Day 1 began with the general session, where VMware Executives presented to the partner community and reinforced the importance of the partner as the unsung heroes helping to drive the  VMware business and most importantly driving value for their customers.

VMware announced VMware Cloud Foundation back in the general session of VMworld 2016. Cloud Foundation is a unified platform for private and public clouds.

Let's start with defining the term "Clouds". This term has been thrown around a lot and some take this term as "In the Cloud" off premises platforms, but some use the term more all inclusive which includes both "On-Prem" and "Off-Prem" platforms. Wikipedia defines this term as "computing that provides shared computer processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand".  For this blog I am using the definition of cloud as the latter. I think of cloud as all inclusive of both off and on-prem platforms for providing resources. I know some feel as though cloud was meant to replace the "on-prem" private cloud and yes, that will ultimately be the direction in years to come, but for now we live in a world of hybrid-cloud and that is what Cloud Foundation is here to assist us with.

Now that we have cleared that up, let's move on to Cloud Foundation from VMware. Cloud Foundation brings together, VMware's vision for SDDC where compute, storage, and networking services are decoupled from the underlying hardware and abstracted into software as pools of resources allowing for IT to become more flexible and agile while also allowing for better management, into an integrated stack for cloud. This is done by defining a platform common to both private and public clouds.

Disruptive innovation, is a term coined by Clayton Christensen. The term describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors. 

For example, take a look at what a company like Uber has done to the taxi service in San Francisco. They don't hire drivers like Yellow Cab. They don't own a fleet of cars. They built an application. An application that has been very disruptive to the taxi industry and is changing the landscape of ride-hailing services.

Thanks to Uber, San Francisco's largest yellow cab company is filing for bankruptcy. Yellow Cab Co-op President Pamela Martinez was quoted saying that some of the financial setbacks "are due to business challenges beyond our control and others are of our own making." Yellow Cab's drivers are flocking to Uber, an app-based enterprise, lured by the promise of more riders and better schedules. 

Yellow Cab has been turned on its head by a disruptive innovation. Uber has disrupted the ride-hailing service industry with a lasting impact which is now moving across the county. 

Why do I point this out? Because, you are either being disrupted or are the disrupter. Think about that for a second. Ask Yellow Cab how it feels to be disrupted in an industry they felt very secure in before an application took over. 

Look at companies like Blockbuster. I bet you can tell me who disrupted them? Got it in your mind?

Bringing VMware NSX and Horizon together
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has become an even more popular virtualization option for many organizations and VMware customers.

VMware continues to work with partners to advance the protection of VDI deployments. Most recently the focus has been on introducing advanced security controls with VMware NSX (network virtualization platform) and Horizon 6 (VDI) environment. VDI in combination with NSX offers organizations the chance to make huge leaps forward in the security and management of their virtualized desktop deployments.

Two big challenges that have slowed the adoption of large-scale desktop virtualization in the past are:

• The lack of effective security that is equal to or better than a physical desktop
• Difficulty scaling out deployments rapidly and quickly without losing visibility or control.

NSX addresses these concerns and much more.

Security for VDI deployments is more critical because of the need to limit “east-west traffic,” the internal traffic in the data center. However, “east-west traffic” isn’t monitored well, if at all, by traditional perimeter defenses. For example a basic surfing or email mistake by a trusted end user could bring a threat right past those defenses into your data center resulting in a breach.

VMware NSX with Horizon enables micro-segmentation and automates the deployment and provisioning processes. This allows for the insertion of advanced security services from third parties that includes:

• Anti-malware
• IDS/IPS
• Integrity monitoring
• URL filtering
• Virtual patching

This provides instant, automated protection as soon as a new virtual desktop is spun up. 

NSX brings security inside the data center with automated fine-grained policies tied to the virtual machines, while its network virtualization capabilities let you create entire networks in software, without touching the underlying physical infrastructure

• Elimination of VLAN sprawl, network flattening to L2
• Role-based application of networking and security policies
• Elimination of complex hardware configuration tools and syntax
• Pervasive and persistent application of policies across the data center, wherever the VM is running, as soon as the VM spans on the host
• Multi-layered defense with partner solution service-chaining (for example, antivirus, malware, NG Firewall)
• Scalable performance with kernel-integrated network function processing (as opposed to a VM appliance approach)

• Improved regulatory compliancy
• Improved risk mitigation
• Security for desktop user workloads residing with other mission-critical workloads in the data center
• Improved business agility – accelerated desktop-pool deployment with rapid network onboarding​

mobility management (EMM) from VMware AirWatch, the recently introduced VMware Identity Manager and the new cloud management service in VMware Horizon Air.  

​Workspace One includes self-service access, choice of device, conditional access, automation and productivity tools along with several major updates to the VMware End-User Computing portfolio.

Updates to the VMware End-User Computing product portfolio include:

• VMware Workspace ONE – A new solution delivering secure digital workspaces for flexible work styles and bring your own device (BYOD). The digital workspace delivered by VMware will address the end user and enterprise IT business mobility needs by aggregating all devices, applications, and services while securely managing them through unified common access and identity.
• VMware Horizon 7 – Major advancements in the latest version features a new cloud-optimized display protocol. Just in Time desktops and a new, home-grown protocol called Blast Extreme Experience.
• New Capability in Horizon Air – A new hybrid-mode (formerly Project Enzo) capability will be available in VMware Horizon Air to provide customers with a single, cloud control plane for delivering and managing on-premises virtual applications and desktops on hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) or VMware Virtual SAN ready-nodes. While it’s not identical to Citrix Workspace Cloud, it does set out to make it easier to deploy the management components associated with virtual desktops and applications as well as the deployment of the desktops themselves. ​
• AppVolume 3 - Introduced last week, VMware introduces several new features. The most important addition is AppToggle, which which lets you deliver single applications from an AppStack with that contains multiple apps as opposed to delivering the entire AppStack. AppCapture and AppIsolation are also important in this release. AppCapture gives you a way to capture applications individually into their own AppStack, then merge that new AppStack into an existing AppStack later. You can then use AppToggle to control which applications users have access to. You can see more here.

Here we are in the future that Back to the Future predicted and I find myself contemplating what the past really looked like compared to now for IT. 

For those of you that live under a rock and have not seen the movies I will give a brief summarization of the second movie from the trilogy. In "Back to the Future Part II," Marty McFly travels to October 21, 2015, to save his children, yet to be born in "Back to the Future's" 1985.

The movie plot is tangled by fixing one thing, McFly, Doc Brown and the villainous Biff Tannen create a number of new mishaps but what remains is the film's vision of a year that was still more than a quarter-century away when the movie was shot and released in 1989. 

​In the IT realm of things I found myself reminiscing of what the data center looked like back in 1989 when the movie was released not to mention 1985 when the movie itself takes place. So, hold onto your hats, "Great Scott!!", we are going back to the past to revisit the data center before VMware's inception in 1998 and the impact we see today.

In order to bore my reader thoroughly I will give a brief history lesson on computing but don't worry I have added plenty of pictures to stimulate your brains. So, let's fire this blog up to 88 miles per hour and get to the past.

VMware announced on January 25th that App Volumes, formerly Cloud Volumes, has been added to the Horizon View Enterprise Licencing bundle.

VMware App Volumes provides real-time application delivery to end-users and desktops. IT can use App Volumes to instantly deliver applications and data to users without compromising user experience. Infrastructure and management costs are reduced by utilizing managed volumes. Unlike traditional application management solutions, App Volumes allows IT to deliver a desktop with no trade-off between user experience and costs. 

For a quick overview of VMware App Volumes see this video from VMware.

Benefits of using App Volumes: 

• IT can deliver or upgrade application workloads within seconds. Provisioning applications is as easy as simply installing them once. 
• App Volumes also helps to deliver great user experience while driving down storage and management costs. With App Volumes, end users can take advantage of fully customized desktops and enjoy the ability to install their own applications and have them persist across sessions. 
• IT can drive down compute, network, and storage costs by leveraging on-demand layering and the non-persistent architecture that App Volumes helps to enable. App Volumes virtual disks can be placed on any supported VMware vSphere datastore, enabling IT to leverage the most appropriate storage including fast storage with high read IOPS such as VMware Virtual SAN instead of needing to stream application across the network from a CIFS shares
  
• VMware App Volumes can be leveraged by physical desktops.
• For Non-VMware VDI environments you can utilize App Volumes on Citrix XenDesktop, XenApp and RDSH.

Careful consideration needs to be given to the underlying virtualization platform as well as to the supporting infrastructure which includes network considerations.

VDI deployments benefit from having more than one connection server to provide high availability. Many organizations use Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) to help balance the load across the multiple connection servers in their environment. ADCs also provide a number of other capabilities such as access control, SSO, and protocol proxy.

See the F5 and Horizon reference architecture here: http://www.slideshare.net/PeterSilva1/preso-16503raavailvdi-record

a Mobile Cloud model. He says that it's "Technology that disrupts and bridges to the mobile cloud".

Strategically aligned businesses, each are focused and free to execute individually or together. The Federation provides customer solutions and choice for the software-defined enterprise and the emerging “3rd platform” of mobile, cloud, big data and social, transformed by billions of users and millions of apps and according to CEO David Goulden, the common vision is "To move from the 2nd platform to the 3rd". Each company plays a significant role in that vision.

This federation offers 5 areas of value:

1. Mobility — provide access to all applications and data through mobile devices.    
   
2. Apps — use agile development to build new customer-centric applications.   
   
3. Big data — build a business data lake to deliver insights using all available data.   
   
4. Infrastructure — move to a software-defined data center (SDDC) infrastructure, expand to hybrid cloud   
   
5. Security — use adaptive, data-driven security to rapidly respond to emerging threats.
   

The idea behind Federation Solutions is simple: shorten time-to-value and reduce implementation risk for these big enterprise IT agenda items.