VMworld 2018: Techies Recap The News You Should Know

VMware made a host of announcements at VMWorld 2018, but the hottest news item of the bunch remains up for debate.

“I think their client computing play, their virtualization plays with Workspace One is interesting,” said analyst Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights & Strategy. “I’ve never seen a clearer presentation ever.”

The new release of Workspace One delivers improved security and employee engagement with next-generation automation and insight. Workspace One customers can now access pre-installed Win32 applications on Dell PCs. Plus, there’s new integrations with the Workspace One Trust Network that offers a new level of risk monitoring and rapid mitigation response.

[Related: Health-Care Industry 'Ripe' For VMware Partners To Sell vSAN, Hyper-Converged Solutions]

VMware also showed off a port of its bare-metal ESXi hypervisor for 64-bit ARM servers, something Moorhead said was the biggest announcement of the show.

“What that basically means is that instead of having an Intel microserver on the edge, you might have an ARM-based device out there. So, they must have been working on this for years,” said Moorhead.

However, for partners, the relationship with Amazon Web Services took center stage.

[Related: VMware Slashes Price Of VMware Cloud On AWS By 50 Percent]

“Bringing the elasticity of Amazon Web Services and AWS Cloud to native VMware environments is huge,” said John Drake, vice president of strategic alliances at Faction, a multi-cloud Platform-as-a-Service provider based in Denver.

The companies unveiled Amazon RDS on VMwareMonday, which they say will make it as easy to set up, operate, and scale databases on-premises and in hybrid environments as it is in AWS. VMware is also cutting the price of VMware Cloud on AWS in half in a market-shaking move that partners predict will result in a cloud computing channel windfall.

“They dropped the minimum requirements from four hosts to three. And if you look at it that way, it makes it a little more price-competitive to get into it,” said David Klee, founder and chief architect at HeraFlux Technologies, a global technology consulting firm based in Lincoln, Neb.

For more feedback from VMworld 2018, watch the video included in this article.