Tag Archives: Keynote

VMworld 2019: Day 1 Keynote

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Pat’s theme this year to open the VMworld 2019 main keynote was “Tech in any age”.  He talked a lot about the good that technology has done for the world.  Things like the Mercy Hospital ship and Angel Medical Flights use technology to bring help to people in need.  He also talked about the unintended consequences of technology.  He mentioned BitCoin in particular being used for nefarious purposes and I think he may have hit a nerve with a few members in the audience, but he has a point.  Blockchain as a technology is a great way to keep a chain of evidence/integrity end to end, but it’s when people use it for bad things does it spoil the concept for everyone.

Pat then went on to start to lay out the vision behind some of this year’s acquisitions and where they fit in the portfolio.  Starting off with the announcements behind containers, Pat introduced Joe Beda who let everyone about Tanzu, VMware’s answer to containers leveraging IP from Heptio and Pivotal.  One of the offshoots of this was Project Pacific, which is a way in which they are embedding Kubernetes and containers directly into vSphere.  They claimed there is an 8% performance increase over running on bare metal and 30% faster than running inside linux VMs.

Next Pat went on to talk about the multi cloud world we live in.  He showed off some very impressive stats highlighting VMware Cloud Foundation being the #1 software to build out a hybrid cloud platform.  VMware’s cloud health is now managing over 7000 customers and helping drive down costs.  Pat then attempted to do the impossible, unite Star Trek and Star Wars fans.  Unfortunately, that’s like mixing water and oil, it just wont happen.

Speaking of hybrid cloud, Project Dimension is a GO!  This is a managed services offering for those that want to have a public cloud like operating model, but not have it running out in the public cloud.  A fully managed environment leveraging VCF on top of DellEMC VxRail with a monthly metered billing is going to be available and is already being leveraged by a few customers in the pilot program.  Interested as well is that VMware is going to be offering DRaaS, leveraging DellEMC Power Protect.  I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this later.

Finally, Pat talked about some recent acquisitions that are being folded into the NSX platform.  AVI networks is going to be adding Application Intelligence to the mix.  Rounding out the robust security platform that NSX is becoming was the Acquisition of Carbon Black (announced just the week before).  To help with that message, Sanjay Poonen came up and explained the 5 points of intrinsic security: Network, Endpoint, Cloud, Identity, and Analytics.  Carbon Black as part of VMware and the security ecosystem (Think Dell SecureWorks) is going to make a strong platform for full stack security in the hybrid cloud era.

You can catch the full replay of the Day 1 Keynote here