The first day of VMWorld 2017 was kicked-off with a keynote presentation by Pat Gelsinger, VMware’s CEO, who emphasized that the future is now. “Science fiction is now becoming a fact,” he said, providing examples from quantum entanglement, through zika-resistant mosquitos, to self-driving cars. However, while whole industries have made the obvious tech transitions by employing intelligent tools, Pat mentioned digital advertising as an example, other industries are only 10% of the way there. Many industries still face the inevitable change and there’s still much work to be done when it comes to digital transformation, and huge opportunities at the enterprise level.

VMware’s vision can easily be portrayed as essentially digital transformation for “any cloud, any application, any device,” with endless application capacity or exploding IoT data. VMware’s motto, “Consumer-Simple, Enterprise-Secure” remains focused on end-user experience and IT security. The spirit of the motto set the tone for the entire day, which continued with many exciting announcements from the company, from ‘Workspace One’ upgrades to AWS partnerships to OpenStack updates. Here’s our take on the most exciting announcements:

VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware’s AWS announcement follows massive interest in deploying MVware Cloud on AWS ever since the initial plan was announced last October. Today, at VMWorld 2017, VMware Cloud on AWS was officially made available. Amongst the key strengths, VMware took pride in the fact that AWS setup would take just a couple of hours and requires a very elastic deployment. Possible use cases included data center extension and consolidation, disaster recovery, hybrid applications, and control of intellectual property. The team at VMware emphasized that this was just the beginning, and the VMware Cloud-AWS partnership would continue to enhance its services in response to the needs of customers and partners.

Expanded Cloud Services

VMware announced expanded cloud services meant to simplify and resolve cloud management and security challenges. Due to the growing complexity of IT infrastructures, enterprises are now required to contend with each provider’s different network and security settings, policies, APIs and schemas. VMware’s NSX Cloud is purposed to simplify operations across public cloud environments by centralizing network and security settings. Putting their motto “consumer simple, enterprise secure,” into action, other cloud service announcements encompassed reducing costs, workload provisioning, traffic visibility and flow, and performance analytics.

AppDefense and The New Security Paradigms

The name of the game at VMWorld 2017 is “predictive, not reactive,” and VMWare’s new security tool, AppDefense, was announced to assist IT teams identify the faultsby baselining the norms, very much similar to the way Loom Systems operates for overall monitoring. AppDefense is activated by predefined triggering actions any time there’s a change to baseline thresholds. In addition to an alert, automated actions could include changing firewall rules, capturing network traffic, or even quarantining the app. VMWare continues to make security a key component of its offerings.

VMware-integrated OpenStack version 4.0

VMware announced a new VIO (VMware-integrated OpenStack) version with more support for containerized applications, integration with vRealize automation, multi vCenter support, and other capabilities designed to improve performance and scale. For any entity that works with a public cloud- Vmware’s support to OpenStack is huge news. No matter how complex OpenStack gets, multiple services exist to make the OpenStack world more accessible to enterprise IT Operations.

And some more announcements:

VMWare also announced upgrades to Workspace ONE, the VMware Cloud Foundation, and their software-defined data center (SDDC). A few presenters hinted also about a few exciting announcements about VMware and containers, so stay tuned for tomorrow’s recap.

Don’t miss our booth #700J for a short demo, our daily ‘Cozmo’ raffle and some AI for IT talk. See you there!

Loom is excited to be a finalist of Best of VMworld 2017! Learn how Loom leverages AI to simplify VMware monitoring.



