ESG Blogs

Yes, VMworld is a vendor event.

But it is also as near to a general IT event as there is.

The 2018 version in Las Vegas showed this “parallel dichotomy” in full force. A focus on the company’s own progress, innovation, and execution was pretty much matched by a focus on its partnerships and its integral position in the overall IT ecosystem. It’s hard to cover everything; but an extensive ESG contingent did its best to distill down some of the key new announcements and take-aways. It means that our On Location video is a little longer than usual at 7 minutes, but it’s packed with insights.

As I've written before, I've been a long time attendee to VMworld (if you count EMEA events separately, this is my 15th VMworld). I have to say that the VMworld 2018 Day 1 Keynote potentially had the biggest impact on the industry I have ever seen from the show.

With VMworld approaching next week, I thought I would share what I’m expecting to hear and what I’m looking forward to on the HCI front in Vegas.

I’m excited about the shift and spotlight HCI has garnered over the last year. It’s gained traction, it’s gotten more competitive, and it’s being recognized as much more than an x86 server with compute and storage. It’s about incorporating networking, ensuring workload mobility, properly managing distributed clusters, data lifecycle management, and embracing hybrid cloud. And while all of these aspects will be key areas of focus at the show as whole, let’s focus on HCI.

As I often joke, as most families are getting their kids ready to go back to school, with new school clothes and school supplies, IT professionals prepare for VMworld. I've been going to VMworld almost every year, sometimes twice a year if we include the EMEA show, for over a decade. I think this year in particular, much more so than in years past, is when the future of VMware will be previewed. I think there will be some exciting announcements around the shift away from just virtualization, with NSX, VMware's role with cloud native and containers, and also VMware Cloud on AWS. Watch the video below and, during the show, tweet to me @edwinyuen if you have questions, and if you are at the show, reach out to me to meet face to face. When the keynotes are over, look for a summary blog from me with my analysis of the key announcements.

As I said in my pre-VMworld blog - I have a love/hate relationship with the conference. It didn't disappoint - it was a wild and crazy few days and a veritable who's who of the tech industry. There were plenty of announcements from VMware (most notably its efforts with AWS and Google, as well as vSAN momentum), partners like Pivot3 (new partner programs and NVMe-based solutions), Dell EMC (new VxRack and Rail solutions), Lenovo (ThinkAgile VX Series and cloud reference architecture) - I think I could go on with this list for a very long time!

VMworld is still “the place to be” for discussing data center modernization—and that means that there were several data protection vendors in attendance, each with something to say.

Full coverage of VMworld 2017 is available at our dedicated ESG On Location page. Please also view the wrap up video from the ESG team.

I have been attending VMworld for 13+ years and always enjoy the event as well as meeting with old friends while making new ones. This year VMware did a commendable job positioning its customers front and center. In fact, during the keynotes and breakout sessions, VMware employees stepped to the sidelines and let the customers tell their stories and echo the VMware value propositions. A true sign of how the market has matured.

Some industry shows—perhaps the majority—can come and go with only a section of the IT world knowing (sometimes a bigger or smaller section depending on the nature of the show, but nonetheless only a section). However, such is the breadth of what VMworld encompasses and touches that I can't imagine there are (m)any people involved in IT to any extent who don't know VMworld took place this week. 

This week at VMworld, VMware announced market availability of a new security technology called AppDefense. AppDefense is an application-layer security control designed to profile applications, determine “normal” behavior, and then provide a series of least privilege controls for applications and options for security incident remediation.

Now in some respects, AppDefense is a lot like application white listing/black listing, which can be very effective for limiting the attack surface but the historical problem with application controls is operational overhead. If you want to implement white listing, you have to know what workloads are running and whether they are allowed to, and then implement controls to restrict unanticipated application behavior. This can become quite cumbersome when servers run multiple applications with dynamic development cycles and changing behavior. 

Back at another VMworld! As I wrote in my preview blog, it’s been 10 years since I went to my first VMworld. As the years have gone by, not only the size of the show changed, but also VMware itself has changed. Over the past 4 or 5 years, VMware has pushed hard to move beyond its traditional virtualization/on-premises focus into areas like end-user computer (EUC), storage, networking, systems management, DevOps, and most notably, cloud. And those efforts have not been marketing or paper efforts. I’ve often noted in my discussions with customers that VMware is not getting the credit it deserves for the products it is releasing, especially in systems management. I think this year clearly is the year that VMware can shed the virtualization bias often applied to it.