VMworld 2013 Europe: Desktone aquisition, NSX General Availability and EUC goodness!

It’s that time of year again with VMworld 2013 in Barcelona kicking off. There is a lot of excitement as the attendees descend upon the floor in Barcelona, and the announcements have already started to kick off for some news that has come from the keynote.

VMware Acquires Desktone

This is an interesting buy for VMware which is mean to augment their VMware Horizon Suite for on-premises deployments to allow the extension of VDI environments into the cloud. The DaaS (Desktop-as-a-Service) offering from Desktone is targeted toward businesses who have elastic desktop virtualization needs to be able to leverage cloud resources for scalability.

One of the key features that Desktone touts is the use of open source technology to delivery VDI hosting which targets the “Microsoft Tax” that is often seen as a barrier to deploying desktop virtualization. I feel that this is less important than the methodology that is being introduces which is the real win for what Desktone can bring to VMware. It will be interesting to see this unfold over the coming months.

The full press release is here: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-euc-daas-10-15-13

VMware NSX is in General Availability

Not that it was a massive surprise to see this come, but the GA release of VMware NSX was announced at Barcelona. I did a little last-minute prediction Sunday for this one which turned out to be true 🙂

The release was scheduled for “Q4 2013” so it seemed appropriate that they package their release announcement along with their European VMworld conference since the timing was there.

What this means for consumers is that they can now build the VMware NSX product into their production builds if they are ready. The pricing and download are yet to be announced, but that should come within a few hours of the keynote once all the dust settles on the announcements and press releases.

vCloud Automation Center 6.0 Announced

The vCAC 6.0 edition was announced today and what is exciting about this, other than the increase amount of automation awesomeness that comes along with it, is the deployment model. With vCAC 6.0 we will now be able to deploy the self-service portal and the Application Director as virtual appliances! If you’ve ever deployed these components in the past, you will know that there is often some serious yak shaving needed to get these components up and running.

More vFabric integration is really slick for those who use the vFabric suite today because you can now manage the vFabric application deployments using vCAC through the native Application Director connection. Very cool news.

vCAC for NSX and vCHS

This is the really cool feature to me! The addition of support for VMware NSX and VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) orchestration is going to the cherry on top. The vCAC toolkit is really great as it is, but the challenge for jumping to it from vCO (vCenter Orchestrator) is the pricing. While vCO is free, the vCAC (pronounced vee-Cake for those who didn’t kn0w) product line is much more full-featured and you will see the inevitable push to this platform in the coming months.

End-User Computing Focus at Barcelona

I’ve typically seen a lot of focus on EUC (End User Computing) at the Barcelona event. This year is no different as there are some great EUC features coming. The integration of

VMware Horizon View 5.2 Interface Update

Better graphics delivery thanks to the Nvidia GRID technology will be a big win for better delivery of high-resolution, 3D graphics, and dynamic applications using VMware Horizon View. This is one of the key markets that VDI has been challenged by, so we will see how the improvements increase the adoption for these types of applications.

Android Support Growth

There are now more Android devices supported for use with VMware Horizon View and the full support of iOS7 is also a part of the updates. You can even use the Google Chromebook thanks to the HTML5 browser support, although the more likely target for that is Windows 8.1 clients. I like the idea of the Chromebook as much as the next person, but it’s not quite a typical client device.

There will be some more news coming in the next few days I’m sure, but this is a pretty good start to get us salivating for the new updates. The VMware Horizon View updates are scheduled for sometime in Q4.

General Session Available for Public Viewing

You can watch the general session from Monday here: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/europe/learn/generalsessions?sf18340226=1 and there is also a link for the Day 2 keynote presentation which will take place on Tuesday.

 

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