Virtualisation giant VMware has today announced a range of product updates across its portfolio as part of its annual conference, VMworld 2020.

The news included a number of announcements regarding its security offerings - including the first products from its purchase of Carbon Black, teased at last year’s show - as well as an early look at what the company is calling ‘Project Monterey’.

“Organizations are introducing increasingly sophisticated applications from cloud-native to machine learning to streaming apps that are distributed and data intensive,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, VMware’s COO of products and cloud services.

“We’re announcing Project Monterey to help customers address the shifting requirements of next-gen apps. By re-imagining the architecture of the data center, cloud and edge, we expect to offer customers the freedom to run these apps in the best environment.”

There were also announcements concerning the company’s Tanzu container management platform, which celebrates its first birthday after its launch at VMworld 2019, as well as its software-defined networking portfolio.

Ironically for a company that was built on virtualisation, VMworld 2020 marks the company’s first fully virtual conference, after the ongoing COVID-19 crisis made its usual physical event impossible. CEO Pat Gelsinger is set to take the stage tomorrow for the general session keynote, and together with other members of the VMware executive team will share details of the company’s response to the pandemic and give an insight into its overall strategy.

The biggest announcement from VMworld 2020 concerned Project Monterey, a new feature for its VMware Cloud Foundation platform which will add support for SmartNICs in order to maximise application performance.

Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) are plug-in server modules that assume control of certain functions such as storage and networking I/O, freeing the server up from managing them and leaving it more processing power to put into applications.

The company is aiming to roll support for SmartNIC cards to VMware Cloud Foundation - its pre-rolled hybrid cloud package vSphere, vSAN and NSX designed to run on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware - but is starting by enabling its ESXi bare-metal hypervisor to run on SmartNICs.

In addition to this, the company is rearchitecting Cloud Foundation to increase support for server disaggregation and bare-metal infrastructure, enabling multiple servers to share hardware resources dynamically on a software-defined basis.

Security is another key focus of the project; because each SmartNIC will be able to run security software and firewall services directly on the device, customers will be able to deploy “up to thousands of tiny firewalls” to protect each individual service within an application, as well as isolate core infrastructure when used to deliver a multi-tenant environment.

The company says that because storage, networking and security is decoupled from the main server infrastructure, each component can be individually patched without affecting application performance or availability. The company’s NSX software defined networking product will be enabled to run on certain SmartNIC products, providing enhanced security, firewalls and air-gapping.

“Organizations are introducing increasingly sophisticated applications from cloud-native to machine learning to streaming apps that are distributed and data intensive,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, VMware's COO of products and cloud services.

“We’re announcing Project Monterey to help customers address the shifting requirements of next-gen apps. By re-imagining the architecture of the data center, cloud and edge, we expect to offer customers the freedom to run these apps in the best environment.”

Project Monterey is a technical preview, and as such has no confirmed data for general availability or wider preview. VMware aims to leverage a broad ecosystem of hardware partners to support the project, and is working with Nvidia, Intel and Pensando to support their respecting SmartNIC products, as well as working directly with hardware manufacturers Dell Technologies, Lenovo and HPE to create integrated HCI systems based on Project Monterey.

“At Equinix, our investments in SmartNIC and related proximity networking technology form an important part of our global, interconnected infrastructure strategy,” said Equinix’s managing director of Bare Metal Zachary Smith.

“We’re excited about the potential of VMware’s Project Monterey to deliver security and performance for next-generation applications while simultaneously unifying infrastructure and operations for our customers.”

VMware’s newly-unveiled Project Monterey may promise additional security, but SmartNICs aren’t the only way that the company is pledging to protect its customers at this year’s VMworld.

In the first major product update since the company’s acquisition of Carbon Black last year, it has today announced VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload, a new product that integrates Carbon Black’s AI-driven automatic detection and response capabilities with vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation to deliver agentless protection for workloads in virtualised, private or hybrid cloud environments.

The new service includes prioritisation tools built into vSphere Client which combine factors like CVSS scores, real-world attack frequency and exploitability. Risk visibility is also built into vCenter, mirroring what security operations teams would see in their Carbon Black Cloud console for increased visibility and a ‘single source of truth’. Workloads are protected via antivirus tools, workload behaviour monitoring and Carbon Blacks existing EDR capabilities.

VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload Essentials will be offered as an ‘unlimited’ six-month free trial for all existing vSphere 6.5 and VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 customers. The company has not confirmed any pricing beyond that, but expects the new service to be available in November, with a Kubernetes security module due the following month - likely integrated with Tanzu.

“Amid global disruption, the key to survival for many companies has meant an accelerated shift to the cloud and ultimately, bolting on security products in their data centers,” said VMware’s COO of Customer Operations, Sanjay Poonen.

“But legacy security systems are no longer sufficient for organizations that are using the cloud as part of their computing infrastructure. It’s time to rethink security for the cloud, organizations need protection at the workload level, not just at the endpoint. The future of cloud must be met with a better way to secure data and applications.”

VMware also announced that it is working on an ‘extended detection and response’ (XDR) platform which will include integrations across its Carbon Black Cloud, vSphere, Workspace ONE and NSX products. The project is described as a “multi-year effort”, meaning a preview release is unlikely to arrive sooner than next year’s VMworld event at the earliest.

Another of the company’s unified security efforts is its new secure access secure edge (SASE) platform, which wraps up a number of existing tools into a cloud-first package designed to appeal to enterprises who are struggling with the pivot to remote working.

The VMware SASE Platform includes a number of products within its SD-WAN portfolio, as well as VMware Secure Access, a new offering which combines its SD-WAN service with its Workspace ONE VDI platform to create a single package. In addition, its NSX Firewall product will be available through the platform on an as-a-service basis for both single and multi-tenant environments.

“As we quickly transitioned to a fully distributed workforce, it was critical for our security posture to align with the prominence of this moment and the critical role Zoom played in business continuity for our customers,” said Aparna Bawa, chief operating officer of Zoom.

“The collaboration with VMware delivers a more secure digital workspace and enables endpoints in our organization to be better safeguarded and compliant with IT security policies.”

VMware Workspace Security received some updates as well, with a new Workspace Security Remote tool for enhanced remote endpoint management, and a Workspace Security VDI offering which integrates VMware Horizon with Carbon Black Cloud, integrating it directly into the vSphere Hypervisor and VMtools for agentless protection.

A further new offering is the VMware Cloud Web Security service, which includes tools such as DLP, sandboxing, secure web gateway and cloud access service broker services - from Menlo Security, integrated at the back end and presented via single-pane-of-glass management. This is accompanied by a new partnership with Zscaler, which will integrate VMware’s SD-WAN and Secure Access products with Zscaler Internet Access.

VMware’s annual conference has today seen the announcement of a number of updates to its Tanzu Kubernetes management portfolio, which was officially launched at VMworld 2019 after being previewed as Project Pacific.

According to VMware, more than one million containers are being run in production via Tanzu, and the company is hoping to increase this with additional support from public cloud providers.

VMware Cloud on AWS now supports Tanzu, with preview support also introduced for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. The company also added that working closely with Microsoft to bring a similar preview to market for Azure users. Finally, a new integration has been introduced with DevOps platform GitLab - dubbed GitLab with Tanzu - to make it easier for developers to get Tanzu-enabled workloads into production.

Additional work has been done on internal integrations; VMware Tanzu Service Mesh has been hooked up to VMware’s Virtual Cloud network through its NSX software and the open source Kubernetes network tool Project Antrea, and includes new resilience and security capabilities.

For commercial customers, the company has also introduced VMware Container Networking with Antrea, which includes full support for Antrea, with all the signed images and binaries needed to run it with maximum peace of mind. It will be included by default with vSphere 7 with Tanzu and NSX-T.

VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network products, meanwhile, benefit from updates across security, networking and automation; the launch of VMware NSX-T 3.1 brings automated deployments at an increased global scale as well as improvements for disaster recovery, while its NSF Federation multi-site management platform has doubled in scale, with new API-based routing and multicast, and Terraform Provider support. vRealize Network Insight 6.0 is also being launched, which brings better visibility of deployments of VMware’s SD-WAN product in addition to new verification capabilities.

“Customers tell us they want the same level of automation they have in the public cloud across their entire environment. But while they can automate some parts of their network, other parts such as firewalls and load balancers still require manual tickets for provisioning. That’s why partial automation is an oxymoron; it’s a half-built bridge that does nothing to get customers to where they want to be,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, for products and cloud services at VMware.

“The VMware Virtual Cloud Network delivers the automation and economics of the public cloud across every element of the network and spanning the entire distributed enterprise at a time when agility and cost matter more than ever.”

New tools are being introduced too. Based on its acquisition of UK AI company Nyansa earlier this year, the company has unveiled VMware Edge Network Intelligence, a new AIOps product to monitor the performance of endpoints and IoT devices.

On the security side, VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention combines Lastline’s AI-based network traffic analysis capabilities with malware sandboxing and NSX Distributed IDS/IPS, which will give customers the ability to apply virtual patches at the workload rather than perimeter level.

“Our hardware-defined network architecture posed significant challenges to our aspirations to lead India’s digitized, mobile future,” said Manish Singh, general manager of Cloud Operations for Bharti Airtel, India’s second largest mobile operator.

"It could take weeks or months to complete global changes to switches, routers, firewalls or other network elements which could impact new service delivery or current performance. By moving to an automated and more secure VMware Virtual Cloud Network built on NSX, we have improved our agility by orders of magnitude, redefined our developer experience, and made security an intrinsic part of our infrastructure.”

Tanzu Service mesh and Container Networking with Antrea are all available now, while other products and services are expected to be available within the next month.

Chief executive of virtualisation giant VMware, Pat Gelsinger, has hit out at cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Facebook's Libra, arguing that their usage is unsustainable and fuelled by criminal activity, comparing them to opioid addiction.

As part of his opening keynote for VMworld 2019, Gelsinger touched on the idea that technologists have an obligation to make sure that the technology they create is being used for good purposes. He noted that while technology itself is neutral, it often leads to unfortunate outcomes if not closely monitored.

"[Blockchain has] given way to Bitcoin, which I will argue is bad. 95+% of its uses are illicit and criminal, and it is a climate crisis, consuming almost a household of energy for every single ledger entry. Bitcoin today is not okay. But the underlying technology is extremely powerful, and blockchain and distributed ledgers are not the problem."

Speaking to IT Pro, Gelsinger stated that although blockchain technology (of which VMware is a provider) can be a powerful enabler for more efficient currency models, there is no major world government that is going to "disenfranchise currency from their political and governmental control processes".

"As a result, what's it used for? 95% is criminal activities! So how can you call that good? If I turn the world into opioid addicts, right, and I made it feel a little better in getting there, was that good or bad?"

He also blasted Libra, Facebook's nascent cryptocurrency platform, which has come under extreme scrutiny from lawmakers and financial experts, including US treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, who called it a "national security risk". Gelsinger voiced similar concerns, declaring that the company lacked the credibility to undertake such a project.

"I'm not a Libra expert here," he told IT Pro "but I think Facebook has no credibility in the social domain, much less in the finance domain, to bring forward a new model of currency for the world."

VMware has announced a number of additions and updates to its networking portfolio, most notably in its SD-WAN and edge computing portfolio.

Debuted at VMworld 2019, and following yesterday's news around hybrid cloud and Kubernetes, the bulk of the updates concern the company's NSX network virtualisation products.

First up, the company's software-defined network virtualisation and security product, NSX-T, has been updated to version 2.5, which VMware promises will offer better scalability, native cloud security controls for public cloud workloads, improved multi-tenancy features and more optimisations for container workloads.

"In [NSX-T] 2.5, we've added performance enhancements for cloud-native container applications, we've introduced compliant certification for FIPS and other compliance requirements, and we've simplified operations with additional automation, higher level API's and some cool new dashboards and wizards," said Tom Gillis, VMware's senior vice president and general manager of networking and security. "Because that's really our goal was to try to let the computers do the work, and make this easier for the customers to deploy."

Accompanying this announcement is the news that the company is integrating a new distributed analytics engine dubbed NSX Intelligence into NSX-T. NSX Intelligence offers packet-level insight for containerised and virtualised workloads, helping security teams with detection, remediation and overall visibility. While this new tool only analyses virtualised workloads running in the data centre, it combines with the newly-updated vRealize Network Intelligence 5.0 (which now supports VMware SD-WAN and Azure) to provide a broad coverage from the data centre to the network edge.

VMware has also formally introduced NSX Advanced Load Balancer, a software-defined tool designed to offer extreme scalability and easier management, as well as new automation capabilities. The product is based on Avi Networks' core technology, which VMware acquired earlier this year, and is the next step in the company's mission to completely eliminate dedicated hardware from the data centre.

"You see these hardware load balancers, they're kind of like the last mainframe of the data centres; like, these rigid, proprietary systems. And the problem you have with them is that you have to provision for peak capacity, you can't provision them on demand. So it's a piece of very expensive 80% gross margin proprietary hardware, that most of the time is sitting there running a 5% utilisation," Gillis said. "So that's really what we're doing now, is replacing the last vestiges of dedicated hardware in the data centre. And it's not just a rip-and-replace it's an opportunity to really rethink how these services are delivered."

VMware's edge portfolio has also seen a few updates. The majority such as the acquisition of AI-based radio access network tuning company Uhana, or the release of VMware Integrated OpenStack 6.0 are geared predominantly towards VMware's telco customers. But one announcement that may be more relevant to general customers is the launch of an on-premise version of Pulse IoT Center 2.0, giving non-cloud customers more flexibility and functionality for managing IoT fleets.

The company also announced that the co-branded SD-WAN package created with parent company Dell has now been released globally, following an early preview of the product at Dell Technologies World earlier this year.

VMware has just announced a shakeup to its executive lineup, as CTO Ray O'Farrell transitions to a new role within the business.

Announced as part of VMworld 2019's final keynote presentation, CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed that O'Farrell will be stepping away from the position of global CTO and will be replaced in the job by senior vice president and CTO of cloud architecture, Greg Lavender.

"Ladies and gentlemen, it's my pleasure to introduce the new CTO for VMware and friend for many, many years," Gelsinger said; "an academic at UT Austin, and a longtime product guy at Cisco, and at Sun, a user at Citi and now part of the VMware family: VMware's new CTO, Greg Lavender."

O'Farrell has been with the company since 2003 and has led the company's technology strategy as CTO for the past four years, seeing the company through the Dell merger and its growing support for public and hybrid cloud.

The growing importance of cloud architecture has been a signature of O'Farrell's tenure as CTO, and will continue to be so in his new role. He will be heading up VMware's cloud-native division, working with projects like its forthcoming Tanzu family and PKS, as well as managing the integration of new acquisitions Pivotal and Carbon Black.

"You've heard us say how important Kubernetes is for us," Gelsinger said, "the Tanzu strategy that we've laid out, the Pivotal merger that we're working on aggressively. And I couldn't think of a better, more capable leader to bring these capabilities than our 16 year veteran. He's done products and code, and now CTO for five years; it's my pleasure to announce Ray O'Farrell as the leader of our cloud-native efforts going forward."

A significant part of O'Farrell's new role will revolve around the forthcoming acquisition of Pivotal, including the integration of Pivotal's existing portfolio into VMware's products and developing new products based on its technology.

"We already have several hundred people in [the cloud native applications] space and it's obviously the intent to acquire Pivotal, which will begin to change some of that as well. So we've got to work through all of that," O'Farrell told IT Pro. "My role is to make sure that we can bring this together in the best possible fashion and my role... is to work out how do we bring these products together and deliver products to our customers."

"I'm very clear on what I'm focused on in terms of driving the integration and driving towards delivering products which solve the problems we heard about on stage."

Time, as the saying goes, makes fools of us all. When I first sat down to write this column on Wednesday afternoon, it had been less than a week since VMware announced its intention to purchase fellow Dell Technologies brand Pivotal. While the news would doubtless be on everyone's mind, I assumed we wouldn't actually hear anything about it at this year's VMworld, and I structured my predictions accordingly. After all, I thought, surely they're not likely to close such a big acquisition in less than a fortnight.

Well, you know what they say about assumptions.

In what I suspect is a move designed specifically to make my life more difficult, CEO Pat Gelsinger has just confirmed that not only is VMware purchasing Pivotal (for the princely sum of $2.7 billion, no less) it's also snapping up security firm Carbon Black.

In light of these developments, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what the big themes of this year's show are going to be. While we probably won't learn too much specifically about how Gelsinger intends to integrate his new toys into the company the deals won't close until the end of January next year expect an update on VMware's strategy and roadmap with security and cloud at the centre.

In terms of specific product updates, public cloud is probably going to feature heavily. Last year's VMworld events (both European and US variants) saw the company announce deeper and more powerful integrations with Amazon Web Services across multiple products and use-cases, which is likely to continue this year.

Dell Technologies World in April also saw VMware and Microsoft surprise delegates by jointly announcing native VMware support on Azure. Expect more news on that front too, as the two companies deepen their partnership. If I had to guess, we'd bet that part of this will be an integration of some kind between Azure Networking and VMware NSX a product that will probably be the focus of a significant portion of VMware's show.

To round out the 'Big Three' public cloud providers, I wouldn't be surprised to hear more news about support for VMware on Google Cloud Platform, either. First announced late last month, the combination of VMware Cloud Foundation with GCP gives VMware pretty much comprehensive coverage of the public cloud landscape.

Moving on from public cloud, the general availability of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC the company's subscription-based on-premise data centre as a service offering is likely to be announced at the event, too. Also announced at Dell Technologies World this year, the service is scheduled for the second half of this year, but has yet to be formally rolled out to customers.

Regardless, the stage is set for a packed-to-bursting show. VMware has gone from strength to strength in recent years, cementing itself as the go-to virtualisation provider and proving its technical nous through smart investments in areas like software-defined networking and containerisation. With two more substantial companies being brought into the fold, we're interested to see where the company goes from here.

VMware's attempt to bring the benefits of the 'as-a-service' model to on-premise customers has officially been launched as an open beta at VMworld Europe in Barcelona.

First announced at VMworld in Las Vegas earlier in the year, Project Dimension is designed to leverage VMware's software-defined data centre portfolio to deliver a radically simplified deployment, management and operations experience to organisations who may have been devoid of some of the benefits of cloud-style operating models thanks to their desire to keep their infrastructure on-premise.

The offering will make use of hyper-converged appliances from VMware's parent company Dell EMC, as well as HCI hardware from market challengers Lenovo. This hardware, VMware says, will be 'zero touch', configured at the factory to the customer's specifications and self-connecting and self-configuring once plugged in in the customer's data centre.

"If you look at something like the hyper-converged systems that we have, they're typically redundant," said VMware CTO Ray O'Farrell. "You have three or four servers in there, so were able to deal with some [failures] in that way. Immediately what we need to be able to do is either predict that failure, or when that failure's occurring, to alert the supply chain, or alert the vendor in a way that makes good sense."

These appliances will run VMware's Cloud Foundation software (which has just been updated to version 3.5) combining vSphere compute management, vSAN storage virtualisation and NSX SD-WAN for networking.

This is combined with VMware's Hybrid Cloud Control Plane, which is usually part of Dell's SaaS offering. Infrastructure delivered as part of Project Dimension will be fully managed by VMware, including maintenance, troubleshooting, patch application and firmware updates.

According to O'Farrell, the main focus area for this offering is edge computing - a growing trend that Dell EMC and VMware have both been making a concerted effort to capitalise on in recent years.

"We are a very pragmatic company based on what do the customers want to do. So when we do something like this, it's because we're hearing customers saying 'I want to do something like this'," he told reporters at the conference.

VMware Blockchain goes into Beta

One of the other key announcements from the show was the official launch of VMware's blockchain product, previously teased as 'Project Concord'. First seen earlier this year as an open-source research project under the Apache 2.0 license, VMware Blockchain has been officially unveiled and launched into beta release.

Developed in partnership with parent company Dell, as well as Deloitte and WWT, the product is designed to allow "enterprise consortiums" to deploy fully-permissioned blockchain-based applications without having to rely on public blockchains like Ethereum.

The product will be delivered as a managed SaaS platform and will be integrated with VMware's existing tools and management products. It will also be supported on IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, as well as on-prem VMware installations and VMware Cloud on AWS.

VMware is deepening its partnerships with IBM and AWS in a bid to further increase the adoption and deployment of hybrid cloud. The company has also announced a number of additional partnerships and a new acquisition.

Announced at the company's annual European conference VMworld Europe, the biggest news was a tie-up with IBM, a company which itself shook the tech world just last week with the announcement that it was set to snap up open source giant Red Hat.

IBM and VMware are teaming up to launch a new fully automated cloud architecture based on minimising downtime for mission-critical VMware workloads across IBM Cloud's 18 global zones. Offered through IBM's Services division, the new architecture will include Intel Optane DC SSD technology, IBM Cloud infrastructure hardware and VMware's software-defined data centre products, aiming to offer customers 99.99% uptime for their essential workloads with automatic failover.

"We believe this a great game-changer for enterprise clients", said Arvind Krishna, IBM's senior vice president of hybrid cloud.

"The VMware and IBM partnership builds upon the strengths of both companies," VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said. "Now with the latest advancements in our relationship, we're making it possible for customers to move, modernise and operate any application - VM or containerised, traditional or mission-critical - in the IBM Cloud."

In addition, support was announced for a number of products within IBM and VMware's respective portfolios. For example, VMware vCenter Server deployments on IBM Cloud now support installation of IBM Cloud Private Hosted, and products under the IBM Cloud for VMware banner can now be integrated with IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, while vRealise Operations is now compatible with IBM Power Systems servers and IBM has certified VMware's NSX-T network virtualisation technology for use as an IBM Cloud Private network stack.

Of course, it wouldn't be an IBM announcement without Watson, and sure enough, Gelsinger announced that VMware would be integrating IBM's AI into its customer service portals to allow users to navigate through the support portal using natural language rather than impersonal drop-down interfaces, hopefully giving a better - and faster - support experience.

The two companies are even opening a 'Joint Innovation Lab', which will see engineers from both companies working together to collaborate on new products, solutions and technologies.

IBM wasn't the only company VMware was cosying up to, however; public cloud titan AWS was also singled out as a key partner, with Gelsinger announcing that VMware Cloud on AWS would be coming to 16 new regions worldwide over the next year. Ireland is first up in Q4 2018, followed by Paris in Q1 next year and Sweden in the second half of 2019, with the rest mostly spread across the APAC region.

Not only that, but the company is also expanding its AWS-based DRaaS offering VMware Site Recovery, doubling the amount of supported virtual machines from 500 per software-defined data centre to 1,000. It has also worked with parent company Dell EMC to integrate VMware Site Recovery with VxRail, the hyper-converged infrastructure solution co-designed by Dell and VMware. The integration will allow customers to quickly set up and enact failover from their VxRail appliances to VMware Cloud on AWS instances without having to reconfigure or modifying their VMs.

New features were also announced for VMware Horizon 7 installations running on AWS, and customers running VMware Cloud on AWS will also soon have access to customer support from within their VMware environments - a feature that VMware says it's planning to bring to the rest of its products at some point in the future.

There was a raft of smaller-scale partnership announcements too, including the integration of services from Okta, Carbon Black and Google into VMware's WorkSpace ONE VDI platform, which now also supports DeX-enabled Samsung devices like the Galaxy S9. Dell Provisioning for Workspace ONE is also now available as part of the Dell ProDeploy Client Suite, allowing customers to bolt additional deployment services onto their Workspace ONE provisioning orders at a reduced rate.

While not strictly speaking a partnership, one of the most interesting announcements was the news that VMware would be acquiring Heptio, a company specialising in Kubernetes tools and development that was founded by Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, two of the original founders of Kubernetes. VMware will be looking to use the skills and technologies that it acquires as part of the deal to improve its PKS offering, increasing its strength in the container space.

"The Heptio news this morning made my day," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. "Craig Mcluckie and Joe Beda were instrumental in the creation of Kubernetes and the founding of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. We are all happy for their success."

"Following so closely after the IBM/Red Hat news, this is yet another example of a large company that believes open source and open cloud computing are critical to future growth."

VMware has beefed up its hybrid cloud offering, announcing the release of VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 at its annual European conference VMworld Europe, along with updates to its Workspace ONE VDI platform and its VMware Cloud Verified programme.

Cloud Foundation 3.5 for multi-cloud complexity management

Designed to support hybrid cloud deployments, Cloud Foundation 3.5 introduces support for VMware's latest product versions, including the company's Kubernetes platform VMware PKS (through integration with VMware NSX-T 2.3), the latest version of vSphere, vRealize Automation 7.5 and vRealize Operations 7.0.

VMware's parent company Dell EMC is also taking the opportunity to announce a sneak peek at the Cloud Foundation software running on VxRail, the hyper-converged infrastructure appliance co-designed by the two companies.

It's unclear whether VxRail deployments will be supported by the time Cloud Foundation 3.5 launches (expected before the end of VMware's fiscal year in February), but it will be validated for use with Dell EMC's vSAN Ready Nodes running on the company's PowerEdge MX platform - Dell's recently-launched 'kinetic infrastructure' designed to support software-defined data centre projects.

It will also be heavily integrated with HPE's composable infrastructure, with customers able to manage hardware run by HPE Synergy Composer and OneView through VMware's SDDC Manager software. Customers can also deploy Cloud Foundation to the public cloud through some of VMware's many partners, including IBM and AWS, who VMware has just improved its partnerships with.

"Fundamentally, we see hybrid clouds as being driven largely by IT operations; proven infrastructure, production environments - and the public cloud are a range of consumers and more driven by developers and line of business," VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said during a keynote speech at the event.

"The VMware Cloud Foundation is essentially the full recipe for building a cloud environment. Virtualised compute, storage and networking with a layer of automation and operations - and as I describe it, the rule of the cloud: 'ruthlessly automate everything'. Every people operation becomes an automation solution."

Elsewhere, the company has also announced version 4.0 of its vRealize Network Insight product, with the ability to troubleshoot connectivity between apps in hybrid environments, as well as the connection between on-premise VMs and AWS EC2 instances. Support for Cisco ACI underlay and ASA firewall will also be coming in this new version (also set to release before February), alongside new visualisation features for NSX-T topology.

vRealise Operations will also be getting a new feature, in the form of Skyline Proactive Support. This automated support system uses gathered data to provide pre-emptive recommendations in order to keep customers' infrastructure ticking over smoothly, and also automates the process of uploading log files to VMware's technical support staff. Skyline Proactive support will be arriving early next year.

Endpoint device management with Workspace ONE

Workspace ONE has had a number of tweaks and tune-ups as well. Workspace ONE Intelligence, the analytics and automation component of VMware's VDI solution, has now been updated to support the creation of integrations with third-party systems like service desk platforms.

Workspace ONE also now supports Sensors for macOS, which allows Workspace ONE admins to query various details about Workspace ONE devices, like configuration, hardware and BIOS info. The feature initially supported Windows 10 devices when it was introduced earlier this year, but has now been expanded to support Macs as well.

Elsewhere, Workspace ONE's Boxer email client now supports G Suite email accounts, and Workspace ONe supports Samsung's DeX platform, meaning VMWare's VDI platform can be run on devices like the Galaxy S9 and Tab S4 while they're in desktop mode. Support for Flexera AdminStudio has been added too, allowing devs to export Win32 apps directly to their Workspace ONE catalogue.

"2018 has been a transformative year for our Workspace ONE platform," said the company's senior vice president and general manager for end-user computing, Shankar Iyer. "With today's announcement we continue to deliver new capabilities at a blistering pace that fully embrace the heterogeneity we see across customers in the industry today. And, we have no intention of slowing down."

VMware's virtual cloud on AWS

The conference was peppered with announcements regarding VMware's cloud partners, too. VMware Cloud on AWS deployments running the company's Horizon 7 endpoint virtualisation software now have support for Instant Clones and App Volumes, offering customers a maximum reduction in storage consumption of up to 80% and a spin-up time of around two seconds per virtual desktop instance.

VMware Cloud on AWS deployments of Horizon 7 will also be integrated with the company's Horizon Cloud Service for simplified monitoring and has teased that admins will soon be able to partially automate their installations of the software.

Finally, the company announced that the VMware Cloud Verified Partner programme has swelled from five companies last year to over 27 companies globally, including more than 12 in Europe. In addition, it is launching new VMware Validated Designs to help partners quickly deploy VMware-approved solutions and has announced the general availability of a number of previously-launched products. These include VMware Cloud Provider Pod, VMware vCloud Director 9.5, VMware vCloud Availability for Cloud-to-Cloud DR, and VMware vCloud Usage Insight Service.

VMware has put the future of its biggest announcement at VMworld Europe this year firmly in the hands of its channel partners.

The company's latest product, HCX, is a workload manager for the cloud, helping organisations ensure the portability of large-scale workloads between different clouds, as well as legacy systems.

CEO Pat Gelsinger, announced the new technology at VMworld in Barcelona, saying: ""HCX ... moves significantly beyond vMotion and gives a loosely coupled architecture that leverages the network overlay technology and allows us to connect on-premise, old environments to modern environments or to cloud environments."

The company has taken the decision to provide HCX exclusively through its channel partner network for the next year, with OVH and IBM being the first to partner with VMware to sell this product.

Speaking at the opening keynote of this year's conference, David Kenny, service VP of Watson and cloud at IBM, claimed: "It's going to solve so many problems for our customers. It's going to enable enterprises to scale up in a huge way."

Joe Baguley, VP and CTO for EMEA at VMware, explained: "For our Cloud Provider [Programme] partners, we're providing ... VMware HCX. That allows them to provide integration to a level that's never been done before with customers' private clouds, ultimately allowing them to [use] vMotion and move workloads backwards and forwards easily to all our VMware cloud provider partners as easily as they could do anyone else."

Gelsinger and other executives talked up the general importance of the VMware partner network during the conference as well.

Speaking at a press conference, Jean Philippe Barleaza, VMware's VP of partners and alliances, said: "We continue to be a fully channel-centric, partner-centric company. We do 95% of our bookings through our partners in EMEA, that's something that has been going on for years and we have absolutely no intention to make any change [to that]."

VMware has detailed changes to its partner programme that reflect the company's expanding technology portfolio.

Execs at VMworld 2016 last week reiterated how VMware was "in transition" as an organisation as it continues to absorb new technologies and expand beyond its core compute business.

"Everyone still thinks we [are] just a vSphere compute business - we are so much more than that now," Henry Godwin, VMware distribution manager for UK&I, told Channel Pro. "We've evolved significantly and we want our partners to come on the journey."

VMware made some changes to its commercial programmes earlier this year, including tightening up deal registration for faster deal approval, with greater protection for partners. "We know [the channel] bring a lot to us, and the way the programme works now it is very easy to track the performance of every partner," said Godwin.

VMware's technology portfolio comprises of three elements: compute, virtual storage and networking virtualisation, based around its vSphere, VSAN and NSX products respectively.

The vendor has 33,000 partners in Europe, and according to Jean-Pierre Brulard, general manager for EMEA, the transformation has spread out to its channel with "major adoption of the new technology, and new partners from the ecosystem of network and security". Indeed, NSX is the fastest growing product in VMware's history, with an estimated revenue run rate of $600m.

As such, the firm has introduced a fast track programme so new types of partners can bypass the traditional vSphere accreditation. "Historically you had to do a vSphere accreditation, even if you're a mobile partner," said Godwin. "We've now introduced fast track programmes - AirWatch being one - so they can become mobile competent without having a vSphere requirement.

"We're making sure the partner programmes reflect the fact we're not just a compute, vSphere channel - actually, a great proportion of our licence sales are not vSphere."

Despite the broadening of its tech portfolio however, the vendor maintains that vSphere is still a core part of the business. "We have got a focus on NSX, we have got a focus on EUC [end user computing], there's no doubt about that," said VMware UK general manager, David Phull. "But it's not to the detriment of vSphere. We've got specialist sales teams now focusing on network security and on end user computing, but it's to complement our existing portfolio, not to detract from it."