Your VMworld US 2018 Recap, Announcements and Sessions

VMware took the stage once again in Las Vegas in August 2018 as another VMworld came and went which was loaded with announcements and content.  Lots of updates were shared for existing products as well as new products and even a brand new acquisition.  Not only were there lots of technical content and and update announcements, but there was also the announcement that VMworld will return to San Francisco in 2019 after three years in Las Vegas.  Read on for your complete VMworld 2018 recap.

The launch of vSphere Platinum will please the security-minded sysadmins.  This new edition offers some built-in security features including hypervisor on up to the application layer with the integrated AppDefense capability.  This edition touts more visibility and awareness of application and virtual machine behaviours and better discover and analysis of patterns to help lead to more secure virtualization and application environments.

vRealize Log Insight grew a new service offering buy adding Log Intelligence and the overall vRealize tools were rebranded as vRealize 2018.  Lots of tweaks and updates are featured from the 7.0 version of vRealize Operations to the more easy-to-install vRealize Automation 7.5 which many have been keen to see released.  Smoothing the install process has definitely been a goal of the VMware team and it’s proving itself out as more of the products get new wizard-drive deployments and a unified look and feel with the VMware Clarity UI.

The packaged and integrated VMware Cloud Foundation update to version 3.0 along with internal product updates and feature enhancements.  Private cloud packaging is much needed as the various tools and products that need to be integrated for a full private cloud usually leads to version issues and confusion by admins and architects.  VCF looks to remove the mystery and mistakes of past on-premises cloud products by taking the variables away.

VMware Cloud on AWS also got some updates as more regions are being announced and the pricing was reduced to help bring more customers on board the platform.  Services and integrations are already being added to help with migrations in and out of the VMC on AWS environment with many more options opening up as products like vRNI and Wavefront become more tightly integrated.

VMware Validated Designs were also strongly featured as a blueprint method to get the SDDC (Software-Defined Data Center) up and running for your environment.  These reference architectures offer a way to ensure specifications are met and results are assured when putting the more complex sets of VMware products together. The designs are validated along with interoperability testing by the VMware team and shared publicly to meet a number of different designs and use-cases.

Previous years featured updates on acquisitions such as Arkin (now vRealize Network Insight) and Wavefront, but VMworld crowds got a first hand view of the live announcement of VMware’s intent to purchase CloudHealth as a way to extend their reach into cost controls on public cloud platforms.  This will potentially become part of the vRealize set of tools in coming years but must wait out the official completion of the purchase and early integration work to see how it will all fit together.

Years past usually saw some announcements on EUC and the Horizon tools for the Barcelona event.  This year we saw a bunch of announcements including the update of Workspace ONE to version 10 and a number of customer stories that were shared on mobile device and remote worker use-cases.  VMware has come a long way from the early days where just linked clone desktops non-persistent desktops was considered groundbreaking news.  The Horizon side of the EUC product set mostly saw performance and tuning updates along with more integration across the identity management and generally Workspace management toolkit.

Just in case you missed a session live in Las Vegas, you can watch everything you ever wanted for your VMworld 2018 recap  at any time directly at the VMworld On-Demand Video Library site which even features previous years going as far back as 2014.  You can watch these sessions any time and it’s kind of fun to enter the wayback machine a couple of years and see some of the content that you may have missed in the past.  When the VMworld Europe event takes place in Barcelona November 5th through the 9th, those sessions will also be added to the video site, usually within a few days of the original presentation dates.

Hopefully you had a chance to see the event live, but the continuous availability of on-demand resources ensures that you can get caught up on what you missed and even pick up some knowledge in areas that you may not have thought you had enough time or interest to experience the first time around.  In this day and age it is very easy to get a complete VMworld 2018 recap from the comfort of wherever you would like.