Monday, August 28, 2017

VMworld2017: General Session Day One with Pat Gelsinger

VMworld's theme for 2017 is "Great Technologists Solve Problems, Great Innovators Create opportunities". 

Pat Gelsinger the CEO of VMware takes the stage. Pat says we have reached an interesting moment were science fiction is becoming science fact. Pat mentions the work being done to genetically modify mosquitoes to fight the Zitka virus. We see this across all industries; tech driven models changing traditional models. He sites the milestone example of digital media surpassing all other traditional forms of media this year.


Pat calls out healthcare and retail as industries that are ripe for change. In each one of these however we are seeing creative destruction in the way work is being done. Fundamentally this is about the apps. VMware's vision of the digital workspace is Any Device, Any Application,Any Cloud with integrated security. In the application world it is still complex and messy. VMware's strategy is to bring it all together in Workspace ONE.

Workspace ONE has three elements: Apps and Identity management, Management and Security across Desktop and Mobility. Today VMware is announcing a partnership with HP. Dion Weisler president and CEO of HP is introduced and mentions that Workspace ONE will be a key component of their managed service offering.

Pat mentions that VMware Cloud Foundation 2.2 is being announced at that show. A key piece of this hyper-convergence is vSAN. This solution is also included in VXRack and VXRail. Pat spends a few moments talking about vSphere 6.5 enhancements which we will cover later in our blog postings.

The physical world meets the digital at the Cloud-to-Edge. VMware announced pulse IoT as VMware's Internet of Things solution in this space (see more here: https://blogs.vmware.com/pulseiot/2017/05/09/introducing-vmware-pulse-iot-center/)

Andy Jassy @ajassy the CEO from Amazon Web Services joins Pat on stage. Andy talks about the integration they have been working on with VMware to remove the binary decision customers are faced with; either VMware or AWS for management. Andy mentions that if a customer can run the same set of management tools both in the enterprise and in AWS it is very cost effective. Some notable early adopters are Moody's financial and Ricoh.

VMware Cloud Services now extend across Private to AWS and IBM Softlayer Public Clouds. These will be extended to Azure and Google Cloud Platform as well. The VMware Cloud strategy is to deliver consistent infrastructure, operations, a rich network of partners and IT agility to its customers.

Pat changes the focus to networking and NSX. VMware sees NSX as the universal connector for all hybrid technologies.  They will extend NSX to public clouds and container platforms which will be a major focus in tomorrow's general session.

Over 100 Billion dollars is being spent on security however it is inordinately complex. VMware believes that security should be native to the infrastructure however the context, automation and policy must be included. VMware sites the five "5" pillars of cyber hygiene 

Least Privilege 
Micro-segmentation
Encryption
Multi-Factor Authentication
Patching

VMware introduces VMware Appdefence. Appdefence is enabled through the VM manifest so that the instance understands what a 'good' state is. The VM monitors its own behaviour to determine when it starts behaving badly and automates the remediation through things like segmentation and honey potting. Appdefence applies these base cyber hygiene elements and manages them at the infrastructure layer. Partners such as IBM are working with VMware products like QRadar to integrate them with VMware Appdefense.





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