VMworld Europe 2019-Day 1 Keynote Highlights

calendar Nov 5, 2019 · 3 min read · vmworld vmw2019 vmware  ·
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VMworld Europe is happening in Barcelona this week, and today saw the annual Tuesday keynote start the morning off. I’m not amongst the 14,000 attendees from 111 countries at the event this year, so I’m recapping the highlights from the comfort of the sofa thanks to the online broadcast.

As has become normal for this European keynote, Jean-Paul Brulard (Senior VP and GM for VMware EMEA) welcomed the audience and introduced CEO Pat Gelsinger to deliver the core of the session. Pat focused on how digital technology has permeated all areas of our life and looked into the future to see how technologies such as AI and 5G will continue to accelerate this development.

VMware’s vision of Any Device, Any Application, and Any Cloud continues to be refined year on year- and the show looked at how VMware works to help provide consistence to the technologists trying to master the breadth of applications, clouds,  and devices in the modern world.

The product features started with Joe Beda being brought onstage to talk Kubernetes. VMware’s new Tanzu portfolio of products is designed to help build, run, and manage Kubernetes in the enterprise and is sold as a product to help both developers and IT. This section included the announcement of the betas of  Project Galleon which takes the Bitnami catalogue to the enterprise and Project Pacific which is vSphere rearchitected with Kubernetes at it’s core. VMware’s Tanzu Mission Control product which helps manage Kubernetes deployments on any platform has reached Private Beta.

In the hybrid cloud arena, VMware Cloud Director Service has been introduced to allow the 4000 VMware Cloud Provider Partners (VCPP) to provision the infrastructure from the hyperscale clouds to their customers. This is available on AWS and IBM clouds today and expected in Azure by the end of the year.

The VMware on AWS platform is continuing to be developed- now available in 4 times the number of regions that it was a year ago, and the Outposts product getting closer to being delivered which will open up AWS zones in customer datacentres. When Tanzu ships next year it will be also feature on the VMWonAWS platform.

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Microsoft also got a mention, VMware are partnering there to provide the HCX migration tools on Azure, and integrating Workspace One with Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Azure SQL 2019 on VMware vSphere is an interesting concept- providing the public cloud database service but on-premises.

Staying on-prem, the private cloud is covered with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is now available – this couples VMware Cloud Foundation with Dell’s VXRail hardware to provide Datacentre-as-a-Service.

NSX, the “secret sauce” of previous VMworld keynotes, continues to develop- the acquisition of AVI Networks providing load balance capabilities and software-defined intrusion detection to bring features only seen within the datacentre in special purpose devices or next-gen firewalls right down into the hypervisor and adjacent to the applications.

Sanjay Poonen (COO) interspersed customer chats in amongst the presentation and towards the end took centre stage to discuss VMware’s security stance.  Their strategy is to provide proactive security whilst tying the network security, endpoint security, cloud security, identity, and analytics together. The Carbon Black acquisition closed between the US and Europe events and this technology will be layered into vSphere, Workspace One, and NSX, providing agentless antivirus protection and threat detection.

There’s a wide range of announcements here- and whilst a lot of the content is similar to the US event back in August, albeit further along the roadmap- it sets up for a good week in Barcelona. You can tune in to the full keynote (1 hour 48 minutes) on Youtube.