Top 8 Takeaways from WWT's VMworld Experts

VMworld 2019 recently wrapped up, and it was one for the books!

We saw new technologies, new products and many positive signs of great things to come. Rather than going through a rundown of all the technology and product announcements, we decided to reach out to our VMware experts and ask them what they thought were the most interesting announcements.

Here's what they had to say.

Brent Collins - Director, Data Center Infrastructure

Choice for VMC

VMC on Dell EMC gives customers additional flexibility when deploying VMware Managed Cloud (VMC).  Customers now have the option to deploy on AWS and Azure, in addition to on-premise. Using HCX gives customers choice on location for their VM workloads and the flexibility to move workloads across locations based on future requirements.

One customer gave us a use case where it can take six to 12 months to architect, purchase and deploy new equipment. In the future, they plan to use VMC on AWS for application development and testing, giving their development teams a head start in new application development. They plan to start the new equipment acquisition process at the start and then leverage HCX to migrate the newly developed applications to on premise for production.

We've already invested heavily in the creation of knowledge articles, videos and labs around VMC and HCX.

Chris Weis - Practice Manager, Software-Defined Infrastructure

Containers and Kubernetes

Overall, I think the application-focused "Build, Run, Manage" messaging and technology offerings were the most interesting thing to come out of VMworld.

Containers and Kubernetes are now first-class citizens in the VMware ecosystem made clear by how heavily VMware focused on them in their messaging and product announcements. Specifically, the native integration of a container runtime and Kubernetes into vSphere as part of Project Pacific and full multicloud management of any Kubernetes clusters with VMware Tanzu.

It was great to see Kubernetes co-founder Craig McLuckie and the integration of the Heptio acquisition running at full speed already. It will be exciting to see how quickly the industry adopts all of this.

So exciting in fact that we're expanding the team to focus on this area and bring these technologies into the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) for customers and partners to access.  We'll also expand upon what we're already doing with Pivotal Ready Architecture and VMware Cloud on AWS as the ecosystem and products evolve. Exciting times!

James Harless – Technical Solutions Architect, Software-Defined Data Center

CloudHealth Hybrid

VMware announced CloudHealth Hybrid at VMworld 2019. This capability will bring together the functionality of CloudHealth Data Center, vRealize Business for Cloud (vRBC) and Cost Insight into a single standalone SaaS offering. This platform will provide unified visibility into cost, usage and performance of public and private cloud resources. More than ever, the software-defined data center (SDDC) will seem like a continuous platform extending invisibly across public and private cloud infrastructures.

Stay tuned as we add this capability to the ATC. The planned lab will provide a demo of CloudHealth and the ability to do real-time analysis of a live running IT environment. In the meantime, we have integrated these new capabilities into our SDDC Workshop.

John Tejada - Technical Solutions Architect, Cloud Management Platforms

vRealize Automation 8

Current vRA 7 customers are asking for two products: an on-premises version of vRA Cloud and a migration tool to help customers migrate from vRA 7.  VMware responded with vRA 8, complete with a simplified installation process, the elimination of cumbersome dependencies and a vRA 7 migration tool.  With this, vRealize is now aligned with VMware's overall strategy of providing on-premises (vRA 8) and off-premises (vRA Cloud) offerings of it's cloud management suite.

While VMware is committed to making the migration as smooth as possible, implementation-specific challenges can occur. In some circumstances, customers will have to decide if they are better off migrating or re-factoring.

I have a separate article covering this topic if you're interested.  At WWT, we are actively putting together services offerings to help customers determine what should and shouldn't (or can't) be migrated, and to help them with the actual migration and/or re-factoring if necessary.

In the meantime, if you'd like to know more, please connect with me here or via our powerful ATC Connect mobile app.

Ivan Wintersteiger - Practice Manager, End User Computing

Workspace ONE

We were excited about VMware's messaging around the significance of the end-user journey and experience powered by Workspace ONE platform. The expansion of Intelligent Hub functionality beyond just being the management agent on a device and an app portal to actually being a tool that user can use even before starting a new job to help them automate and streamline processes such as onboarding. In addition, the announcement around Carbon Black acquisition and how this will fit very nicely into and expand end point security message part of Workspace ONE platform.

Bruce Clounie - Principal Solutions Architect, Network Solutions

VMware NSX

The announcement of NSX-T 2.5,  NSX Intelligence and NSX Service Mesh further expands the reach of NSX as VMware's strategic direction for networking. NSX-T 2.5 with NSX cloud provides for native cloud security controls. This seamlessly integrates with existing clouds allowing NSX to provide consistent policy management across diverse environments. NSX Intelligence provides for not only insight into application flows, but also policy recommendations and seamless policy enforcement.  Inline with VMware's new portfolio of Kubernetes management tools (Tanzu), was the announcement of NSX Service Mesh which allows for Istio-based management of network policies across multiple Kubernetes clusters in private or public clouds.

WWT will be incorporating these new technology announcements into our existing NSX capabilities in the Advanced Technology Center.

Tyler Warren - Technical Solutions Architect, Hybrid Cloud Platforms

VMware Cloud

VMworld 2019 celebrated the two-year anniversary of VMware Cloud on AWS with some impressive success stories and product announcements. Seeing customers go all-in on VMC is a testament to the product's quick rise to maturity and VMware's dedication to hybrid cloud.

New VMC capabilities like GPU-enabled nodes and storage optimizations with Elastic vSAN will open up more and more use cases for customers. VMC's Azure cousin, Azure VMware Solutions, also got quite a bit of stage time with it's expansion to more Azure regions.  It's exciting to see VMware embracing customers' public cloud journeys with their best of breed Hybrid Cloud Platforms.

I had the privilege of presenting on WWT's VMware Cloud on AWS capabilities and the journey to a VMware Hybrid Cloud in the AWS booth and with our partner Equinix. In case you missed those sessions, take a look at these demos VMC-AWS Operations and VMC-AWS Migration.  When you're ready to dig deeper into VMware Cloud on AWS, spend some time in our on-demand VMC-AWS lab!

Scott Miller - Senior Director, Partner Management

WWT and VMware Partnership Update

We are more excited than ever about our VMware partnership and our mutual investments to bring transformational outcomes for our customers.

After meeting with sales leaders and product teams, it is undeniable how much our respective go-to-market strategies are uniquely aligned, today and looking forward

WWT can provide VMware and our customers differentiated value through our:

• Application development resources and offerings.
• Multicloud expertise, service capabilities and complex, integrated lab environments.
• Leveraging our deep networking history to modernize our customers' infrastructure.
• Unparalleled services capabilities and experience in empowering the digital workspace.

We would like to thank VMware for the presentation opportunities around EUC, PKS and VMC on AWS. Additionally, we appreciate the time the VMware sales leadership took to meet with us to discuss a targeted approach to address our customers' needs.

Please join our ecosystem to accelerate your time to market and reduce risk leveraging our integrated environments. We will continue to stay on the cutting-edge in enhancing our capabilities, reference architectures and offerings as these exciting new solutions are released.