VMworld Day 2 – Quick Review

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Better late than never, right?  I’m about 36 hours past due on this, but the crazy that is VMworld is in full effect and I’m finally just getting caught up on some e-mail and my review.

Tuesday morning we started at 9am with Sanjay Poonen who leads the End-User Computing Business Unit at VMware, who talked with the audience about why people-centric computing. People-centric computing is a simple concept—application and content delivery should be a matter of connecting them to people and not to devices.

Typically this is handled by two separate teams with a collection of independent tools to make it all possible, usually separated by the Windows Desktop Administrators and the Mobile Device Administrators. Tuesday it was announced and demonstrated how to manage application delivery and device management to a myriad of different types of devices. Including Windows 10 devices, which was specifically called out by bringing Microsoft on stage and announcing a great partnership.

airwatch

VMware Project A2 was announced which bridges the VMware App Volumes technology to Windows 10 physical PCs. This means administrators will now have a single solution to manage virtual, physical and mobile end-points along with simple abstracted deployment of applications while following security policies at a people-centric level rather than device level. If you’re not aware of what App Volumes is, this came from the acquisition of CloudVolumes, it allows desktop administrators to rapidly package, deliver, and manage the lifecycle of application layers on virtual desktops and published application (RDSH) servers, including Citrix XenApp. Wrapping up the End-User Computing portion, Poonen talked about the integration work they’ve done with Horizon, Airwatch and NSX. It was demonstrated how policy settings in NSX can affect Airwatch connectivity to mobile applications.

Next, keeping up with the now Network & Security theme, Martin Casado who leads the Networking and Security business unit at VMware joined the stage. He spoke of the realities of IT and how applications are changing and how provisioning these new distributed systems is dramatically affecting security. The Applications have become the network, they are truly distributed and could have a combination of servers, load balancers, firewalls, etc. There was a huge focus on security, and the work VMware has done and will continue to do in this space. Encryption everywhere, and it has to be simple, as a simple attribute to the application – you check the box and traffic is automatically encrypted. In-flight encryption is good, but it’s only half of the story as at rest is also critical.

Pat Gelsinger wrapped up the morning general session, he discussed the growth of Internet connectivity and how it is having major impact on education and healthcare. He spoke of the trends of the number of connected devices, and how iOS application revenue has surpassed the revenues of the US film industry. He continued to discuss these trends of change, and reviewed the importance of the moves VMware has made as well as the product announcements, trying to show a common link among all of the announcements and keynotes of the week. I also strongly suggest you watch the replay of the keynote, as Gelsinger highlights his Top 5 Imperatives for the Digital Economy. Replays are available on VMworld.com.

In closing, in addition to what was mentioned above, VMworld also announced VMware Horizon 6.2, VMware Identity Manager Advanced Edition and VMware NSX 6.2.