Today marks the opening of VMware’s VMworld Europe 2018 event in Barcelona, Spain. The Dell-owned virtualization giant has a bunch of announcements to kick off its shindig.
Now, your humble vulture has seen his fair share of marketing departments’ techno-biz babble in his time during product launches, but has gotta say: VMware has turned corporate brandwidth messaging into an art form. To help readers cut through the blurb, we’ll attempt to translate it into plain English.
Let’s get cracking; the bolded text is word-for-word from VMworld Europe’s announcements this morning.
Translation: You’re getting updated Kubernetes support.
Translation: Sales keeps telling us to say “Kubernetes.” Also, we just bought Kubernetes upstart Heptio. Anyone else doing Kubernetes? Anyone?
Translation: Version 3.5 of VMware Cloud Foundation – its software stack for setting up on-and-off-premises hybrid clouds – will be available by February 2019. It is validated to run with vSAN Ready Nodes on PowerEdge MX servers made by its parent, Dell EMC. Version 3.5 can work with VMware SDDC Manager, HPE Synergy Composer, and HPE OneView to together provide a user-interface to manage physical resources.
It integrates with VMware NSX-T 2.3, which tries to make managing the networking and security of Kubernetes containers easier and supports VMware’s enterprise-aimed Pivotal Container Service (PKS) that also wrangles Kubernetes. (No, that’s not a typo.) The NSX-T 2.3 integration also means sysadmins can search for objects and events, and perform operations, from a new user interface. Version 3.5 supports vSphere 6.7 Update 1, and includes VMware vRealize Automation 7.5.
The Cloud Foundation 3.5 bill of materials … Click to enlarge
Also due to arrive by February as a packaged application or VMware Cloud service is VMware vRealize Network Insight 4.0. This tries to help sysadmins pinpoint application connectivity issues when using hybrid or multiple clouds, such as the network links between a virtual machine on-site and an EC2 instance hosted by Amazon Web Services. There are also new ways to view your network, and support has been added for Cisco networking equipment.
VMware Skyline Proactive Support for vRealize Operations, a customer support system, is also due to land early 2019.
Translation: VMware Cloud on AWS is coming to more Amazon regions this quarter: Ireland (AWS EU), northern California (AWS US West), and Ohio (AWS US East).
Translation: We can’t stop you shifting your software to the Amazon cloud, but spare a thought for your old pal, VMware, eh?
VMware Cloud on AWS works pretty much like a compatibility layer that sits between your applications and AWS. Alternatively, think of it as VMware Cloud Foundation hosted by Amazon. Software designed to run within on-premises VMware environments should be able to run on AWS via this layer without having to rewrite or refactor the code, we’re told.
You can also use Dell EMC’s VxRail with VMware Site Recovery to fail over to VMware Cloud on AWS. There’s also support for the Horizon Enterprise Suite, the virtual desktop management toolkit. You can also live migrate “thousands” of virtual machines between vSphere on-premises kit and VMware Cloud on AWS using HCX.
Translation: More cloud providers, such as OVH and Telefonica, are offering services that are compatible with VMware Cloud. Some 27 providers, more than a dozen in Europe, in total are verified as such, which is better than the five this time last year. VMware’s also made “validated designs” – approved blueprints for services and infrastructure – for cloud providers to deploy.
Translation: It’s hard to believe, but yes, our products bravely aim to deliver value to customers, staff, investors, friends, family, and all statutory and non-statutory bodies.
Translation: We will wear you down.
Translation: And we want our fingers in every single one of those pies, even though you know us as that server hypervisor giant.
We’ll do this with updates like Workspace ONE Intelligence Automation Connector, which links business analytics toolbox Workspace ONE Intelligence to things like your IT service desks so you can see what needs fixing and why. Meanwhile, Workspace ONE Sensors for macOS allows sysadmins to query Macs on the corporate network for their details, from their hardware configurations to their installed software.
Dell Provisioning for Workspace ONE is now part of the Dell ProDeploy Client Suite. Admins can push desktop applications directly from their Flexera AdminStudio installations into their Workspace ONE workplace software catalog. An integration of Carbon Black, Workspace ONE Intelligence, and VMware AppDefense is being previewed; this combination is supposed to help detect and thwart miscreants and malware menacing your data centers.
That’s about it for now. You can find all this stuff unfiltered here, and perhaps in more detail here: VMware and AWS, Cloud Foundation 3.5, and Workspace ONE. ®
