX-T workshop where we were treated to a four hour session with content that is usually delivered in 5 days. Very interesting stuff!

After the day, we had a great dinner with all PQR customers, before we head to the Rubrik party at Ocana.

Today it’s Keynote day and I am really excited about that.

Opening was Jean-Pierre Brulard, the General Manager for VMware EMEA saying happy 20th birthday. After some nice words from Jean-Pierre about the community it was time for him to introduce VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger.

Pat talked about the history of ESX, being able to provisioned new servers in minutes in stead of weeks, through compute virtualization. “Bridging Accross” as a theme to VMware’s development during the years, where workspace and networking were virtualized as well.

Pat announced the fact that VMware is a carbon neutral company, two years ahead of schedule. Impressive!

He also discussed the Tech Superpowers

• Cloud
• Mobile
• AI/MI
• Edge/IoT

As separate entities they are great, but combined they become faboulous.

The VMware Vision hasn’t changed in the last couple of years and that might seem like a bad thing, but it is the absolute opposite. It is impressive that the company had the vision 5 years ago and has gone to fill this with products and thus creating their vision.

Security is broken, chasing bad is not a good way to secure your data. Turn it around and ensure that your applications are behaving the way they should. Ensuring Good!

Announcments in this area:

• vCloud Suite Platinum, combining vSphere and AppDefense and the vCloud Suite. Like burgers and fries, burgers being compute virtualization and the fries are security.
• Adaptive Microsegmentation, learn the behaviour, lock the application and adapt the security to this behaviour. Learn-Lock-Adapt!

Pat then announced Ray O’Farrel, the Chief Talking/Technology Officer to get a demonstration of vSphere Platinum. Using Machine Learning to secure the application. One button security through vSphere Platinum.

Every company is on a cloud journey. Being it private, hybrid or public, but VMware is at the heart of this, for all building blocks in there.

VMware Cloud Foundation is the combination of the Software Defined Infrastructure ánd the needed management and deployment of these building blocks.

VCF 3.5 is announced.

IBM Cloud has been around for two years. One of IBM’s executive is asked on stage to discuss this and to talk about the Red Hat acquisition.

IBM announcing: Mission Critical Cloud. Fully managed within multi availability zones.

After this Pat takes is to the on-premises and public options for the native AWS services. This is really cool, the location of the service is irrelant.

Cloud is no longer a place, but an operating model.

Project Dimension delivers cloud simplicity to Data Center and Edge.  Beta program is available as of today!

CloudHealth has been acquired by VMware and within PQR we are already looking at this for our new Cloud Brokering Service. Very cool stuff!

Now the cool stuff begins 😉 with Virtual Cloud Networking. VMware is used for 80 million switch-ports, 10 times more than the number 2.

A couple of demo’s being performed by Certified Smart Guy: Ray O’Farrell, starting of with showing IBM Cloud’s combination of Watson and NSX, where microsegmentation is used to secure workloads. Second demo is utilizing NSX to recover from a disaster in the on-premises data center and using VMC for this.

New feature on VMC: Elastic vSAN, expanding storage using native public cloud functionality.

Next demo: CloudHealth where you can get a nice view of where your Cloud-spend is going, with a lot of insight and detail in there. Also the ability to get recommendations for cost savings. Impressive stuff.

And furthermore the announcement that VMware has acquired Heptio.