My takeaways from VMware Explore 2022 in Barcelona.

After two years of the pandemic, finally I was able to participate in the VMware Explore conference in Barcelona. VMware Explore formerly known as VMworld is a global multi-cloud conference, hosted by VMware.

For me personally, the most valuable aspect of attending was finally meeting so many people with whom I have been working very closely over the past years. It was amazing to meet fellows vExperts and members of vCommunity and VMware Champions.

Of course, at the top of the mind of everyone is cloud transformation and how to change the current approach which is called “cloud chaos” also known as “cloud-first” to the state of “cloud-smart”. With a “cloud-smart” approach, organizations can capitalize on technological advancements that increase agility while decreasing costs—and reap the full benefits of the cloud.

As we all know today’s IT is full of dangerous things and malicious actors waiting to get into our networks and mine our data. Hence the conference was heavy on the security. My takeaway from the sessions I participated in was the conclusion that NSX and Carbon Black could potentially replace firewall solutions like for example Panorama from Palo Alto.

The sessions I was taking part of:

Enforcing a Strong Zero Trust Ransomware Defense
Multi-Cloud Network and Security with NSX
Use Zero Trust Principles to Protect your VMware Infrastructure
Delivering Ransomware Protection
Detecting Advanced Threats with VMware NSZ Network Detection and Response

As you already know the vRealize Suite has been renamed to Aria. The big announcement during the conference in Barcelona was a free tier of VMware Aria Hub. With the new free tier, you may inventory, map, filter, and search resources from up to two of your native public cloud accounts, which can be either from AWS or Microsoft Azure for now. VMware Arial Hub assists you in understanding the relationships between your resources, policies, and other critical components in your public cloud and Kubernetes environments. You also have access to CIS benchmark violation data from VMware Aria Automation for Secure Clouds, as well as list price costing for resources from VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth. If you are interested in more details please click this link.

Once Aria was announced back in VMware Explore US, my initial thoughts ( and not only mine, as I spoke to many people and they had the same association) were that name has to do something with Game of Thrones ( I know different spellings, but still… )

But we all were wrong! As music definition of Aria is a self-contained piece for one voice, with or without instrumental or orchestral accompaniment, normally part of a larger work. And this is how the VMware engineers see the vRealize Suite.

VMware has a history of using subtle musical references in internal project naming, and with the announcements of Aria Hub and Aria Graph, this name begins to make more sense. That is a hub of self-contained pieces for one voice.