The IT Nerd

VMware today unveiled new releases of VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN — which power the industry’s leading hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions — to help enterprises securely run their business-critical and modern applications in the data centre, at the edge, in the public cloud, or in hybrid cloud environments. VMware vSphere 6.7 and VMware vSAN 6.7 will both enhance user experience, security, application support, and hybrid cloud management features.

Enterprises are faced with increasingly complex technology environments made up of a growing landscape of public cloud services as well as data centre and edge resources. To cope with this complexity and the growing rate of technological changes, enterprises need to build on a digital foundation that provides consistent infrastructure and operations and is secure by default. VMware’s software forms an integrated digital foundation that powers the apps and services transforming businesses and industries. For customers, this provides the broadest investment protection by enabling a flexible and secure common operating environment from the cloud to the data centre to the edge.

VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN — building blocks of this digital foundation — both have leading positions in their relative industries according to IDC. (1,2)

VMware vSphere 6.7: Efficient and Secure Platform for the Hybrid Cloud
VMware vSphere 6.7 will introduce new capabilities and enhancements to help deliver an efficient and more secure platform for hybrid cloud environments. The latest release will feature simple and efficient management at scale, comprehensive built-in security, increased support for more workloads, and further enable a seamless hybrid cloud experience. VMware vSphere 6.7 will continue to offer customers a universal application platform that supports workloads spanning artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Big Data, business-critical, cloud-native, in-memory, and 3D graphics, among others.

New and enhanced features in VMware vSphere 6.7 will include:

• New vCenter Hybrid Linked Mode: Will enable unified visibility and management across different versions of vSphere running on-premises and in the public cloud such as VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Cloud and other VMware Cloud Provider Program partner clouds. This will allow customers to maintain their current version of vSphere on-premises as needed while enjoying the benefits of new capabilities in vSphere-based public clouds.
• New ESXi Single Reboot and vSphere Quick Boot: Will significantly reduce patch and upgrade times by halving the number of reboots required to one, while vSphere Quick Boot will skip hardware initialization steps to gain further re-start efficiencies.
• New vSphere Persistent Memory: Will leverage the latest innovation around non-volatile memory and significantly enhance performance for both existing and new apps.
• Enhanced NVIDIA GRID vGPUs Support for Modern Workloads: Will improve host lifecycle management and reduce end-user disruption via new suspend and resume capabilities for VMs for GPU-accelerated environments. vSphere 6.7 will enhance support for NVIDIA GRID Virtual PC/Virtual Apps (for knowledge workers) and NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation (for design and engineering professionals) to enable optimal management of VDI workloads as well as enable administrators (admins) to run other NVIDIA GPU-enabled workloads, including AI and ML.
• New Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 Support and Virtual TPM 2.0: This combination will significantly enhance protection and integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system (OS). Virtual TPM 2.0 will help prevent VMs and hosts from being tampered or compromised, thwarting the loading of unauthorized components and enable guest OS security features.
• Enhanced VMware vSphere Client: This latest release of the HTML-5-based vSphere Client will introduce new functionality to manage VMware NSX, vSAN and vSphere Update Manager along with an increased support for third-party products.

The enhanced vCenter Server Appliance will deliver an improved user experience made possible through more efficient management capabilities and significant performance improvements. It will deliver a faster experience for vSphere admins (compared to vSphere 6.5), while delivering considerable time and cost savings. Performance improvements will include:

• 200 per cent faster performance in vCenter operations per second (3)
• 300 per cent reduction in memory usage (3)
• 300 per cent faster DRS-related operations (e.g. Power-on, Placement of VM) (3)

VMware vSphere customers can deploy VMware AppDefense to further secure applications running in the data center or cloud. AppDefense leverages its unique position in vSphere to understand what applications are intended to do, monitor against that intended state, and automate response if anyone or anything attempts to manipulate them.

VMware vSAN 6.7: Elevates the HCI Experience On-Premises and in the Cloud
Powering the largest hybrid cloud ecosystem of any HCI vendor, vSAN enables customers to evolve their vSphere environment on-premises or in the cloud with hyper-converged infrastructure that lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) with efficient operations and that easily scales to future demands. VMware vSAN 6.7 reduces time-to-expertise with a new intuitive interface and accelerates decision-making through advanced monitoring and analytics.

New and enhanced features in VMware vSAN 6.7 include:

• New VMware vSphere HTML5 Client Support: Will provide vSAN admins with a unified, intuitive management experience using the HTML5-based vSphere Client that introduces new functionality and optimized workflows for vSAN operations.
• New Integrated vRealize Operations Healthchecks in vCenter Server: Will offer a single pane of glass to monitor and control multiple HCI environments. vRealize Operations 6.7 will provide a global operations view of vSAN 6.7 environments with six new dashboards embedded within vCenter Server 6.7 enabling customers to monitor capacity, performance, KPIs and alerts, and more. This capability does not require a separate vRealize Operations license and is available to anyone with a vSAN Advanced or vSAN Enterprise license.
• New Host-Pinning and iSCSI failover support: Will extend the suitability of HCI to applications such as Cassandra, Hadoop and MongoDB as well as to clustered Windows Server environments. New application support requires customers to contact VMware for additional details.
• New Intelligent Self-Healing Capabilities: Will mitigate the effects of disruptive events such as hardware failures with smart resource allocation.
• Enhanced vSAN Encryption: Will meet strict U.S. Federal government security requirements with FIPS 140-2 validation to protect data from disruptive events.

As part of today’s announcement, VMware is also introducing vSAN ReadyCare to improve the support experience for HCI environments. VMware will help customers maintain performance by avoiding or quickly resolving issues and minimize downtime through a combination of proactive telemetry capabilities from vSAN Support Insight advanced analytics, and a broad investment in VMware support staff.

VMware is widely recognized as the leading HCI software provider, and now delivers vSphere and vSAN-powered HCI in two of the top four public cloud providers, including AWS and IBM. Through an expansive partner ecosystem, VMware supports the broadest set of consumption options for its HCI software from turnkey HCI integrated systems such as Dell EMC VxRail and VxRack SDDC solutions to certified vSAN ReadyNode hardware reference architectures to as-a-service consumption models in public clouds.

VMware vSphere 6.7 and VMware vSAN 6.7 are both expected to become available by the end of VMware’s Q1 FY19 (May 4, 2018).

Additional Resources

• Read “Introducing VMware vSphere 6.7!” in the vSphere blog
• Read “Extending Hybrid Cloud Leadership with vSAN 6.7” in the Virtual Blocks blog
• Learn more about VMware vSphere
• Learn more about VMware vSAN

VMware today announced new releases across its integrated VMware vRealize® cloud management platform (CMP) that will make it easier for customers to implement, use, and manage hybrid cloud environments. Guided by customer feedback, the new updates to the vRealize platform will combine to simplify how customers innovate and enable IT governance through new ‘self-driving’ operations capabilities that optimize workload performance and capacity across their hybrid clouds as well as through new and enhanced IT automation and productivity capabilities.

The new product releases — vRealize Operations 6.7, vRealize Automation 7.4, vRealize Business for Cloud 7.4, vRealize Orchestrator 7.4, vRealize Log Insight 4.6 and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 — will come together in the VMware vRealize Suite to enable customers to manage and provision compute, network, storage and application services across hybrid cloud environments at scale. The new operations, automation and lifecycle management features and enhancements across the integrated platform are designed to provide customers with faster overall time to value, improved ease of use, and increased control of VMware’s software-defined data centre (SDDC) stack.

Self-Driving Operations to Assure Performance and Optimize Capacity Based on Intent

VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 will introduce several new and enhanced performance and capacity optimization capabilities to help customers address operational challenges. This new release will enable customers to adopt a ‘self-driving’ approach to monitoring and managing their data centres and cloud environments. VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 will also feature enhanced monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities to better predict, prevent, and remediate problems via integrations across VMware’s SDDC stack. New features will include:

• New Capacity Analytics Engine: VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 will introduce a new capacity analytics engine to provide customers with real-time visibility into capacity usage and demand to predict and improve capacity utilization. The new capacity analytics engine will feature ARIMA techniques and layer on periodicity, trend, and spike detection, along with a simplified user experience to help manage capacity as well as plan and forecast more accurately and faster than before. The new capacity management capabilities, which include cost analytics, will enable customers to more efficiently identify savings via automated reclamation of idle resources as well as right-sizing of environments; run “what-if” scenarios to plan for future projects; and plan capacity based on demand across clouds including VMware vSphere-based private clouds, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware Cloud on AWS and their associated costs. The new capacity analytics engine will set the stage for the introduction of machine learning capabilities over time.
• New Performance Automation based on Business and Operational Intent: This new release is designed to provide customers with continuous performance optimization of vSphere-based private clouds today, and VMware Cloud on AWS in the future, to meet application performance needs based on business intent (e.g., workload balancing to reduce software license costs by enabling license enforcement and separation or to meet performance SLAs) or operational intent (e.g., leaving headroom for business critical apps or to densify clusters). The software uses predictive analytics and enhanced automated workload balancing to drive the continuous optimization. Deep integration between vRealize Operations 6.7 and vRealize Automation 7.4 will deliver enhanced initial workload placement capabilities based on intent to provide customers with a closed loop operations experience. Customers will be able to turn on self-driving operations to continuously and automatically optimize workloads.
• New Wavefront by VMware Integration: vRealize Operations 6.7 will feature a new out-of-the-box integration with Wavefront by VMware to empower IT and application owners to triage and resolve issues faster. This integration will help to rapidly on-board Wavefront through the automatic discovery of applications and the installation and management of the required agents. Additionally, this will enable IT to provide app monitoring capabilities to their DevOps teams for apps such as Cassandra, Kafka, and Redis, along with traditional apps.
• New User Interface: This new release will be even simpler to use featuring a persona-based ‘Quick Start’ dashboard to help customers quickly perform operational tasks. It will also include updated workflows for enterprise-wide troubleshooting with metrics and logs.

vRealize Automation 7.4 Delivers Increased Productivity and Faster Time to Value
VMware vRealize Automation 7.4 will introduce key innovations and improvements to help customers achieve consistent operations, greater productivity and faster time to value. This latest release will feature new modern consumption and service delivery capabilities, enhanced multi-tenancy and increased product integration including:

• New and Enhanced Curated Blueprints and OVF Files: This release will dramatically speed up application blueprinting by offering 120-plus free, curated blueprints and OVF (Open Virtualization Format) files out-of-the-box. VMware has teamed with Bitnami to add 20 new blueprints and 100-plus new OVFs of popular applications and databases such as GitLab, Hadoop, Jenkins and MongoDB to speed application development and deployment.
• New Custom Form Designer: This will enable IT teams to easily build rich service request forms for vRealize Automation 7.4 catalog items and reduce blueprint sprawl.
• Enhanced Multi-Tenancy Capabilities: The new release will introduce filter-based networking services visibility and filter-based infrastructure elements visibility per tenant as well as support the latest release of vRealize Orchestrator, which is now multi-tenant.

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager Now Extends to IT Content Management
Last September, VMware introduced vRealize Suite 2017 which took a leap forward in simplifying daily administration and operations of the suite with new built-in, automated lifecycle management of Day 0 through Day 2 tasks. The lifecycle management capabilities help customers speed time to value by automating the deployment, configuration and upgrading of products in the suite. The new VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 will extend lifecycle management to integrated IT content management across infrastructure and cloud environments. New features include:

• New In-Product Marketplace: This release will introduce a new and integrated “app store”-like experience for customers to consume out-of-the-box solutions from VMware and ecosystem partners. These solutions will span vRealize Operations management packs, vRealize Log Insight content packs, and vRealize Automation blueprints and plug-ins. Within the Lifecycle Manager, customers will be able to access, download, deploy and delete relevant packaged applications and content.
• New IT Content Lifecycle Management: This release will also enable IT content lifecycle management including automated release pipeline for content capturing, testing and deployment; storing and versioning of content via integration with GitLab; and, support for multi-developer use cases. The content management capabilities will allow customers to treat infrastructure content as applications and apply DevOps principles to manage vRealize content with speed, quality and consistency across multiple environments.

Today’s news bookends the recent VMware Cloud Services updates including the introduction of VMware Log Intelligence and enhancements to Wavefront by VMware and VMware Cost Insight. VMware is innovating across its cloud management portfolio while providing customers with choice of how to consume its offerings – as a service via a subscription model or on-premises via a license model.

Product Availability
VMware vRealize Automation 7.4, VMware vRealize Business for Cloud 7.4, VMware vRealize Log Insight 4.6, VMware vRealize Operations 6.7, vRealize Orchestrator 7.4, VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 are all expected to become available by the end of VMware’s Q1 FY19 (May 4, 2018).

Here’s some links with additional information from VMware:

• Read the What’s New in VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 blog post
• Read the What’s New in VMware vRealize Automation 7.4 blog post
• Read the What’s New in VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 blog post
• Learn more about the VMware vRealize Suite
• Keep up with VMware vRealize via the Cloud Management Blog

VMware and Carbon Black, the leader in next-generation endpoint security, today announced an expanded partnership that will help transform current approaches to cloud and data centre security. The companies have developed a new joint solution that will dramatically shrink an organization’s attack surface, while empowering security teams with automated threat detection and remediation to react faster and more effectively to attacks. Today’s announcement expands on a collaboration announced earlier this year, giving VMware AppDefense customers the ability to leverage Carbon Black’s Predictive Security Cloud (PSC) reputation services.

As applications become more distributed and dynamic, they have also become more difficult to secure. Traditional security solutions are not flexible enough to keep up with applications as they change over time, leading to breakdowns in security. The majority of attacks causing damage today are not simple malware easily rooted out with “known bad” signatures. They require watching behaviour of applications for any deviation from the norm. They hinge on attackers manipulating the executables, processes, and operating system of the endpoint itself. Identifying these threats requires a deep understanding of both application behaviour and threat behaviour, something that traditional endpoint security products don’t possess.

The newly jointly developed solution will combine VMware AppDefense and Cb Defense’s advanced threat protection to provide a unique one-two punch for stopping threats to applications inside the data centre. VMware AppDefense leverages the power of the virtual infrastructure to create least privilege environments around applications. It enforces system integrity using the hypervisor, provides visibility into the intended state and behaviour of applications, and monitors state and behaviour from a protected position. Cb Defense, running on the Predictive Security Cloud, provides a next-generation endpoint protection solution that applies behavioural approaches to detect threats. It uses streaming prevention to monitor for malicious behaviour on a machine to protect against malware- and non-malware-based attacks. The solution combines three key elements to advance cloud and data centre security:

Enforcing Known Good Application Behaviour: By leveraging the virtual infrastructure, the solution will have an authoritative understanding of how data centre endpoints are meant to behave and is the first to know when changes are made. This contextual intelligence will remove the guesswork involved in determining which changes to processes, executables, and operating systems inside a given data centre endpoint are legitimate and which indicate real threats.

Detecting Unknown Threats: The solution will leverage application context to perform advanced behavioural threat detection to provide additional protection beyond least privilege. Any threat that isn’t prevented by locking down the application’s behaviour will be picked up by Carbon Black’s Streaming Prevention – a next-gen threat detection technology that uses event stream processing to correlate multiple events over time to indicate the presence of a threat. Users will see threat activity in real time, visualize the attack chain to see exactly what attackers are trying to do, and respond immediately to shut down attacks in progress.

Automating and Orchestrating Response: Once a threat is identified, the solution will allow for the full understanding of application context during investigation, and again, will use the virtual infrastructure to deliver a library of responses, ranging from suspending or snapshotting a VM, to quarantining the compromised machine and performing forensic analysis.

The new joint solution will be generally available from Carbon Black in VMware’s Q4 FY 2018, which ends on February 3, 2018. Customers can learn more about this joint solution by clicking here. VMware and Carbon Black will be launching a 15-city tour to give enterprises an opportunity to learn firsthand how the new solution protects their virtual data centre infrastructure. Sign up to be notified of dates and locations here.

For more info, check out these resources:

• Link to blog on the partnership
• Learn more about the partnership landing page
• Webinar: Securing the Virtual Data Center with Carbon Black and VMware
• More on AppDefense
• More on Cb Defense
• Carbon Black Threat Report: The Ransomware Economy

Today at VMworld 2017 Europe, VMware unveiled new innovations to help VMware Cloud Provider partners migrate VMware workloads, expand service offerings to drive revenue and growth, lower cost through automation and more efficient operations, and create unique differentiation through VMware’s Cloud Provider program. Today’s news includes:

• Initial availability of VMware HCX technologies to enable multi-cloud and multi-site application migration and portability;
• Debut of VMware Cloud Provider Platform to address the strategic business imperatives of Cloud Providers globally;
• New VMware Cloud Verified Trust Mark and initial VMware Cloud Verified partners;
• Continued innovation and success of VMware Cloud Providers globally

VMware Cloud Providers represent more than 4,000 partners building services using VMware Cloud Infrastructure technologies, operating in more than 110 countries. VMware Cloud Providers give customers the flexibility to choose the ideal cloud provider based on the needs of the business and the needs of IT. Customers can select from a variety of offerings with the optimal set of services and expertise while also managing costs and selecting services that operate in required geographic locations. Through the use of VMware Cloud Infrastructure technologies, VMware Cloud Providers preserve a common operating environment, promoting more seamless portability of apps and interoperability between multiple clouds without compromising visibility, operations, automation, security and governance.

VMware HCX Technologies: Any Cloud to Any Cloud Application Portability

VMware HCX technologies delivers any cloud to any cloud secure, seamless interoperability and mobility, enabling large scale application migration and ongoing portability with zero application downtime or refactoring. Offered through VMware Cloud Providers and initially available from IBM, a key design partner, and OVH, HCX technologies enables customers to modernize data centres with the most current VMware SDDC offerings while maintaining business continuity, application uptime, network architectures and performance.

HCX technologies provides operational support to enable efficient cloud migration and protect the integrity of applications at the origination and destination cloud. Data synchronization, network extension, traffic engineering, automated VPN and WAN optimizations and built in security all provide the critical operational capabilities to ensure efficient and effective cloud migration.

VMware HCX technologies enables infrastructure hybridity. Customers can now securely extend data centres to the cloud while maintaining the same governance and control. The technology creates a secure, high-performance and highly reliable hybrid fabric that seamlessly interconnects multiple sites. It provides flexibility to deploy workloads on the cloud for regional and cyclical capacity, supporting bi-directional mobility, business continuity and disaster recovery.

VMware Cloud Provider Platform Drives Differentiation, Efficiency and Revenue

VMware Cloud Provider Platform enables VMware Cloud Providers to meet their critical business imperatives: drive operational efficiency, quickly monetize new services, and compete more effectively. Delivering flexible tenancy and self-service options at scale across multi-tenant and single-tenant cloud-hosted environments, the Cloud Provider Platform enables partners to rapidly deploy and scale up an environment upon which they can build their own value-added differentiated cloud services. VMware Cloud Provider Platform combines a core set of VMware’s industry-leading cloud infrastructure, with cloud provider management and operations software, and new a tested and validated Certified Reference Design, to empower VMware Cloud Providers with:

• Flexible, tenant-specific metering for subscription and on demand services
• Self-service multi-tenant compute, network, storage, and other infrastructure services
• Granular, role-based access per tenant to VMware NSX-based networking services
• Valuable ecosystem services through key vendors
• Lower OPEX and accelerated time to revenue

The Cloud Provider Platform serves as a seamless onramp for partners to adopt the newest innovations from VMware for cloud providers, including VMware vSphere, VMware NSX and VMware vCloud Director. The new Certified Reference Designs will establish performance benchmarks and tenant SLAs and provides hardware and software sizing guidelines for defined scale profiles. This accelerates time to value for cloud providers while improving service assurance and enabling better end customer satisfaction. VMware Cloud Providers can currently purchase platform components to deploy against the Certified Reference Design through the existing Cloud Provider bundles.

VMware Cloud Verified Partners Accelerate Customers’ Digital Transformation

To help customers identify a provider that can deliver services with VMware Cloud Infrastructure technology, VMware is announcing a new class of VMware Cloud Verified partners, signified by a VMware Cloud Verified trust mark. Providers carrying the VMware Cloud Verified trust mark have made deep investments in VMware Cloud Infrastructure technologies and are committed to offering key services and support on top of a common infrastructure. This new trust mark identifies VMware Cloud Providers that fuel business growth by driving innovation, improving efficiency and lowering costs for customers as they transform application portfolios for a multi-cloud, multi-device world.

The initial VMware Cloud Verified partners are CenturyLink, Fujitsu, IBM Cloud, OVH and Rackspace. The VMware Cloud Verified designation gives customers confidence that these providers are adopting the most complete, most advanced VMware technologies from their cloud service providers, assuring the greatest degree of interoperability across clouds and the greatest advantage for their business. VMware will continue to introduce new Cloud Verified partners over time to drive greater flexibility for customers in their selection of global cloud providers with consistent infrastructure and consistent operations.

Additional Resources

• Go to the VMworld 2017 Europe Online Press Kit
• Read an overview of today’s VMware news by Joe Baguley, Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, EMEA, VMware – “Accelerating Enterprise Transformation – A Perspective on VMworld 2017 Europe”
• Read more about: “How VMware Cloud Continues to Grow“, “VMware Cloud Provider Platform”, “VMware HCX technologies”, “VMware Cloud Verified”
• Connect with VMware on Twitter and Facebook
• Connect with VMware Canada on Twitter
• Learn more about VMware Cloud on Twitter and on Cloud.VMware.com

Today at VMworld® 2017, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) unveiled innovations that make VMware Workspace ONE powered by AirWatch the industry’s first unified end user experience, management and security solution for all endpoint platforms. Customers will now have the ability to use Workspace ONE as a single solution to enable unified endpoint management (UEM) and unify the end user experience across all endpoint platforms including Windows, macOS, Chrome OS, iOS, and Android. In addition, Workspace ONE will now uniquely integrate application programming interfaces (APIs) from major endpoint platform providers to stay in lock-step with the latest innovations in devices and applications.

Workspace ONE is the industry’s first digital workspace platform that uniquely integrates AirWatch endpoint management technology with end-user identity to deliver a consumer-simple experience with enterprise-class security. Workspace ONE will also extend the same experience and security to traditional Windows environments with VMware Horizon virtual application and desktop technology.

Bringing Market-Leading Mobile Experience, Management, and Security to Windows, macOS, and Chrome OS Platforms

Legacy methods of PC lifecycle management struggle to keep pace with the mobile workforce. Workspace ONE brings a modern approach and delivers a secure, full self-service experience to end users from onboarding to ongoing productivity, similar to a mobile experience. Employees can now receive a new laptop and be up and running in minutes with out-of-the-box enrollment and self-service applications. This new approach eliminates a complex, expensive, and error prone desktop management model, and security is strengthened with the ability to quarantine and update any device in real-time using the cloud. This same experience and security model is also available for Windows 10 and macOS with Workspace ONE.

Workspace ONE will also offer cloud-based peer-to-peer (P2P) software distribution technology to install large applications to distributed PCs at scale. This capability eliminates the need for costly branch office servers that requires silo-ed infrastructure management.

In addition, Workspace ONE is the first solution to manage Chrome devices making it the industry’s only digital workspace platform for iOS, Android, Windows 10, macOS, and Chrome OS. Partners like HP further validate the solution by powering the HP device as a service (DaaS) offering using Workspace ONE.

Transforming Traditional Windows Using a Modern Service Delivery Architecture

The only way to deliver traditional Windows applications as part of a modern digital workspace is to transform them using a service delivery architecture that has invisible infrastructure and fully-automated management.

Horizon 7 integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation™ and Dell EMC VDI Complete with Horizon Apps makes infrastructure elastic, integrating compute, storage, networking, and infrastructure management together. This eliminates the need for deep planning and operational visibility for infrastructure components. Together with Horizon Cloud, customers will now have options for elastic infrastructure for on-premises or cloud. Furthermore, management of Windows desktops and applications can be automated with the VMware Just in Time Management Platform (JMP) and a technology preview that integrates JMP platform technologies (Instant Clone, VMware App Volumes™, and User Environment Manager) into a single console, that will further simplify management.

Quickly Embrace Office 365 with Better Experience and Security

Customers want to adopt Office 365 quickly but are challenged with complicated provisioning and delivering secure experiences across all endpoint platforms. Workspace ONE will now give customers the ability to enforce and manage security policies and data loss prevention (DLP) alongside all of their applications and devices.

Workspace ONE Intelligence — Delivering Smart and Actionable Insights

Modern mobile workstyles create a massive challenge for IT trying to gain insight into usage patterns of applications and devices for informed decision-making. VMware Workspace ONE Intelligence is a new add-on service to Workspace ONE that will deliver comprehensive insights and automated actions to help accelerate planning, enhance security, and improve end user experience. Insight into application deployments, usage, device security, and end-user experience will help IT understand the performance and security of their digital workspace environments. In addition, a built-in rules engine will empower customers with automated actions that enable real-time security and performance optimization unavailable in legacy models.

Availability and Pricing

Updates to Workspace ONE in addition to Horizon 7 with Cloud Foundation and Dell EMC VDI Complete with Horizon Apps are expected to be generally available in Q3 FY18.

General availability for Workspace ONE Intelligence is expected in Q4 FY18.

Additional Resources

• Read a blog post on VMware Radius by Sumit Dhawan, senior vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware
• Read a perspective on today’s VMworld news from Chris Wolf, Vice President and CTO, Global Field and Industry, VMware, “Exceptional Developer, User, and Customer Experiences are the Keys Innovation and Productivity”
• More information and content is available in the VMworld 2017 Online Press Kit
• Visit the VMware AirWatch blog to learn more about innovations in Workspace ONE and AirWatch
• Visit the VMware End-User Computing blog to learn more about innovations in Horizon and JMP Technologies
• Learn more about VMware Education Services for End-User Computing solutions
• Follow VMware Workspace ONE powered by AirWatch on Facebook and Twitter

Follow VMware Horizon on Facebook and Twitter

Yesterday at VMworld 2017, VMware,  unveiled an expanded set of products and services as part of VMware Cloud that are available through VMware and partners. New and updated offerings announced today include:

• VMware Cloud on AWS is now initially available in AWS U.S. West (Oregon) region
• New VMware Cloud Services that enable end-to-end visibility into cloud usage, costs, and networks, with consistent networking and security across public clouds and on-premises environments
• New VMware Cloud Provider services and partner offerings based on VMware Cloud Foundation
• Expanded VMware NSX support of networking and security for clouds and cloud-native apps
• New VMware Cloud Provider innovations including VMware vCloud Director® 9.0

As enterprises begin to experience the benefits of their unique digital transformations, VMware is helping customers through their journey with cloud, mobile and security software and services that let them build exactly what they need, the way they need it, for today and tomorrow.

VMware Cloud on AWS Now Available

Yesterday, VMware announces VMware Cloud on AWS initial availability in the AWS U.S. West (Oregon) region. VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware’s enterprise class software-defined data centre software to the AWS Cloud, and enables customers to run applications across VMware vSphere-based private, public and hybrid cloud environments, with optimized access to AWS services. Delivered, sold and supported by VMware as an on-demand service, IT teams manage their cloud-based resources with familiar VMware tools. VMware Cloud on AWS is powered by VMware Cloud Foundation to deliver a complete set of software-defined services for compute, storage, networking and security in a single integrated stack, running on elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure. Read the VMware Cloud on AWS news release here.

VMware Cloud Services: Manage, Secure, Monitor, and Automate Cloud Infrastructure and Applications

VMware Cloud Services provide a unified approach to gain end-to-end visibility into cloud usage, costs, network traffic, metrics monitoring, and analytics, and deliver consistent security across public clouds and on-premises environments. By enabling IT organizations to manage and secure across clouds, VMware is helping IT organizations balance agility and flexibility with control and governance, across multiple clouds. Today, VMware is announcing its initial set of cloud services:

• VMware AppDefense: a data centre endpoint security solution that protects applications by embedding application control, and threat detection and response capabilities into the VMware vSphere-based environments on which applications and data live. By leveraging vSphere, AppDefense gains a deep understanding of the intended state and behaviour of the applications running on virtual machines and can detect and respond to unauthorized changes. With AppDefense, VMware is helping IT transform security by building on a virtualization foundation and moving to a new security architecture that’s intent-based and application focused. Read the AppDefense news release here.
• VMware Cost Insight: a cost monitoring and optimization service for public and private clouds that helps IT analyze cloud spend, find savings opportunities, and communicate the cost of services to the business. With Cost Insight, users can understand aggregated cloud costs and identify key cost drivers. Cost Insight provides granular visibility into public and private cloud costs so that IT leaders can map investments to strategic business priorities and ensure cost transparency. Read more about Cost Insight in this blog.
• VMware Discovery: an automated inventory service that improves cloud visibility and tames shadow IT by bringing together inventory information and cloud accounts from multiple clouds, making it easy for IT to search for and identify workloads deployed from their enterprise. Using native cloud tags and properties that have been identified, customers can group cloud resources even if they span across multiple clouds. With better organization of cloud resources, Discovery allows organization of cloud resources in ways that mirror business needs. Read more about Discovery in this blog.
• VMware Network Insight: a network and security analysis service offering purpose-built for public clouds and software-defined data centres. Network Insight provides comprehensive network visibility and granular understanding of traffic flows to enable cloud security planning and network troubleshooting. Best practices checks, an intuitive UI and search simplify VMware NSX administration, making it easier for cloud administrators to manage and troubleshoot NSX deployments at scale. Read more about Network Insight in this blog.
• VMware NSX Cloud: a service that provides consistent networking and security for applications running in multiple private and public clouds, via a single management console and common API. Micro-segmentation security policy is defined once and applied to application workloads running anywhere — in cloud virtual networks, regions, availability zones — and across multiple clouds. Overlay networking enables more precise control over topologies, traffic flows, IP addressing, and protocols used in public clouds. The consistency and control delivered by NSX Cloud enables IT to simplify and scale operations, improve standardization and compliance, and lower OPEX for applications running in public clouds. Read more about NSX Cloud in this blog.
• Wavefront by VMware: a metrics monitoring and analytics platform that handles the high-scale requirements of modern cloud-native applications. Wavefront by VMware’s speed, scale, and flexibility empowers DevOps, and developer teams with instant insight into the performance of highly-distributed cloud-native services. Wavefront by VMware’s analytics, query-driven alerts, interactive visualizations, open API, and integrations, all powered by a scalable time-series database, deliver “first pane of glass” visibility to help DevOps teams detect performance anomalies while enabling high availability of key cloud services. Developers can self-serve and adapt Wavefront by VMware analytics to the unique needs of their code while gaining visibility into its production behaviour. Read more about Wavefront in this blog.

VMware Cloud Foundation: Fastest Path To Private Cloud, On Premises or As A Service

VMware Cloud Foundation is the industry’s most advanced cloud infrastructure platform. It can be flexibly deployed on-premises or consumed as a service in the cloud, and used to run traditional and cloud-native containerized applications. VMware Cloud Foundation accelerates IT’s time-to-market by providing an integrated cloud infrastructure stack that includes a complete set of software-defined services for compute, storage, networking, and security. With new built-in lifecycle management automation, customers can eliminate the overhead of infrastructure-level Day 0 to Day 2 operations. VMware Cloud Foundation provides customers choice among a growing ecosystem of compatible public cloud services, turnkey integrated systems and certified server options:

• New cloud services — VMware partners delivering services based on Cloud Foundation now include CenturyLink (announcement), Rackspace (announcement), and Fujitsu.
• New Integrated systems — VMware partners announcing new solutions include the newly updated version of Dell EMC VxRack SDDC and the new releases of HDS UCP-RS, Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX and QCT QxStack.
• New certified servers — VMware is announcing an expanded list of Cloud Foundation certified server options from Cisco, HDS, Fujitsu, and Lenovo.

VMware NSX Momentum: Networking and Security for Clouds and Cloud-Native Apps

With more than 2,600 customers, VMware NSX is the network virtualization and security platform that is helping customers make the transition to the digital era. As developers increasingly use containers, and the percentage of workloads running in public clouds increases, VMware NSX is expanding to offer a full range of networking and security services, natively, in these environments. VMware NSX is the de facto network for the software-defined data centre, and a key component of VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud on AWS and multiple VMware Cloud Services. VMware Cloud Provider partners are adopting NSX to deliver services that unlock new revenue streams. Open and secure by design, scalable across different environments and delivered as code, NSX gives developers and partners the best environment to innovate on top of — while adhering to the needs and policies set in place by their business.

Building and Enabling The World’s Most Successful Network of Cloud Providers

Previously known as the vCloud Air Network, more than 4,300 VMware Cloud Providers operating under the VMware Cloud Provider Program provide tailored cloud solutions and services in more than 110 countries. VMware is delivering continued innovation for cloud providers including VMware vCloud Director, VMware NSX, VMware vCloud® Availability for cloud-based DR as a Service, and VMware Certified Reference Designs to enable delivery services to drive revenue and improve differentiation. The newest release of VMware vCloud Director 9.0 will enable easy and intuitive cloud consumption for VMware customers, and will provide simple and secure migrations of vSphere workloads to the VMware Cloud Provider environments. New VMware Certified Reference Designs for Cloud Providers help lower OPEX and improve time-to-revenue. Read this VMware vCloud Director customer success story.

Availability

• VMware Cloud on AWS is initially available in AWS US West (Oregon) region
• VMware Cloud Services including VMware Discovery, VMware Cost Insight, VMware Network Insight, VMware NSX Cloud, Wavefront by VMware and VMware AppDefense are initially available in the U.S. Visit http://cloud.vmware.com
• VMware vCloud Director 9.0 will be generally available in Q3 FY2018

Additional Resources

• Read a perspective on today’s VMworld news from Chris Wolf, Vice President and CTO, Global Field and Industry, VMware, “Innovation from the Data Center to the Edge to the Cloud”
• Go to the VMworld 2017 US Online Press Kit
• Read more about vCloud Director 9.0 here
• Read more about VMware Cloud on AWS here
• Read the AppDefense news release here
• Read more about Cost Insight in this blog
• Read more about Discovery in this blog
• Read more about Network Insight in this blog
• Read more about NSX Cloud in this blog
• Read more about Wavefront in this blog
• Connect with VMware on Twitter and Facebook

VMware has announced new versions of VMware Fusion solutions and the 10th anniversary of delivering enterprise-quality Windows virtualization on Mac. VMware Fusion 10 Pro, designed for technical professionals that want to build, test and demonstrate Mac, Windows and Linux applications on a Mac, will include advanced capabilities that continue to evolve the solution to support technical professionals and developers. VMware Fusion 10 designed for personal use, will offer Touch Bar support, enhanced GPU and 3D graphics performance, and an updated user interface (UI) to leverage the latest innovations in Mac. Together, the solutions will enable Mac users to take full advantage of the innovative features and capabilities available in Mac, Linux and Windows 10.

VMware Fusion 10 Pro – More Enterprise Capable Than Ever Before
VMware Fusion 10 Pro will provide the foundation of modern development and testing, enabling multi-operating system development, multi-operating system testing, and integration into DevOps/agile development workflows. Fusion enables IT professionals and developers to run virtual machines that are compatible with corporate data centres from a Mac to perform tasks such as data centre design and testing, data centre management, network design and testing, and application development and testing.

Support for REST APIs will offer a new interface for managing virtual machines (VMs) remotely and programmatically. This will enable developers and enterprises to integrate Fusion into a modern development and testing pipeline by performing VM operations including VM inventory management, VM power management, cloning, networking, configuration, and IP and MAC address gathering, among others. Developers will also benefit from integration with VMware PhotonOS that will support the most common container formats, runtime engines and scheduling frameworks for seamless migration of containers-based applications from development to production.

Support for Microsoft’s new Virtualization Based Security features, such as Credential Guard for Windows 10 virtual machines, unified extensible firmware interface (UEFI) Secure Boot, and a virtual Trusted Platform Module will add to existing security features in Fusion 10 Pro — delivering a more secure development environment than ever before. Enhanced networking controls will enable management of network address translation (NAT) rules, network packet loss and latency simulation, and renaming of VM networks for better organization. All this will be managed from a completely updated user interface that provides a more modern, informative, and streamlined experience for users.

Lastly, support for MacBook Touch Bar will enable users to easily access commonly used controls using the latest MacBook hardware features.

VMware Fusion 10 – Delivering Power and Performance to Individuals
VMware Fusion 10, a streamlined version of VMware Fusion 10 Pro, will offer seamless integration with Windows and Linux applications for a native Mac application experience. Advancements will include improved graphics performance and accuracy with Apple Metal technology, Touch Bar support, and support for the latest versions of Windows 10.

Availability and Pricing
VMware Fusion 10 Pro and VMware Fusion 10 are expected to be available in October for US$159 and US$79 respectively. VMware Fusion 10 Pro will also be available through VMware partners and distributors.

Customers who purchase Fusion 8.5 or Fusion 8.5 Pro between August 22 and November 1 will be eligible for an electronic upgrade to Fusion 10 or Fusion 10 Pro, respectively, at no additional cost. Learn more about the VMware Fusion Technology Guarantee Program here.

Fusion 8.5 customers will be able to upgrade to Fusion 10 Pro for only US$119 and to Fusion 10 for US$49 at the VMware online store or download a free trial.