VMWorld Europe 2017 started today in the classic congress venue of Barcelona.
As always, VMware participates with a number of announcements and new products: we will cover the most exciting news.
New VMware HCX technologies for portability and multi-cloud and multi-site integration are now available
VMware HCX is a technology that enables secure, fast and protected mobility and interoperability between different clouds, thus allowing the migration of big-sized applications without downtime. Being a new solution, it will be initially available on IMB and OVH platforms only, and accessible by means of VMware Cloud Providers.
Introducing the new vRealize Suite 2017
VMware announced improvements on its cloud management platform, in particular with an improved orientation towards private and public or SDDC multi-cloud environments, by working on all components that form the vRealize Suite: Operations (new 6.6 version), Automation (new 7.3 version), Business for Cloud (new 7.3 version) and Log Insight (updated to version 4.5). More specifically, Operations introduces a new Intelligence related to decisions, pDRS (predefined Distributed Resource Schedule) and native solutions for vSAN and hyperconvergent solutions. Automation introduces the support to the container management system Admiral 1.1 and to Virtual Container Host, Docker host and Docker volumes instances.
Business for Cloud is now included into Operations as dedicated tab, and Insight has a further integration with Operations to offer more precise and detailed analyses.
The new VMware-IBM partnership speeds up the adoption of cloud solution in the Enterprise sector
The two giants of the IT field announced during last VMworld that some 1.400 companies all around the world are upgrading their virtual infrastructures towards the IBM cloud. New security and network control solutions have been announced thanks to the collaboration with F5 Networks (with the product F5 BIG-IP) and Fortinet (with is FortiGate-NGFW) in order to expand VMware environments into a public cloud. Among the other news of the partnership between VMware and IBM, we cite the provisioning of the IBM cloud to offer Horizon Cloud (a virtual desktop solution) which will be available in Q4 2017, the availability of SAP-HANA certified servers and the VMware Cloud Certified certification.
VMware provides Communications Service Providers with the most secure and quick path towards OpenStack and NFV
The new vCloud NFV-OpenStack has been announced at this VMworld edition: this solution delivers production services like Network Function Virtualization on an OpenStack platform. It also includes VMware Integrated OpenStack Carrier Edition, a new OpenStack Octa distribution, completely integrated and guaranteed to work with VMware NFV solutions.
Moreover, it has been announced that Vodafone Group chose VMware as the partner in the roll-out of its NFV infrastructure.
vCloud NFV is also and ETSI-compliant platform (European Telecommunications Standard Institute), complete and modular which provides High Availability and carrier-grade performances with advanced network virtualization capabilities.
VMware expands its Mobile Security Alliance
Mobile Security Alliance -MSA- is a partnership between many vendors of the IT market, in particular those related to IT security. At its foundation in 2015 by VMware, it counted 10 partners operating in the endpoints, applications, cloud and network sectors which provided solutions integrated with VMware Workspace ONE for the security of devices, endpoints and users.
Nowadays MSA counts 23 partners, and 6 of those were announced during the VMworld: Bay Dynamics, CipherCloud, Entrust Datacard Corporation, Gurucul, Intercede and Kaymera.
With the addition of new partners and expertise, the areas covered by the platform grows from 4 to 6, with the addition of authentication and data analysis.
Two practical examples are about discarding physical smartcards in favour of mobile devices enabled authentication (thanks to the expertise of Entrust DataCard) and an advanced threats identification on mobile devices (thanks to Kaymera).
An improved integration between Dell EMC and VMware to speed up the deployment of NFV architectures
Dell EMC and VMware offer a pre-integrated, pre-validated and OpenStack Ready infrastructure to offer their CSP and MSP clients some efficient solutions for the development and distribution of their own services. Just like the new Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware, for instance: this is a hardware+software integrated solution on Intel Xeon and vCloud NFV platform coupled with a vSAN or ScaleIO.
VMware goes into Amazon’s AWS Cloud
VMware released the VMware Cloud on AWS solution which includes an SDDC platform composed by vSphere, VSAN and NSX deployed on hosts in Amazon’s datacenters. Talking about hardware, the host is an I3.16XL EC2 virtual instance, with double processor, 18 cores, 512 GB of Ram memory and more than 13 TB of SSD storage. The basic configuration includes the use of at least 4 hosts (up to 16), which are controlled by a single vCenter server, so that it can be managed as a regular on-premises cluster, albeit being in a public cloud.
Introducing a new collaboration with Pivotal Container Services
Still talking about Cloud, VMware announced a new collaboration with Pivotal Software, specifically regarding their Pivotal Container Service. PKS -that’s the acronym of the product- is a solution to manage container and workloads developed with such technology, and it deals with orchestration, high availability, monitoring and automation so that production environments can sustain their cycles.
New security levels with AppDefence
AppDefence is a solution for the protection of applications in Cloud virtualized environments, and profiles and monitors applications with the aim of identifying anomalies, attacks and can reply and manage such situations in an automated fashion. Launching price is $ 500 per CPU with an annual cycle.
VMware WorkSpace ONE is available on Azure
VMware’s desktop virtualization platform will be available on Microsoft’s cloud too, with a starting price of $ 8/user/month.