Looking back at VMworld 2018, it is interesting to see which route that VMware is moving towards. The last years VMware has been focusing a lot on the software-defined data center and the partnership with Amazon on delivering VMware on AWS, with the recent announcements from VMware you can see that they want to move further up the stack, and also allow customers to run AWS services such as RDS in their own datacentres as well, competing with the message that Microsoft is delivering with Azure Stack and also with what Google wants to provide with GKE on-prem. But also moving into the AI stage and analytics.
They also want to provide VMware as a managed service within your own datacentre with an offering called Project Dimension. So its all about Hybrid.
So… let’s get down to the announcements that came from VMworld 2018?
NOTE: That much of the content is directly from VMware blogs until I get sort out all the facts behind each product 🙂
VMware Cost Insight
VMware Cost Insight enables granular visibility into public and private cloud costs.
For example, track your spendings across public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and private data center clouds, such as vCenter Server. Or use VMware Cost Insight to track detailed expenses for multiple cloud services, accounts, and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types.
https://cloud.vmware.com/cost-insight
vSphere 6.7 Update 1
More info about the release here –> https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2018/08/under-the-hood
vSAN 6.7 Update 1
More info about the release here –> https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2018/08/27/whats-new-in-vsan-6-7
vSphere Platinum
VMware vSphere Platinum is a new edition of vSphere that combines the industry leading capabilities of vSphere with VMware AppDefense.
This blogpost goes into detail about the features in Platinum and AppDefense –> https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2018/08/under-the-hood-vsphere-platinum.html
Release notes about vSphere Platinum here –> https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2018/08/introducing
vRealize Suite 2018
- vRealize Operations 7.0 – Augmenting what we released in Q1 earlier this year, the Self-Driving Operations is enhanced by platform integrations that automate host-based placement within and across clusters based on business intent. Improvements to the UI, right-sizing workflows, and capacity planning further simplify use, reduce costs and assure performance.
- vRealize Automation 7.5 – With its new UI, vRealize Automation 7.5 is enhanced to support broader developer use cases with new Ansible Tower integration for configuration management, Pivotal Container Service (PKS) integration for Kubernetes cluster management, and NSX-T integration for supporting next generation network virtualization within vRealize Automation. vRealize Automation enables both Programmable Provisioning and Application Operations.
- vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 2.0 – vRealize Suite 2018 makes private cloud easier to operate and consume with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 2.0, which enables a DevOps approach for managing its lifecycle. New features include enhanced certificate management, supporting vRealize Operations content, and simultaneous release of content across the Suite.
- vRealize Business for Cloud 7.5 – Enabling Programmable Provisioning, vRealize Business for Cloud 7.5 supports suite level patching and certificate management, vRealize Business for Cloud 7.5 adds usability enhancements, including simplified mapping of Business controller user with Business Group.
- vRealize Log Insight 4.7 – Also enabling Self-Driving Operations, vRealize Log Insight 4.7 supports suite level patching and certificate management, as well as adding security improvements and usability enhancements.
What’s new with vRealize Suite 2018 –> https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2018/08/whats-new
VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.3
VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.3 extends advanced multi-cloud networking and security capabilities to AWS, in addition to Microsoft Azure and on-premises environments. This pervasive connectivity, independent of the underlying cloud, empowers customers that operate across multiple public clouds to take advantage of local availability zones and the unique services of different cloud providers. NSX-T Data Center 2.3 introduces support for bare metal hosts, in addition to hypervisor and container environments. This includes Linux-based workloads running on bare-metal servers, as well as containers running on bare-metal servers without a hypervisor. To support this new capability, NSX-T leverages the Open vSwitch, allowing any Linux host to be an NSX-T transport node. This enables IT to terminate an overlay network on the Linux host and provide stateful security services.
VMware is further extending multi-cloud support with support for NSX-T technology in VMware Cloud on AWS environments. With this support, which is currently in preview (2), VMware Cloud on AWS customers will be able to implement micro-segmentation with the distributed firewall, grouping constructs, and advanced matching criteria such as security tags across software-defined data centers in VMware Cloud on AWS.
Source: http://bit.ly/2MYSAi0
Pulse IoT Center 2.0
VMware Pulse IoT Center 2.0 will offer updated capabilities designed to provide customers with broader management, more intelligent operations, faster innovation and better protection. Taken together, these new capabilities support larger IoT deployments—up to 500 million IoT devices—with SaaS support and additional security features. Other features focus on ease of use, simplified management and heightened control.
- SAAS Support: Customers will be able to consume Pulse IoT Center as an on premise or SaaS solution depending on their needs. SaaS services will be hosted by VMware and VCPP partners.
- Low-touch Secure Enrollment: Minimal touch enrollment and configuration capabilities will be supported for select gateways
- Deeper Edge System Management: Ability to perform Gateway configuration through the action framework (sshd, turn on/off port, IP address table, etc.) as well as provide complete firmware and BIOS updates for selected gateways
- Richer Alerts and Notifications Capabilities: Alerts can now be set for individual managed object or a group of managed objects. Notifications for alerts can be received via email or SMS integration, and through an API into a third-party system
- Enhanced Over-the-air (OTA) Updates: Customers now have more granular control over OTA scheduling, activation, progress status, package type and failure handling
- More Extensibility: RESTful APIs will be available for all functionalities for customer and partner integration, improving extensibility.
- Additional Security Features: Customers will be able to leverage role-based user access and multi-tenancy restrict access for different organizations and use cases.
Project Dimension
Project Dimension will extend the VMware Cloud to the data center. Project Dimension will combine VMware Cloud Foundation, with VMware Cloud managed service to deliver an SDDC infrastructure as an end-to-end service, operated by VMware. Project Dimension will dramatically simplify operational complexity and cost and offers built-in security and isolation, allowing customers to focus on innovating and differentiating their businesses.
Cloud Provider Hub.
The Cloud Provider Hub is the evolution of the previously-branded VMware MSP Platform. The MSP Platform introduced the ability for Cloud Providers to deliver VMware Cloud on AWS as a managed service. You can read more about Cloud Provider Hub here –> https://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/2018/08/vmware-cloud-provider-hub.html
Cloud Provider Pod.
You can read more about Cloud Provider Pod here –> https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/cloud/cloud-provider-pod-datasheet.pdf but it provides an automated deployment of SDDC for Cloud Providers. 
Cloud Operations Services
These next three services are tightly integrated and also my guess that CloudHealth will be added to the mix a bit later as well into the Cloud Operations Services. These services consist of Cloud Assembly, Service Broker, and Code Stream. To deliver a multi-cloud strategy and expect a seamless experience across hybrid and native public clouds.
VMware Cloud Assembly
Is a multi-cloud provisioning service. For VMware SDDC-based virtual infrastructure, it offers the ability to create a private cloud. Cloud Assembly also provides an abstraction layer across multiple clouds
VMware Service Broker
Service Broker has three main roles:
- It is a catalog (or storefront) for curated templates from multiple clouds
- It governs usage of templates and services through policy definition and configuration
- It is a broker between Cloud Assembly-managed services and the 3rd party managed services (hence the name)
The basic use case is creating a storefront where one can publish curated templates, such as, Cloud Assembly Blueprints, AWS Cloud Formation Templates (CFT), Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, VMware vRealize Orchestrator-based XaaS templates, Kubernetes Helm Charts, etc
VMware Code Stream
Code Stream is primarily a continuous delivery service. It includes many pre-built continuous integration plug-ins for development tools (e.g. Git, Jenkins) and orchestration systems (e.g. Kubernetes). Whereas Cloud Assembly automates infrastructure or application deployments,
Project Concord
You can read more about it here –> https://blogs.vmware.com/opensource/2018/08/28/meet-project-concord/
and also here –> https://vmware.github.io/concord-bft/
VMware CloudHealth
The main features of CloudHealth’s cloud management platform include:
- Data collection: The tool collects and consolidates data from an enterprise’s cloud deployments, including from public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), as well as private cloud platforms.
- Reporting and analysis: to visualize and analyze collected data through custom reports and dashboards. An organization can use these tools to monitor the performance and usage of cloud resources, such as virtual machine instances, by an end user or business department.
- Cost management: monitor the costs of cloud computing resources, identify which users or business departments spend the most, and forecast monthly costs.
- Governance and security: CloudHealth offers IT governance features, such as automation, policy management, and authorization, to help a business maintain compliance. This feature is mostly aimed at AWS at the moment.
VMware acquires CloudHealth –> https://ir.vmware.com/overview/press-releases/press-release-details/2018/VMware-Announces-Intent-to-Acquire-CloudHealth-Technologies-a-Global-Platform-for-Multi-Cloud-Operations/default.aspx
Amazon RDS on vSphere
The source from: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-amazon-rds-on-vmware/
Architecture – Your vSphere environment is effectively a private, local AWS Availability Zone (AZ), connected to AWS across a VPN tunnel running over the Internet or an AWS Direct Connect connection. You will be able to create Multi-AZ instances of RDS that span vSphere clusters.
Backups – Backups can make use of local (on-premises storage) or AWS, and are subject to both local and AWS retention policies. Backups are portable and can be used to create an in-cloud Amazon RDS instance. Point in Time Recovery (PITR) will be supported, as long as you restore to the same environment.
Management – You will be able to manage your Amazon RDS on vSphere instances from the Amazon RDS Console and from vCenter. You will also be able to use the Amazon RDS CLI and the Amazon RDS APIs.
Regions – We’ll be launching in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt)Regions, with more to come over time.
You can read more about it here –> https://aws.amazon.com/rds/vmware/
VMware Secure State
VMware Secure State service builds a real-time model of your cloud infrastructure, mapping the relationships of how services are configured and changed to find new vulnerabilities across service layers.
Deeper Cloud Insights — While detecting open data bucket vulnerabilities and doing best practice configuration checks is important, there is a new layer of cross-service vulnerabilities that exist in every cloud account. It’s as easy as someone spinning up a server with the same SSH key they used on your AWS Admin account. As cloud usage grows, a solution must move beyond detecting simple configuration conditions to find this emerging class of cross-service threats.
We’ll talk more about both cloud security best practices and give examples of other “connected threats” as we move forward.
Real-time Detection and Change Modeling – It’s our belief that the faster you can detect an issue and route it to the right place, the lower it will cost to fix that issue. Imagine getting a notification for a mistake you made just a few moments ago. As a cloud deployer, getting this insight within the context of your deployment, allows you to quickly correct or validate your setup.
More info here –> https://cloud.vmware.com/community/2018/08/27/vmware-secure-state-public-beta-announcement/
Horizon 7 Version 7.6
- Additional features in Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS
- New Blast Extreme functionality, including adaptive transport with IPv6
- Geolocation redirection
- Support for NVIDIA V100 ad AMD V340
- Skype for Business feature updates
- New functionality in Horizon clients
- New Horizon Cloud Connector
- New version of UEM and AppVolumes
Workspace ONE Hub
Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub is the single destination where employees can securely access, discover, connect with, and take action on corporate resources, teams, and workflows wherever they are and from any device. Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub brings together support for BYO and corporate-owned devices in a single, streamlined app experience for the entire employee lifecycle from on-boarding to day-1 productivity and beyond. Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub builds on the success of Workspace ONE.
Workspace ONE AirLift
VMware Workspace ONE AirLift is a server-side connector that simplifies and speeds the customers journey to modern management. Workspace ONE AirLift bridges administrative frameworks between Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) and Workspace ONE UEM.
Workspace ONE AirLift also provides the means to export applications from ConfigMgr to Workspace ONE UEM. You can then deploy and manage applications from the Workspace ONE platform. Workspace ONE AirLift provides validations so you aware of any additional configuration applications may need.
More information here –> https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workspace-ONE-UEM/9.7/ws1_airlift.pdf