VMworld 2019 Day 1 Recap

VMworld 2019 kicked off with VMware's CEO Pat Gelsinger taking the stage. VMware continues to be that innovative force in the age of what he calls. "Tech in the Age of Any". 

Pat Gelsinger began by speaking about the over four decades of disruptive innovations that VMware has brought to the industry beginning with vSphere, which virtualized the compute, to vSAN virtualization the for storage, NSX and SD-WAN to bring virtualization to the network, desktop virtualization with Horizon and Workspace One, and the hybrid-cloud with offerings like VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (VMC).

VMware remains committed to its customers to bring the vision of any device, any app, and any cloud. VMware is no longer talking about building on-premises solutions, public cloud, but just cloud. They are in the business of being the platform to build clouds regardless of location. With offerings like VMware Cloud Foundations as that building block for the cloud architectures bringing together the best of VMware vSphere, NSX, vSAN and more. Offerings like Cloud Foundations will allow customers to have a consistent infrastructure across all cloud environments giving them the ability to take advantage of the tools they've invested in while gaining agility, security, and control of their applications. 

Pat Gelsinger spoke about the worlds of Dev/Ops and the challenges customer face bridging these two worlds together. He mentioned that offerings like Kubernetes will be that bridge to bring Dev/Ops together but to quote Joe Beda Principal, Engineer at VMware, this is will be like "Improvisational jazz" ,and VMware remains committed to this space. This is evident with the new acquisition of Pivotal  which brings a new developer platform into VMware that makes it easier for developers to write, test and deploy their applications and of course Kubernetes which is the de facto standard for multi-cloud modern apps. 

VMware made a lot of announcements from Tanzu and Bitnami and with the acquisition of Pivotal, these new offerings super-charge the products and services VMware can bring to market. VMware now has a far deeper connection to the developer community and can offer developers a complete modern application supply chain. These combined offers will ensure that customers can run consistent Kubernetes. 

Project Pacific was announced as an effort to embed Kubernetes in vSphere. The integration of Kubernetes and vSphere is happening at the API and UI layers, but also the core virtualization layer as ESXi will run Kubernetes natively.​

VMware spoke about Project Dimension now VMware Cloud on Dell which delivers edge and data center infrastructure as-a-service, combining VMware's leading compute, storage, networking solutions with hyper converged hardware, managed by VMware.  This will be based on VxRail and bring cloud-like infrastructure to on-premises while allowing customers to burst to offerings like VMC on AWS.

VMware Intrinsic Security was also announced which brings security to all aspects of the data center while leveraging the security capabilities and practices that are already in your software and virtual infrastructure to drastically simplify your security environment with fewer products, and less management and operational overhead. Intrinsic security focuses on five key pillars, network, endpoint, identity, cloud, and analytics to secure the cloud.

VMware also spoke about the acquisition of Carbon Black, a publicly traded security company focused on securing the modern cloud native applications. 

You can see VMware's COO Sanjay Poonen's comments and the full general session replay here.