Thoughts on the VMworld 2018 Day 1 Keynote

Today, with some assistance from the VMware Blogger program, I was able to get front and center for the VMworld 2018 keynote.  They shared some interesting updates with us.  First and foremost, Pat has a new tattoo

But seriously, VMware has seen their transition over the years in 5 acts.  First, it was all about ESXi.  Then came the ByoD (Bring your own Device revolution.  Followed closely by SDN (Software Defined Networking).  Then the entrance into public/hybrid clouds.  Most recently, they are getting into the Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning space.

As Pat put it, cloud is all about consistent infrastructure and consistent operations.  And the best way to do that on prem is with Cloud Foundation

When it comes to Public Cloud, there were some new announcements around integration with AWS.  Andy Jassy from Amazon came up on stage and talked a bit about road maps.  They’ve been getting high demand for their new fed cloud and will be opening and eastern US location soon.  However, the biggest announcement was around support for RDS (Relational Database Service) on VMware.  This is really going hard after the database market and is a great way to make a splash.

Next up was Project Dimension.  This is like a reverse hybrid cloud option.  The idea is going with a cloud first initiative that then stretches into on prem.  So what you can do now, leveraging VMware on AWS, is give your developers and AWS availability zone that is running on your own local hardware.

One of the cooler demos i saw was around “Cloud Motion”.  The idea of being able to bulk move VMs right into the could.  It starts by using vSphere Replication, and then when that’s done it does a vMotion right up into the cloud.  This makes it real easy to fling workloads into the cloud when the time is right.

There were also some great announcements around integration with Dell.  All new business laptops will ship ready to work with VMware workspace one.

We also got to see some cool new tech.  Coming soon you will see a version of ESXi that runs on ARM64 chips.  We are finding these embedded in more and more IoT devices, and this is a great way to do development and high availability.

And finally something new called vSphere Pro, which is a version of vSphere that has AppDefense built right in.  Now you can start building your firewall rules, segregation, and app security right in vSphere and be protected much more easily.

All in all, i think this is a strong showing from VMware that is in an area of growth.  I’m looking forward to the rest of the conference.