I have been very very busy with work and strategic leadership sessions which have kept me away from contributing to the community so let me begin with a huge sorry!

So VMworld 2016 – Be_Tomorrow is on and going and its really great to see VMware focus on IT transformation and hybrid cloud strategy to enable multi cloud “seamless” consumption – something few vendors out there offer and none is better than VMware themselves.

I am sure you heard about the new vRealize Automation 7.x release and the upcoming NSX features of multi cloud and hybrid cloud environments. This means you can use NSX to manage networks in Amazon and Azure! What you can also do is create “ONE” security policy that spans across all the clouds and automatically applies it! This means no going to each cloud platform to modify your policy – apply it in NSX and see it get enforced in AWS, GCP, vCloud Air, Azure and OpenStack! This is huge – unless you think security is not important – in which case you will be in trouble soon.

Horizon Suite has some major updates as well! Below is a grab from this blog site.

• Further enhancements to the protocol
• Improvements in the GPU-encode/decode that significantly lower bandwidth and latency
• Improvements in the JPG/PNG codec to reduce bandwidth utilization by 6x
• vRealize Operations integration with Blast Extreme.  I can now see Blast statistics in the vROPs console
• UEM Smart Policies Integration with Blast.  I can now use the same PCoIP smart policies to control the Blast protocol.  This enhancement also allows administrators to set per-device policies so I can set different policies for Windows, Mac, Android, and IOS.
• A Raspberry Pi client

vRealize automation features are awesome – The new 7.x version includes

• Improved Views – You can now see the IP Address of the provisioned VM in items view and change the All Services Icon!
• Improved Migration and Upgrades – vRA 6 to 7.1
• Out of the Box Active Directory Integration for provisioning
• Out of the box IPAM integration – Infoblox
• Portlets for external web content – Great for posting how to videos or company wide messages.
• Scale out/in -Support for elastic applications

And still in Beta and super exciting –

• Native Container Support
• Azure Endpoint – Provision to Microsoft Azure  (YAYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!)
• vRA Service Now integration – Use Service Now portal for vRA (I FAINTED!!!)

Pretty awesome right? Well there are more upgrades and improvements in the entire VMware portfolio so will blog about it soon.

And before I forget – we had a very successful book signing session at the Rackspace booth! Stop by and have a chat with me or other awesome folks.

Be_Tomorrow!