VMworld 2020 – Announcements

Like the VMWorld conferences in the past few years, VMworld 2020 was kicked off with a keynote by VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. Unlike past conferences, this year’s VMworld is entirely virtual. While it’s admirable that they have produced a full-featured virtual conference as a response to the limitations of today’s pandemic, I have to admit that the virtual format lacks the energy and enthusiasm that is present in the in-person events.

The theme for this year’s conference was “Possible together” and that pretty much describes VMware’s recent Project Pacific where they rearchitected vSphere to include Kubernetes. Pat stated that VMware’s goal is to be able to support any app on any cloud running on any device. Pat went on to say that VMware “delivers the digital foundation for an unpredictable world”.

In spite of these challenging times VMware made a number of significant announcements. Some of the main announcements from this year’s VMworld 2020 include:

  • VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload — VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload is integrated with vSphere and provides vulnerability reporting and workload hardening with the prevention, detection, and response capabilities. VMware is offering a six-month unlimited free trial of VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload Essentials for all current vSphere 6.5 and VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 customers.
  • Project Monterey — Project Monterey is in preview and it is a project to rearchitect VMware Cloud Foundation from the hardware up to support the new requirements of modern applications enabled by Project Pacific. It is intended to address the changing requirements of next-generation applications including AI, machine learning and 5G applications.
  • Tanzu for VMware Cloud On AWS —  VMware Tanzu is a collection of products and services for modernizing applications and infrastructure and it is now supported on VMware Cloud on AWS.
  • VMware Edge Network Intelligence – Is the integration of the technology from VMware’s Nyansa acquisition with VMware’s networking support. The solution uses machine learning-based predictive analytics to ensure SLAs are met, along with providing security and visibility to end-user and IoT devices.
  • VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention –Combines the technology from VMware’s Lastline acquisition with VMware’s NSX Service-defined Firewall to use machine learning to identify network threats and minimize false positives.
  • vRealize AI — vRealize AI is a cloud service that’s designed to optimize application performance. It combines near-real-time and historical observability with reinforcement learning to enable the VMware cloud infrastructure to better meet the changing needs of application workloads.
  • VMware Workspace Security Remote — Provides endpoint management and endpoint security for physical Mac and Windows 10 devices.
  • VMware’s Workspace Security VDI – Integrates VMware Workspace ONE Horizon and VMware Carbon Black Cloud to leverage behavioral detection in order to protect against ransomware and file-less malware. It is integrated into VMTools for agentless distribution.
  • vRealize Network Insight version 6.0 – The new release of vRealize Network Insight uses formal verification to gather network state to build and model how the network functions. It is designed to allow IT and network operations to discover potential brownouts before they occur
  • VMware vRealize Cloud Universal — Combines SaaS and on-premises management software into a single subscription license making it easier to switch between vRealize Cloud solutions without needing to acquire different licenses.