Couldn’t make it to VMworld this year? Not to worry, The VAR Guy is bringing you the highlights from each day of the event, taking place this week in Las Vegas. It’s the first time the conference has returned to Sin City in five years, having hosted VMworld in San Francisco since 2011.

VMware Tweaks Cloud Strategy with Cloud Foundation

In a world increasingly dominated by third-party data centers such as Amazon Web Services, VMware announced a new set of services it hopes will help it compete in the public cloud ecosystem. Rather than trying to compete with the established public cloud giants, the new services focus on facilitating connections between on-prem and public cloud platforms. Cloud Foundation provides the capability for customers to run computing workloads across internal data centers—a market in which VMware is a huge player—as well as public clouds such as AWS, Microsoft Azure or its own public cloud.

Cloud Foundation will utilize the same virtualization capabilities such as NSX and vSphere that VMware currently offers in its vCloud Air platform. But in contrast to vCloud Air, which helps customers transition from internal data centers to a public cloud, Cloud Foundation allows admins to run workloads across on-prem and public platforms. Essentially, partners can configure data center workloads based on evolving needs and greatly reduces the need to frequently replace hardware.

In addition to Cloud Foundation, VMware announced a new suite of cross-cloud services, which rounds out an improved approach to the software-defined data center. The architecture “enables consistent deployment models, security policies, visibility, and governance for all applications, running on-premises and off, regardless of the underlying cloud, hardware platform or hypervisor,” according to a VMware press release.

The company announced that IBM would be the first third-party cloud provider to offer Cloud Foundation, which is slated to be available in the third quarter of this year.

Michael Dell Addresses Concerns over EMC Merger

Dell CEO Michael Dell made a cameo appearance during the opening keynote by VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger in which he reassured partners that Dell has no intention of disrupting VMware’s partner ecosystem in the wake of its merger with EMC, VMware’s parent company.

“The open ecosystem of VMware is absolutely critical to its success,” Dell said. “We’re not going to change it.”

Dell praised VMware’s network virtualization capabilities and expressed optimism that they would help grow Dell’s footprint in the cloud marketplace. Combined with emerging technologies such as analytics and machine learning, Dell said he expects VMware’s robust partner community to help the new combined company, Dell Technologies, jumpstart new growth opportunities.

VMware Offers Free Fusion and Workstation Upgrades

One of the biggest sources of grumbling in the channel is the cost most providers charge for upgrades to products, which are necessary for system improvement and accurate vendor support for the latest operating systems. VMware announced that it will offer upgrades this year to Fusion and Workstation, including support for the latest macOS and Windows operating systems at no cost to existing customers.

In a win for providers frustrated by the headaches surrounding OS migrations, the updates provide a secure testing environment to ensure application compatibility and test system performance before deployment. Here are the details:

For registered attendees of this year’s VMworld., VMware is offering an 18-month version of Fusion or Workstation.