Eye on VMware – VMworld Announcements, Day 1 – 08/28/2017

This is a special edition of Eye on VMware as I’m out at VMworld this week. I will provide a day-to-day recap of announcements.

After one day of VMworld Hands on Labs and 2,601 labs completed, the top 3 Labs are as follows:

HOL-1808-01-HCI – vSAN 6.6 – Getting Started

HOL-1803-01-NET – VMware NSX – Getting Started

HOL-1887-01-EMT – VMware Cloud on AWS – Getting Started

HOL LIVE STATS

Today, VMware announces a series of products and collaborations at today’s VMworld. Below is a summary:

VMware Cloud Services: Manage, Secure, Monitor, and Automate Cloud Infrastructure and Applications

VMware Cloud Services provide a unified approach to gain end-to-end visibility into cloud usage, costs, network traffic, metrics monitoring, and analytics, and deliver consistent security across public clouds and on-premises environments. By enabling IT organizations to manage and secure across clouds, VMware is helping IT organizations balance agility and flexibility with control and governance, across multiple clouds. Today, VMware is announcing its initial set of cloud services:

• VMware AppDefense™: a data center endpoint security solution that protects applications by embedding application control, and threat detection and response capabilities into the VMware vSphere-based environments on which applications and data live. By leveraging vSphere, AppDefense gains a deep understanding of the intended state and behavior of the applications running on virtual machines and can detect and respond to unauthorized changes. With AppDefense, VMware is helping IT transform security by building on a virtualization foundation and moving to a new security architecture that’s intent-based and application focused. Read the AppDefense news release here.
• VMware Cost Insight™: a cost monitoring and optimization service for public and private clouds that helps IT analyze cloud spend, find savings opportunities, and communicate the cost of services to the business. With Cost Insight, users can understand aggregated cloud costs and identify key cost drivers. Cost Insight provides granular visibility into public and private cloud costs so that IT leaders can map investments to strategic business priorities and ensure cost transparency. Read more about Cost Insight in this blog.
• VMware Discovery™: an automated inventory service that improves cloud visibility and tames shadow IT by bringing together inventory information and cloud accounts from multiple clouds, making it easy for IT to search for and identify workloads deployed from their enterprise. Using native cloud tags and properties that have been identified, customers can group cloud resources even if they span across multiple clouds. With better organization of cloud resources, Discovery allows organization of cloud resources in ways that mirror business needs. Read more about Discovery in this blog.
• VMware Network Insight™: a network and security analysis service offering purpose-built for public clouds and software-defined data centers. Network Insight provides comprehensive network visibility and granular understanding of traffic flows to enable cloud security planning and network troubleshooting. Best practices checks, an intuitive UI and search simplify VMware NSX administration, making it easier for cloud administrators to manage and troubleshoot NSX deployments at scale. Read more about Network Insight in this blog.
• VMware NSX Cloud™: a service that provides consistent networking and security for applications running in multiple private and public clouds, via a single management console and common API. Micro-segmentation security policy is defined once and applied to application workloads running anywhere — in cloud virtual networks, regions, availability zones — and across multiple clouds. Overlay networking enables more precise control over topologies, traffic flows, IP addressing, and protocols used in public clouds. The consistency and control delivered by NSX Cloud enables IT to simplify and scale operations, improve standardization and compliance, and lower OPEX for applications running in public clouds. Read more about NSX Cloud in this blog.
• Wavefront® by VMware®: a metrics monitoring and analytics platform that handles the high-scale requirements of modern cloud-native applications. Wavefront by VMware’s speed, scale, and flexibility empowers DevOps, and developer teams with instant insight into the performance of highly-distributed cloud-native services. Wavefront by VMware’s analytics, query-driven alerts, interactive visualizations, open API, and integrations, all powered by a scalable time-series database, deliver “first pane of glass” visibility to help DevOps teams detect performance anomalies while enabling high availability of key cloud services. Developers can self-serve and adapt Wavefront by VMware analytics to the unique needs of their code while gaining visibility into its production behavior. Read more about Wavefront in this blog.

New partners for the hybrid solutions include Fujitsu and its Fujitsu Cloud Service and DXC and its Managed Cloud Services.

VMware and HP announce a partnership to add VMware’s Workspace ONE to the HP’s DaaS technology platform for endpoint management.

VMware Cloud on AWS
VMware and Amazon announce the availability of VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services.

VMware and Dell EMC Partner to Deliver First Data Protection Solution for VMware Cloud on AWS

• Announced today, VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service running on elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure
• Dell EMC is the first to offer data protection for VMware Cloud on AWS, including backup and recovery for workloads running in VMware Cloud on AWS
• Dell EMC Data Domain and Data Protection Suite provide self-service data protection services tightly integrated with VMware vSphere

VMware Cloud Foundation: Fastest Path To Private Cloud, On Premises or As A Service
VMware Cloud Foundation is the industry’s most advanced cloud infrastructure platform. It can be flexibly deployed on-premises or consumed as a service in the cloud, and used to run traditional and cloud-native containerized applications. VMware Cloud Foundation accelerates IT’s time-to-market by providing an integrated cloud infrastructure stack that includes a complete set of software-defined services for compute, storage, networking, and security. With new built-in lifecycle management automation, customers can eliminate the overhead of infrastructure-level Day 0 to Day 2 operations. VMware Cloud Foundation provides customers choice among a growing ecosystem of compatible public cloud services, turnkey integrated systems and certified server options:

• New cloud services — VMware partners delivering services based on Cloud Foundation now include CenturyLink (announcement), Rackspace (announcement), and Fujitsu.
• New Integrated systems — VMware partners announcing new solutions include the newly updated version of Dell EMC VxRack SDDC and the new releases of HDS UCP-RS, Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX and QCT QxStack.
• New certified servers — VMware is announcing an expanded list of Cloud Foundation certified server options from Cisco, HDS, Fujitsu, and Lenovo.

VMware Integrated OpenStack 4 to Deliver Enhanced Performance and Scale Capabilities
VMware Integrated OpenStack is an OpenStack distribution from VMware that complies with the OpenStack Foundation’s 2017.01 interoperability guidelines. It provides customers with the fastest and most efficient solution to deploy and operate OpenStack clouds on VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) infrastructure — typically without the need for professional services. VMware Integrated OpenStack 4 will support the latest OpenStack release — Ocata — enabling customers to take advantage of new performance and scalability enhancements to core compute and networking services as well as increased support for containers. VMware Integrated OpenStack 4 will introduce several new capabilities and integrations beyond those made available by the community. Additional new functionality will include:

• Enhancements that enable enterprises to run containerized applications alongside traditional applications in production on OpenStack
• vRealize Automation™ integration to enable OpenStack users to use vRealize Automation-based policies and to consume OpenStack components within vRealize Automation blueprints
• Increased scale and isolation for OpenStack clouds enabled through new multi-VMware vCenter® support

VMware is also announcing new pricing and packaging for VMware Integrated OpenStack, which was previously available at no cost to qualified customers. See additional details in the Pricing and Availability section.

vRealize Network Insight 3.5 to Deliver Enhanced Visibility for Networking and Security
VMware vRealize Network Insight delivers intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security across virtual, physical, and multiple-clouds with micro-segmentation planning that can be scaled to thousands of VMs at a time with 360-degree visibility and VMware NSX® operations. VMware vRealize Network Insight 3.5 will provide deeper visibility into the networking and security infrastructure enabling customers to easily monitor NSX deployments and help meet PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance. Key new capabilities will include:

• The NSX Edge Health Dashboard and NSX Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX) integration to enable NSX customers to safeguard health and access analytics for SDDC flows impacted by NSX firewall rules
• Support for Brocade MLX, Check Point Firewall and HPE OneView to provide customers with holistic visibility across their virtual and physical networking and security infrastructure
• The PCI compliance dashboard for NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW) will help customers in verticals such as financial, healthcare and government to build compliance for their NSX infrastructure

This latest release will build on significant capabilities delivered in vRealize Network Insight 3.4, which introduced support for micro-segmentation planning, troubleshooting, and application modeling using native Amazon Web Services (AWS) components.

New VMware vSAN Offering, VMware HCI Acceleration Kit Accelerates the Adoption of Distributed IT
Digitally-driven customers are increasingly in need of enterprise-class infrastructure at remote and branch sites to accelerate decision-making and deliver a level of IT independence to these important extensions of their business or operations. The distributed nature of vertical applications ranging from retail locations to oil rigs to tactical military installations is driving a need for flexible, cost-sensitive infrastructure that can be managed by IT generalists. The new VMware HCI Acceleration Kit brings affordable enterprise infrastructure with familiar, common management from the data center to distributed environments. Powered by the award-winning VMware vSAN software, the new offering delivers server economics to enterprise storage environments with a unique VMware vSphere®-native architecture that can be deployed on a broad choice of hardware platforms certified by VMware vSAN ReadyLabs™. The solution includes VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN standard licenses. The software licenses support single-socket vSAN ReadyNodes, which are available from Dell, Fujitsu, Lenovo, NEC, and Supermicro today. The VMware HCI Acceleration Kit pricing starts at $7,852 per 3-node cluster and the software licenses allow unlimited virtual machines.These new HCI systems based on vSAN will help power edge analytics and enable on-prem deployments of the new VMware Pulse™ IoT Center™ for Internet of Things (IoT) use cases.Read what partners have to say about the new VMware HCI Acceleration Kit.

VMware Introduces New vSphere Scale-Out Edition for Big Data and HPC Workloads
VMware vSphere Scale-Out™ edition, a new solution in the vSphere product line aimed at Big Data and HPC workloads. VMware vSphere Scale-Out edition includes the features and functions most useful to Big Data and HPC workloads such as those provided by the core vSphere hypervisor and the vSphere Distributed Switch™. This new solution also enables the ability to rapidly change and provision compute nodes. The solution will be offered at an attractive price point, optimized for Big Data and HPC environments.

VMware Validated Designs 4.1 Help Customers Implement Latest Software Releases
VMware Validated Designs 4.1 features a new, optional consolidated data center architecture for small footprint deployments in a single region. This latest version also delivers an updated software bill of materials (BOM) with support for vSphere 6.5 U1, vSAN 6.6.1, NSX 6.3.3 on both the standard and new consolidated architecture to enable customers to implement the latest VMware software releases with fully-validated interoperability. VMware Validated Designs are comprehensive and extensively-tested blueprints to build and operate an SDDC. The designs are engineered to help customers deploy VMware SDDC components to achieve a wide variety of use cases such as private cloud, micro-segmentation, IT automation, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) with predictable results — according to best practices.

VMware CTO, Chris Wolf’s Summary on key announcements

Innovation from the Data Center to the Edge to the Cloud | VMware Radius

At VMworld 2017 U.S., VMware announces the availability of several strategic initiatives. VMware CTO Chris Wolf outlines the day’s announcements.