General Session Day Two with Pat Gelsinger, Micheal Dell and Ray O'Farrell

Pat welcomes the audience and calls Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies onto stage. It is a bit of a fireside chat with a number of questions from the audience. 

The first question was a concern on VMware support to which Pat mentions VMware Skyline which provides proactive and predictive support to their customers.

The next question is VMware & Dells plan around IoT and Big Data. Michael mentions that Digital transformation is a CEO level discussion and concern. If you are not looking at how you use data to enhance your business you are doing it the wrong way. Dell and VMware have been reimagining their products to take advantage of IoT and Big Data while addressing both their larger and SMB markets and supporting their partners. The focus is on making the VMware ecosystem even more open moving forward through products like VMware Pulse IoT Center.

The final question is around the synergies between VMware, Dell and EMC. Michael mentions that the more they do together the better things get. For every product release the integration gets deeper, however it is being done in a way that supports the ecosystem of partners. Michael mentions the innovation being done by customers in leveraging containers to drive their business.

Rob Mee, the CEO of Pivotal is introduced and he mentions that they have been partnering to build Kubo which is open-source. Rob then announces, Pivotal Container Service "PKS" which includes kubernetes, Pivotal and NSX as s single product. 

Sam Ramji the VP of Google Cloud Platform is introduced to speak containers. Google has  been running at the containers at scale for sometime. Google sees container adoption skyrocketing. Sam believes "PKS" is important as it enables a hybrid infrastructure for running containers. It enables customers to put containers where they need them with support from Google and VMware.

Ray O'Farrell the CTO of VMware is introduced. VMware has a few guiding principals, like having the most modern infrastructure possible. VMware also wants to be pragmatic in how we develop product so we want to maintain the operational aspects of those products. As customers have asked for new models, VMware now has SaaS products.

Ray begins with a fictitious company "Elastic Sky Pizza"Z. They need to undergo a digital transformation.  The company integrates cloud foundation with AppDefender, vRealize Suite and VMware Cloud on AWS. When we think about our options, Public Cloud is great for getting things done quickly. VMware infrastructure can provide consistent experience by having a consistent environment.

The last piece of the puzzle is to layer VMware AppDefense for security. A demo is shown of the dashboard which shows a sample application with the known good behaviours. Once we have identified all the good behaviours and turn on the rules we know the application is protected.

vRealize is shown with the integrated AWS cloud connection. The demo shows deploying a SDDC in AWS which is easy with the vRealize Operations console. The four "4" node cluster will take approx. two "2" hours to deploy. In addition you can set thresholds for adding additional hosts depending on utilization. 

vRealize Network Insight is shown which color codes the complexity of the application depending on the total traffic flows. Green indicates an application with mostly contained network flows. The application is selected for migration and vMotioned into the AWS Cluster.

The demo moves to the "PKS" dashboard. The demo goes through the wizard interface for creating the kubernetes cluster. The credentials are then shared with the developers. The developer is then able to use native commands to interact with the environment. The last bit of the demo shows the NSX security wrapped around the container networks.

The VMware Cloud Services are promo'd

1. VM Automation - provides cloud agnostic blueprint for deployment in any hyper-scale cloud provider. 
2. VMware NSX Cloud - AWS instances are shown through the interface which provides a consistent view of all the networking
3. Wavefront - Wavefront measures the KPIs for the application and infrastructure, thinks VMware Log Insight in the cloud. 
4. Workspace ONE Mobile Flows - Mobile Flows allows you to automate business processes by using automated workflows

VMware Pulse IoT Center is the last topic that the team is covering. Pulse IoT Center can manage from your gateway to your things. It will manage from the gateway devices out to the sensors and machines. The technology is based on components from vROPs and AirWatch.

VMworld 2017: Delivering New User Experiences with Digital Workspaces with Sumit Dhawan

Sumit Dhawan @sumit_dhawan, the SVP of EUC mentions that VMware worked hard with partners like Apple, Google and Amazon to deliver a massive amount of innovation this year. If you think about cost, it can only be controlled by standardizing. While we may have control over PCs, Mobile and Cloud, we lack control holistically. If we look at the technologies that are coming to the 'Cloud-to-Edge' like the Internet-of-Things "IoT" this is only going to compound.

If you look at modern OSes like Apple, Android and Windows 10 they all offer APIs for management. Securely communicating using these APIs to the device allows you to provide context. If you pair this with identity then you begin to understand the application profile of the user. Workspace ONE brings identity and context together in a unique way.

From a management perspective, IT also wants to ensure compliance of all these devices. Within Workspace ONE VMware has created a digital contract between the IT team and the users. Workspace provides one place for the management of all devices. Workspace ONE can be extended for various use cases which will now be demo'd.

Shawn Bass "@shawnbass", the CTO of VMware's EUC platform is introduced onto the stage. Shawn keys the demo which will demonstrate Windows 10 management via AirWatch. Jason Rosak "@Jasonrosak" the director of product management explains the demo.

Jason mentions how time intensive the traditional approach of imaging then deploying a desktop is compared to mobile device setup. The demo shows an intuitive setup process with Windows 10 being managed by AirWatch and deploying applications via policy. 

While this deals with the day one setup issues, it does not deal with application delivery. Shawn announces a new integration for delivering large application package without having to deploy branch office deployment services. Users are able to self-serve their applications and threw  network bandwidth harvesting technology running in the background localized deployment points are not required. In addition,the demo shows the patch enforcement ability through workspace ONE. 

Dan Quintas the product manager for Mac integration is introduced. VMware has simplified the deployment of macOS Sierra. The demo shows a bunch of new bootstrap tools to deploy  applications on a MacBook. Workspace ONE has native support for Mac. The demo shows Visio working on the Mac leveraging Horizon using the advanced windowing capabilities. This delivers a seamless experience to the MacBook.

VMware is the first to provide comprehensive Chrome management support. This includes the ability to provide a managed Google Play environment on the Chrome book with the applications curated by the admin team.

Dell is brought onstage to announce Dell EMC VDI Complete which are fully packaged solutions for as low as $7 USD/user/month (Previously announced at Dell EMC World). In addition Horizon Cloud can now deliver support on Azure. A demo is shown in which the Horizon Cloud is used to add an Azure Region. Once done, the Horizon Cloud pairs with the Azure Region. The next step is to upload your image and configure your farm. You can then entitle applications from within Horizon Cloud to your Azure Horizon environment. You can pair your Azure subscription cost with a 8$ USD/user/month for the Horizon Cloud option.

Workspace ONE intelligence is announced which allows you to leverage analytics to apply patch and remediation policies to avoid things like the wannacry exploits. 

A technology preview is announced of Mobile Flows which allows workflows to be integrated into the email requests. A demo is shown with Mobile Flows integrated into the VMware boxer email client. Mobile flows will extend across a wide range of applications and cloud platforms.

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VMworld 2017: VMware Cloud Services presented by Guido Appenzeller Chief Strategy Officer

67% of VMware customers forsee an end state where they rely on multiple clouds. If you are running in multiple clouds a key consideration is vendor lock-in. This creates silos of different ways of defining policy, firewalls etc with little portability between them. 

VMware Cloud Services is about creating a cloud agnostic, cross cloud management solutions. The current product portfolio consists of the following service offerings:

Discovery - gives you a central database of all services you are consuming between clouds; VMware, AWS and Azure for example. In addition you can tag them.

Cost Insight - allows you to analyze and compare cloud spend, find savings opportunities and the cost of services to the business.

Network Insight - is now offered as a cloud service. It takes data points across your enterprise or AWS and allows you to run analyzes on them. VMware found customers using this information to plan application migrations to understand the interdependencies 

Wavefront - allows you to take real-time monitoring analytics to the cloud to provide visibility on application health

NSX Cloud - the SaaS version of NSX; you go online, request a new cluster from AWS which is deployed (Note: at this time this service is only available on Amazon)

These services have been built on the AWS Cloud. Pricing is available on http:/cloud.vmware.com . There are two costing models, pay-per-use or prepaid for one to three years.