VMworld 2020! It was a success. I enjoyed it even though it was online. I have gotten the premier pass to enjoy and interact with few vExperts and Round Tables.
This years VMworld was deep diving into Networking and Security. With Cyber Security being the most important and crucial portion of any organization. Data is increasingly getting distributed with all the data points around the globe from edge locations to data centers. Security will always be the #1 priority to ensure that personal or sensitive data does not get into hands of hackers or malicious users.
Few interesting key points pulled from VMware’s Website
The key components of the VMware SASE solution include:
- VMware SD-WAN, our industry leading platform for transforming wide area networking.
- Cloud Access Service Broker (CASB), Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and remote browser isolation via our new collaboration with Menlo Security. These offerings will be sold and supported by VMware.
- VMware NSX Stateful Layer 7 Firewall SaaS offering.
- Zero Trust Network Access, which leverages VMware SD-WAN and VMware Workspace ONE in an integrated offering to provide optimal performance and policy-based access centered on the user and device identity for each connection.
- Edge Network Intelligence, which is the integration of the technology we acquired from Nyansa. The solution uses machine learning-based predictive analytics to ensure SLAs are met, along with providing security and visibility to end-user and IoT devices.
While the SASE announcement is big news, there are several additional security announcements that I believe you’ll find of interest:
- VMware Workspace Security VDI: VMware Workspace ONE Horizon and VMware Carbon Black Cloud are integrated into a single unified solution that leverages behavioral detection to protect against ransomware and file-less malware. On VMware vSphere, the solution is integrated into VMware Tools, removing the need to install and manage additional security agents.
- VMware Workspace Security Remote: An integrated solution that provides endpoint management, endpoint security and remote IT for physical Mac and Windows 10 devices. The solution includes the next-generation antivirus, audit and remediation, and detection and response capabilities of Carbon Black Cloud. It also includes the analytics, automation, device health, orchestration, and zero-trust access of the Workspace ONE platform.
- VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload: Agentless security for virtual machines on vSphere—the realization of the vision that we articulated at VMworld 2019. This solution makes it much easier for infrastructure operations and security operations to collaborate.
Security risk visibility is now built into VMware vCenter, providing the same visibility as seen in Carbon Black Cloud, thus streamlining collaboration and more proactive threat remediation. Security is now dynamically ingrained in the VM lifecycle as a part of VMware Tools, making security intrinsic to the infrastructure.
We also plan to introduce a Carbon Black Cloud module for hardening and better securing Kubernetes workloads, giving security teams policy governance and control of their Kubernetes environments. - VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention brings the technology from our recent Lastline acquisition to the VMware NSX Service-defined Firewall. This solution is the only purpose-built, distributed, scale-out firewall designed to protect east-west traffic across multi-cloud environments. Lastline integration into the service-defined firewall uses unsupervised and supervised machine learning to identify threats and minimize false positives, with the ability to apply virtual patches at every workload and not just at the perimeter—an industry first.
We also announced several new capabilities across our network portfolio:
- VMware Container Networking with Antrea: A commercial offering consisting of signed images and binaries and full support for open source Project Antrea. VMware Container Networking with Antrea will be included in VMware NSX-T and vSphere 7 with Tanzu. While Antrea can get you started, when you look to scale container networking across clusters, NSX-T will get you there.
- NSX-T 3.1: New API-driven advanced routing and multicast capabilities, along with automated deployment of workflows through Terraform Provider.
- VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.0 Network Assurance and Verification: Now leverages formal verification to gather network state build and model how the network functions. The model is then used to provide continuous verification of business policies across virtual, physical, and multi-cloud networks. This allows IT and network operations to discover potential brownouts before they occur.
Source: https://www.vmware.com/company/news/updates/2020/vmworld-2020-news-announcement-summary.html
Overall, VMworld 2020 was a huge success, i enjoyed it. I do miss being in the physical conference and interacting with hundreds of people and meeting new friends. I sadly do not have any pictures to provide for this years VMworld!