VMworld 2018: Day 3 Keynote Highlights
The third day of VMworld 2018 in Barcelona was filled with exciting announcements and product demos. Sanjay Poonen, the COO of VMware, kicked off the keynote by highlighting the digital transformation happening in the EUC (End-User Computing) world. He stated that VMware has 66,000 EUC customers and is promoting an any-app, any-device strategy through the Workspace One platform.
Ray O’Farrell, the CTO of SDDC (Software-Defined Data Center), took the stage next to provide further detail about the announcements in the SDDC. He showcased the advances made in vSphere 6.5, including a six times faster interface and new HTML5 client. He also demoed the new VM encryption facilities in 6.5 and covered some of the advances in vRealize automation, including support for containers.
Yanbing Li, the VP of Engineering for vSAN, discussed the latest features in vSAN 6.5. These include Direct-Connect options for 2-node deployments, iSCSI support, and ongoing beta-future versions of the product are likely to offer data at-rest encryption and nested fault domains.
Rajiv Ramaswami, the GM of Networking and Security, discussed NSX, which is now giving 1700 NSX customers micro-segmentation and distributed load balancing. He highlighted how NSX is underpinning VMware’s SDDC and is expected to grow as the private/public/hybrid cloud model expands.
Kit Colbert brought the keynote to a close with insights into container hosting and management using the Photon Platform. He announced that Photon will offer Kubernetes-as-a-service in Q4 this year, and both the Photon Controller and Photon OS are open source and available for download from Github.
Adam Eckerle and Emad Younis presented a session on what’s new in vCenter and how to keep it running smoothly after installation. The highlights of the session included a whiteboarded overview of PSC migrations and topology, with the linear ring topology being preferable over hub/spoke and full mesh in larger deployments.
In addition to the keynote sessions, I had the opportunity to present at the vBrownBag stage on some of the unusual practices IT pros might experience in a university environment and how virtualization can be used to save the day. If you’re interested in more details, check out my post and video link here.
Overall, Day 3 of VMworld 2018 was filled with exciting announcements and product demos that highlighted VMware’s commitment to digital transformation and software-defined data centers. The keynote sessions provided valuable insights into the latest features and advancements in the EUC, SDDC, and vSAN products, and the presentations from Adam Eckerle and Emad Younis offered practical advice for keeping vCenter running smoothly.