VMware enables a hybrid cloud platform powering next-generation hybrid IT

At VMworld 2019, VMware has introduced new and expanded cloud offerings that will help customers meet the unique needs of traditional and modern applications. VMware empowers IT operators, developers, desktop administrators, and security professionals with the company’s hybrid cloud platform to build, run, and manage workloads on a consistent infrastructure across their data center, public cloud, or edge infrastructure of choice. With a hybrid cloud platform enabled by VMware, customers can migrate and modernize applications across clouds, data centers, and edge locations, while simplifying cloud planning, deployment, costs and ongoing operations.

VMware Cloud unlocks the future of hybrid IT and helps customers meet application needs by delivering the hybrid cloud as a platform. VMware uniquely enables a consistent hybrid cloud platform spanning all major public clouds – AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud – and more than 60 VMware Cloud Verified partners worldwide. More than 70 million workloads run on VMware. Of these, 10 million are in the cloud. These are running in more than 10,000 data centers run by VMware Cloud providers.

Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, products and services, VMware, says, “Hybrid cloud is giving every organization the power to drive their businesses today, and the freedom to access incredible innovation for the future. No other vendor spans the hybrid cloud as broadly or as comprehensively as VMware. Our hybrid cloud platform is resonating strongly with customers and these innovations will further accelerate our cloud leadership, as we deliver an unparalleled level of consistent infrastructure and operations, from the data center to the cloud to the edge.”

Consistent Hybrid Cloud Operations

VMware Hybrid Cloud Operations simplify the way customers manage systems and applications through automation, cost management, compliance, resource governance, security and visibility.New advancements in VMware Hybrid Cloud Operations include:

* Self-Driving Operations: As customers deploy applications across hybrid clouds, critical operational tasks such as capacity planning, performance management, trouble shooting and enabling compliance to become challenging. VMware vRealize Operations 8.0 is optimized for the new world of hybrid cloud operations. It will deliver new and enhanced capabilities for self-driving hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) operations as well as multi-cloud monitoring. The latest release will deliver Intent-Driven continuous performance optimization, more efficient capacity management, intelligent remediation and integrated compliance and configuration. These capabilities will enable customers to manage multiple cloud resources and applications with the same software that they use to manage their datacenter. VMware vRealize Operations Cloud, a SaaS offering, is now in Tech Preview.

* Hybrid Cloud Automation: VMware vRealize Automation 8.0 will enable IT and DevOps to automate the self-service deployment and day 2 operations of complex applications, VMs and containers on any cloud. The solution will enhance operational agility and developer productivity through a series of new capabilities that will improve ease of use, user experience and multi-cloud readiness, with broad extensibility across VMware Cloud on AWS and all major public clouds, and enhanced ServiceNow, Terraform and Git integrations. The solution will be built upon a container-based microservices architecture that is easier and simpler to install, with improved performance and high availability. These services will also be available as part of VMware vRealize Automation Cloud, previously known as Cloud Automation Services.

* Complete Cloud Management Platform: VMware vRealize Suite 2019 software will integrate vRealize Automation 8.0 and vRealize Operations 8.0 to deliver advanced closed loop optimization capabilities that enable continuous performance optimization, simplify IT operations, and lower IT costs. The addition of VMware vCloud Suite 2019 Platinum in vRealize Suite 2019 will enable IT Operations teams to gain visibility into application context and behavior to accurately identify and eliminate legitimate threats in real time, while continuously hardening and protecting workloads.

* Hybrid Cloud Cost and Compliance: CloudHealth is a leading multi-cloud management platform for managing cloud costs, enabling governance and enforcing business policy. CloudHealth manages more than$8 billion dollars of public cloud spend at more than 5,000 customers. CloudHealth Hybrid is a new service that will extend the same rich cost optimization, migration assessment governance and security functionality that CloudHealth delivers to public cloud environments, to VMware hybrid cloud environments.Customers will be able to eliminate wasted cloud spend and provide users with reports on actual cloud spend (showback) through visibility into all cloud costs with cost/usage/performance data. CloudHealth Hybrid will enable organizations to accelerate migrations and optimize cloud infrastructure for each workload based on cost/performance. With the ability to create policies for proper hybrid cloud resource usage, and trigger notifications when policies are violated, customers will gain flexibility with guardrails to better prevent unauthorized services and security vulnerabilities.

* Enterprise Observability: Wavefront by VMware delivers integrated, full-stack enterprise observability from application to infrastructure across any cloud, empowering DevOps, Kubernetes and container operations, and development teams to troubleshoot application workloads and get to root cause faster. With a new enterprise-wide dashboard UX, Wavefront simplifies troubleshooting and reduces incident remediation times through automation triggered by fine-grained alerts. Kubernetes monitoring is enhanced with automatic service discovery for Kubernetes environments, including the discovery of application and infrastructure components allowing the setup of default dashboards. Wavefront can observe and help enable operation of more than 200,000 concurrently running containers. Wavefront is also strengthening applications observability with the addition of trace logs to distributed tracing offering. This provides instant insights into the health and performance of Kubernetes, containerized applications and microservices at scale.

* VMware Cloud Marketplace, powered by Bitnami: VMware Cloud Marketplace enables customers to discover and deploy validated, third-party solutions for VMware platforms, across public, private and hybrid cloud environments. The marketplace is now available for VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud Provider Partners. From the entire catalog – which also includes hundreds of open-source solutions packaged by Bitnami – customers can browse, filter and select the specialized tools that are right for them. For vendors, it offers a way to easily publish solutions for VMware customers globally, and for multiple VMware platforms. Currently, VMware Cloud Marketplace meets a variety of common use-case requirements such as back-up and security, through third-party ISV solutions and popular open-source options.

* Cloud Migration: VMware HCX is the leading application mobility platform that enables cloud mobility and migration for a variety of on-prem to on-prem, on-prem to cloud, or cloud to on-prem scenarios. Cloud Migration Services, built on VMware HCX, simplifies the complex tasks associated with identifying, planning and migrating workloads to any hybrid cloud. A new Cloud Migration experience is available on VMware Cloud on AWS today through the Cloud Console, and over time other workflows are planned to be available on VMware Cloud on AWS as well as other platforms such as VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts and VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.

* Disaster Recovery as-a-Service and Data Protection: VMware is partnering with Dell EMC across multiple areas to bring customers greater choice in Disaster Recovery as-a-Service and Data Protection solutions. Initially the companies will collaborate on a new DRaaS solution using AWS S3 for VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware and Dell EMC will also collaborate to enable Dell EMC to offer best in class data protection solutions for VMware workloads running at the edge, core and cloud.

* Proactive Support: VMware Skyline, developed by VMware Global Services, is a proactive support technology available to customers with an active Production Support or Premier Services contract. Skyline automatically and more securely collects, aggregates and analyzes customer-specific product usage data to proactively identify potential issues and improve time-to-resolution. Skyline has added new proactive support enhancements including automated software compatibility checks, automated log bundle upload for Horizon 7.10 and above via Log Assist, and integration with Dell EMC Support Assist, enabling a richer proactive support experience for customers running VMware and Dell. VMware Skyline is included with customer’s Production and Premier Support subscriptions. Premier Support customers will have access to advanced reporting features and remediation support from dedicated support representatives.

Consistent Cloud Infrastructure Across Data Center, Cloud and Edge

VMware Cloud Foundation enables a hybrid cloud platform that spans all major public clouds – AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud – and more than 60 VMware Cloud Verified partners worldwide. Today, VMware is announcing -

* VMware Cloud on Dell EMC: VMware Cloud on Dell EMC provides simple, more secure and scalable infrastructure delivered as-a-service to customers’ on-premises data center and edge locations, this co-engineered offering from VMware and Dell Technologies is now available in the U.S. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is core to the Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service solution, unveiled at Dell Technologies World 2019. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC consists of VMware’s high-performance compute, storage and networking software powered by VMware vSphere, vSAN and NSX tightly integrated with Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure, and delivered as a service. The cloud service is fully managed by VMware and combines public cloud simplicity, agility and economics with the security, control and performance of on-premises infrastructure.

* VMware Cloud on AWS: VMware Cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered service that brings VMware’s enterprise class Software-Defined Data Center software to the AWS Cloud, delivered as an on-demand service with optimized access to AWS services, enabling IT teams to leverage the best of both worlds. This release focuses on migrating and modernizing workloads. New VMware HCX capabilities enable push-button migration and inter-connectivity between VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs running in different AWS Regions and new Elastic vSAN support further improves storage scaling. Once applications are migrated, customers can extend the capabilities of applications through integration of native AWS Services. In the future, through innovative technology, such as Bitfusion and partnerships with industry leaders such as NVIDIA, customers will be able to enrich existing applications and power new modern enterprise applications, including AI, machine learning, and data analytics workflows, through best-in-class GPU acceleration services.

* VMware Tanzu: This new portfolio of products and services is designed to transform the way enterprises build software on Kubernetes. The first offering in the VMware Tanzu portfolio will be VMware Tanzu Mission Control. A tech preview, Tanzu Mission Control will enable customers to manage their Kubernetes footprint across environments with complete consistency. VMware also announced a tech preview of Project Pacific, which is focused on transforming VMware vSphere into a Kubernetes native platform in a future release. This will enable enterprises to accelerate development and operation of modern apps on vSphere while continuing to take advantage of existing investments in technology, tools and skillsets.

* Foundation for the Hybrid Cloud: VMware vSphere and vSAN are building blocks of VMware Cloud Foundation-the industry-leading solution for hybrid cloud that expands the definition of HCI by unifying the essential cloud infrastructure capabilities of compute, storage, networking and integrated cloud management. VMware recently made available new releases of vSphere and vSAN which together power the industry’s leading hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions. VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 3 delivers capabilities to further simplify operations and enhance performance of the platform. The release introduced new support for multiple NVIDIA GRID virtual GPUs (vGPU) per virtual machine to enable more graphics and compute intensive workloads to run on the platform. Additionally, the new release is now compatible with the second generation of AMD EPYC processors. VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 3 delivers container-ready infrastructure through its new Cloud Native Storage (CNS) to support agile, next-gen application development and enhancements to management for consistent operations across hybrid clouds.

Customer Commentary

* 8x8 Inc. is a leading Software-as-a-Service provider of voice, video, chat, contact center, and enterprise-class API solutions for all sized businesses.

* Boys Town is an American institution that has helped tens of thousands of at-risk young people over the course of its 100+ year history.

* Cerner has a broad range of services that enables organizations to form a relationship designed to help them receive great value from their solutions.

* Cox Automotive is a leading provider of products and services that span the global automotive ecosystem.

* GILAI is an IT service provider to Switzerland’s disability benefits agencies, serving more than 80 percent of the country’s market.

* SugarCreek manufactures brand worthy food solutions for the nation's largest and best-known brands.

Availability

VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 3, VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 3, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, VMware Cloud Marketplace and the new Wavefront capabilities are available. VMware vRealize Operations 8.0, VMware vRealize Automation 8.0, VMware vRealize Suite 2019, CloudHealth Hybrid, and the updates to VMware Cloud on AWS will be available in Q3 FY2020 which ends on November 1, 2019.