This years VMworld was a little later on that pervious years however Barcelona is still sunny and lots of innovation has happened since 2017. This year I did expect to hear more about security and automation using Artificial Intelligence (AI). VMware did not disappoint!
Day one – getting familiar with VM2018’s Layout.
Same location as last year. 
Same old registration and bag drop off area 
The VMware Store is located in the VMvillage 
The Alumni Lounge is Back 
Table Football 
The Journey To Digital Workspace
The first day was hectic with lots of different activities going on, and to finish the day off, I delivered a presentation on Optimising And Tuning Windows 10 Using VMware Horizon 7.
General Session – Overview
Jean-Pierre Brulard kicked off this years session welcoming everyone and announcing that It’s VMware’s 20th anniversary and VMworld Europe’s 10th anniversary. 12000 attendees have joined this years event in Europe.
VMware 20 Year Anniversary 
VMworld Europe 10 year Anniversary 
VMware Community
Pat Gelsinger Comes on stage to talk about the VMware community and “Bridging across the Silos of innovation”. Pat then moves on to talk about the effects of IT and our (humans) carbon footprint in society. Pat announced that VMware are two years ahead of schedule and are now Carbon Neutral (VMware Global Operations).
CARBON NEUTRAL! 
CARBON AVOIDANCE
Tech Superpowers
Bridging across the silos of innovation:
Act 1 bridge across Servers
Act 2 bridge across devices
Act 3 bridge across networks
Tech Superpowers 
AI 
Superpowers interlinked.
Applications are the centre of a network “The Application is a Network”
Security
Pat describes the current security challenges and uses the terms “Chasing bad”, “Bolt-on” and “Security is broken”. Chasing bad does not provide a solution for securing IT systems and current solutions are failing (as we all know). Pat goes on to describe a technique “learn, lock and Adapt” using AppDefence & vSphere Platinum.
There was talk of Micro segmentation where Pat described ways to prevent bad actors from horizontally scaling a datacenter. Pat made it clear that NSX has an important part to play and security should be at the heart of every technology conversation.
There was a brief demo that showed how app defence can learn the typical behaviour of a Virtual machine which then is used to create an behaviour map (manifest). In essence, this manifest is used to lock down the application by defined rulesets.
Pat stated: “Today we have too many Security products” . New models for security are required. Basic Security mechanisms must be integrated with every solution, reducing the attack surface by design.
VMware Global Services to use IBM Watson
Cloud Health
VMware intend to acquire CloudHealth. For more details, please see the following link: https://ir.vmware.com/overview/press-releases/press-release-details/2018/VMware-Announces-Intent-to-Acquire-CloudHealth-Technologies-a-Global-Platform-for-Multi-Cloud-Operations/default.aspx
WorkspaceOne
Workspace one Intelligence using windows analytics to gauge application compatibility and provide reporting / automation to remediate issues. There is a lot of forward thinking going on here, and it makes sense to simplify the future of OS migrations. Pat detailed how devices still need to consume services and data. Device proliferation is everywhere and Workspace a key focus area is how to tackle the complexity of device management.
ESXI running on a Raspberry PI !
Ray O ‘Farrell Shows off the fact the guys in the Lab have successfully deployed ESXI onto a Raspberry PI.
Summary
Other topics covered: Project Dimension – a fully managed SDDC service from VMware that can be hosted on premise or at the edge. More to follow over the next few months and years as its still early stages. VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services -AWS’s Relational Database Services (RDS) into the hybrid cloud world. Project Pulse – beta program announced. Project Concord – VMware is offering blockchain as a service. Site Recovery with VMware on AWS – Elastic VSAN is key. Cloud Verified IBM Cloud – Stronger relationship ties with IBM announced.
If you want to watch full video and find out about all the exciting news and announcements, you can find the details here: https://www.vmworld.com/en/europe/learning/general-sessions.html
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