Jacques Tibbels
VMware Business Manager
VMworld Europe 2019 took place in sunny Barcelona, Spain between 4th-7th November. This year Softcat’s attendance was strong with 20 Softcatters and 80 customers in attendance and ready to give the Fira Gran Via a touch of Softcat Purple. VMworld 2019 Europe officially kicked off with the opening keynote and general session led by VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, Kubernetes & Heptio co-founder Joe Beda as well as VMware Principal Engineer and VMware COO Sanjay Poonen.
Pat reinforced the VMware’s strategy and vision for the future, “any cloud, any application, any device with intrinsic security.” Whilst there are still challenges to achieve the ‘Any, Any, Any’ dream VMware have made key acquisitions and developments throughout the year to help customer to build a more agile approach. Pat introduced several new projects VMware is launching to help IT practitioners adapt and implement toward the ‘Any, Any, Any’ vision.
Finishing the full Networking and Security technology stack
The most exciting announcement made was around Security solutions, VMware Tanzu and Pacific.
Earlier this year VMware acquired Carbon black. This has hardened VMware’s portfolio as Carbon Black is an industry-leading endpoint and workload security platform, with a cloud-native architecture. The Carbon Black platform, along with VMware NSX, VMware Workspace ONE, VMware Secure State and future VMware innovations, will deliver a highly-differentiated intrinsic security platform across network, endpoint, workload, identity, cloud and analytics. VMware believe this will bring a fundamentally new standard to the security industry.
VMware also announced some exciting updates with regards to NSX. As a mature product from VMware it’s good to see continued investment being made in the platform. VMware is now introducing NSX Distributed intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS), taking the NSX platform’s Layer 7-capable internal firewalling to a whole new level. NSX Distributed IDS/IPS is unique because it will take advantage of VMware’s intrinsic understanding of the services that make up an application and match IDS/IPS signatures to specific parts of an application.
Another feature which was announced at VMworld was NSX Federation. NSX Federation is a new capability that will enable customers to deploy and consistently enforce security policies generated by NSX Intelligence across multiple data centers. NSX Federation will help enterprises simplify disaster recovery and share application resources. Converged operations will vastly simplify the overall security architecture and make it easier for customers to manage security policies, demonstrate compliance, and provide holistic context for security troubleshooting. This type of efficiency and flexibility cannot be matched by traditional “bump in the wire” appliances and is a major difference between legacy and proprietary hardware-defined systems and an open, scale-out software solution such as VMware NSX.
VMware’s head is still in the cloud
Another VMware tool set to add to customers Cloud Health deployment is VMware Secure State.
Secure State delivers an interconnected Security approach that enables deep visibility into cloud service relationships and correlates risk due to misconfigurations and threats across multi-cloud infrastructure. VMware announced the new VMware Secure State Findings API which will enable customers to build guardrails into the infrastructure provisioning pipeline. Native VMware Secure State rules or custom policies enable selective verification of configuration settings in near real-time during testing and staging of cloud infrastructure. Detecting security and compliance issues earlier will help companies scale security at cloud speed, minimise risk that’s being introduced into production-ready infrastructure, and accelerate time to market for releasing public cloud applications.
The future is all about containers
Big on the agenda for VMware in 2020 is Containers. This is where VMware also took the opportunity at VMworld to talk about project Tanzu and Project Pacific. VMware Tanzu products and services will help enterprises build modern applications, run Kubernetes with consistency across environments, and manage all their Kubernetes clusters from a single control point. VMware Tanzu includes a tech preview of VMware Tanzu Mission Control. With VMware Tanzu Mission Control, customers will have a single point of control to manage all their conformant Kubernetes clusters regardless of where they are running—vSphere, public clouds, managed services, packaged distributions and do-it-yourself (DIY) Kubernetes. The new service will offer broad capabilities powered by VMware’s extended product portfolio. Project Pacific is a re-architecture of vSphere with Kubernetes as its control plane. To a developer, Project Pacific looks like a Kubernetes cluster where they can use Kubernetes declarative syntax to manage cloud resources like virtual machines, disks and networks. To the IT admin, Project Pacific looks like vSphere – but with the new ability to manage a whole application instead of always dealing with the individual VMs that make it up.
Round Up
As you can see the next few years will be dominated by cutting edge IT, through the use of containers, Hybrid cloud/multi cloud adoption as well as management. VMware have a strong focus on cloud and containers as well as tools for security and Cloud management. With an ever-growing portfolio though development and acquisitions VMware are leading the curve towards a hybrid cloud strategy. There’s a lot of exciting technology soon to be released (some which has not been mentioned on this blog). Stay tuned…
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