Over 20,000 customers, partners, and thought-leaders gathered in San Francisco to kick-off VMworld US 2019 earlier this week. Over the past few days, attendees have been engaging with VMware experts and learning how to tackle their toughest IT challenges, push the boundaries of innovation, and scale their business to meet the needs of their customers.
With dozens of key product and partnership announcements happening over the course of the week, hundreds of speaker sessions and learning workshops, and dozens of training and certification classes, the excitement in San Francisco (and online for those who attended virtually) was high.
There was a lot to unpack from this week: the announcement of the Vmware Tanzu Portfolio, innovations such as Project Pacific, and expansion of recent partnerships in including VMware Cloud on AWS and NVIDIA. Here’s a recap of what you might have missed from this week, including VMware’s intent to acquire Pivotal and Carbon Black (and how they fall into the VMware story).
VMware Tanzu (…and Project Pacific, and Pivotal, and more!)
In the VMworld general session keynote, Pat Gelsinger and Joe Beda announced VMware Tanzu—a new portfolio of products and services to transform the way enterprises build, run, and manage software on Kubernetes. This included a technology preview of Project Pacific, which will focus on transforming VMware vSphere into a Kubernetes native platform (future release), and VMware Tanzu Mission Control, a single point of control from which customers will manage all of their Kubernetes clusters regardless of where they run. Together Gelsinger and Beda laid out what each of the three major pieces in the Vmware Tanzu portfolio means for the industry.
Building modern applications
Enterprises are struggling to accommodate the requirements of all the different kinds of applications they are using (e.g. existing, off-the-shelf, and cloud native applications). VMware Tanzu seeks to meet customers wherever they are in their modern application journey.
- Off-the-shelf applications: Bitnami (a recent VMware acquisition) packages and delivers applications for Kubernetes with incredible reach. Today, the Bitnami Community Catalog offers 180 applications and components that are installed more than 1 million times every month. With a deep connection with all major cloud providers and the recently announced Project Galleon, Bitnami is positioned to bring customized application stacks to end developers throughout the enterprise.
- Cloud-native applications: VMware recently announced a definitive agreement to acquire Pivotal. Pivotal offers a powerful set of developer assets with a leading developer-centric platform and services that accelerate modern application development.
Having fully embraced Kubernetes, Pivotal—alongside Bitnami and others—will fuel VMware’s Any Cloud, Any App, And Device strategy and their ability to transform the way enterprises build and deliver applications on Kubernetes on any cloud.
Running a consistent implementation of Kubernetes
VMware intends to be the leading enabler of Kubernetes for both their customers and ecosystem partners in the challenging world of public cloud. To reach that goal, VMware anchored their VMware Tanzy announcement with a tech preview of Project Pacific, which is an effort to embed Kubernetes in vSphere. The integration of Kubernetes and vSphere is not only happening at the API and UI layers but also at the core virtualization layer… ESXi will be able to run Kubernetes natively (this is huge!).
Project Pacific will put Kubernetes at the fingertips of thousands of more vSphere users, including those that aren’t yet using Kubernetes or containers. Operators will gain access to Kubernetes’ capabilities through a familiar set of tools and scripts, while developers will be able to access cloud resources using Kubernetes APIs.
Manage it all from a single point of control
As VMware works to make Kubernetes more accessible, organizations will have a larger (and significantly more complicated) environment to manage. To give customers a way to operate Kubernetes consistently across clouds, clusters, and teams, VMware announced VMware Tanzu Mission Control, which will provide maximum operational efficiency matched with an enterprise toolkit.
With VMware Tanzu Mission Control, customers will be able to provision, secure, and manage all of their Kubernetes clusters from a single point of control, providing greater independence for developers and consistency and scalability for cloud operators.
With VMware Tanzu, VMware offers customers a portfolio of services of products and services to transform the way they build, run, and manage software on Kubernetes.
To learn how CloudHealth will support the VMware Tanzu portfolio, read our blog.
CloudHealth Hybrid
VMware also introduced new and expanded cloud offerings that will help customers meet the unique needs of traditional and modern applications. With a hybrid cloud platform enabled by VMware, customers can migrate and modernize applications across clouds, data centers, and edge locations, while simplifying cloud planning, development, deployment, and ongoing operations.
As part of VMware’s expanded hybrid cloud portfolio, CloudHealth Hybrid was announced to help customers gain control over their hybrid cloud costs and compliance. CloudHealth Hybrid will build on the foundation of CloudHealth Data Center (which already provides customers with general cost and usage data for their VMware vSphere infrastructure and migration assessments from their data center to public cloud) and will offer new capabilities for multicloud and hybrid cloud environments, including:
- Detailed cost benchmarks and drivers
- VMware Cloud on AWS support
- Migration assessment
- Policies and governance
Primary use cases for CloudHealth Hybrid will center on optimization, migration assessment, and governance, allowing customers to easily identify and eliminate wasted spend, ease the transition to public cloud, and create custom policies to ensure proper usage across all teams and departments.
To learn more about CloudHealth Hybrid, read the announcement blog.
Intent to acquire Carbon Black
Another acquisition is in the books for VMware (it’s been quite a busy year for the M&A team!) as VMware announced its intent to acquire Carbon Black, one of the industry’s leading next-generation security cloud provider. With this acquisition, VMware aims to completely disrupt the endpoint security space and represents an evolution in VMware’s intrinsic security strategy. Carbon Black’s world-class solutions for securing user devices and workloads in private and public clouds, as well as their security cloud, will be at the center of VMware’s security analytics portfolio.
To learn more about how this acquisition will accelerate VMware’s vision for intrinsic security, read the blog.
Missed some of the sessions?
If you weren’t able to attend VMworld US 2019 in person (or had an event calendar too packed to hit every session on your list!), you can check out the session recordings available on the VMworld On-Demand Video Library.
