General Session, Day 2: VMworld 2015
Enterprise software vendor VMware kicked off its big annual VMworld conference in San Francisco with several news announcements, from new open-source tools to a new “intelligent automation engine” for making the best use of companies’ data center equipment.
We started with another jolly video featuring everyone’s friend, Nigel McCloud — who, by the way, now has a twitter account: @NigelMcCloud… just so you can keep in touch.
The session then began in earnest, starting with a focus on EUC, and reinforcing the theme of one, unified hybrid cloud — for any app.
A VMworld first — someone from Microsoft ventured on stage — Enterprise and Security VP, Jim Alkove. This introduced the demo of a physical Windows 10 machine being managed by VMware Airwatch. As you may remember, the demo last year showcased App Volumes being connected to a Horizon VDI instance — this time we saw the same thing, but using a physical Windows 10 client. This included the import of applications from a System Center repository, which then became App Volumes — useful for legacy apps.
The mix of Airwatch and App Volumes forms VMware’s Project A2, now in Tech Preview, which offers features such as configuration without re-imaging, a unified app catalog, SSO to these corporate apps, and so on?—?click here for more information.
We then moved onto integration with NSX, and saw a neat demo of the Airwatch policy engine integrating with the NSX policy engine — the result being that if a device moved out of compliance, access to specific apps could then be restricted. There was also a brief mention of the new features available in NSX 6.2.
Cross-vCenter NSX is a key new feature — Universal Policies can be created that span multiple vCenters, as can Universal Logical Switches — so the layer-2 domain can span different vCenters too. If you’d like to read more, the release notes for VMware NSX 6.2 are found here!
We finished with a thoughtful talk from Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO (also now on Twitter by the way — @PGelsinger) — full of interesting nuggets of information, such as that the app industry is now bigger than Hollywood!
After touching on subjects such as the future of the automation industry, and an interesting prediction that in the next decade, it is expected that 40% of the S&P 500 will be no more the talk ended back at the theme of the conference — that we are entering the professional era of cloud, with one unified hybrid cloud. And one ring to rule them all. No, wait — just the cloud thing 🙂
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