VMware Empowers Customers to Build their Multi-Cloud Future

This week at VMworld 2020, VMware, Inc. announced new innovations to help customers build, run, manage, connect, and protect any app on any cloud. Today, more than 15 million enterprise workloads run on VMware in the cloud, and more than 4,300 partners offer VMware-based cloud services. This includes all major public cloud providers. With these new and updated offerings, customers and partners can unlock multi-cloud’s full potential value by providing more developer freedom while providing IT with consistent and efficient security and operations.

The company also announced its intent to acquire SaltStack, a pioneer in building intelligent, event-driven automation software. Following close, SaltStack will enable VMware to significantly broaden its software configuration management and infrastructure and network automation capabilities. 

At VMworld 2020, VMware is delivering a range of solutions and services to help customers survive and thrive in the most turbulent market in generations. VMware’s cloud, app modernization, networking, security, and digital workspace platforms form a flexible, consistent digital foundation on which to build, run, manage, connect and protect applications, anywhere. Applications are at the heart of digital transformation. They enable businesses to deliver powerful and personalized digital experiences to customers and employees. The complex and diverse needs of applications drive the need for multi-cloud strategies. VMware helps organizations at all points in their multi-cloud journey.

“VMware has reached a major milestone in its plan to unlock the power of every cloud for every business. We now support customers’ application strategies by delivering VMware-based services on every major public cloud provider and hundreds of VMware Cloud Verified partners worldwide,” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, products and cloud services, VMware. “As we drive our strategy forward, we are expanding our portfolio of cloud infrastructure, operations, and security services to enable faster application migration and modernization, and better business agility and resiliency.”

Delivering a Unified Platform for a Modern, Multi-Cloud World

VMware supports organizations across all clouds and all application types. The company offers a complete cloud portfolio that delivers consistent infrastructure and operations and enables a flexible and agile developer model. At VMworld, VMware is announcing:

• Migrating and Modernizing Apps on VMware Cloud on AWS: VMware Cloud on AWS momentum continues to grow. As of August 2020, total VMs are up 140% and the total number of hosts are up 130% year over year on VMware Cloud on AWS. More than 600 channel partners have achieved a VMware Cloud on AWS service competency, and there are 300+ certified or validated technology solutions available to VMware Cloud on AWS customers. Working with AWS, VMware’s preferred public cloud partner for vSphere-based workloads, VMware is delivering innovations that will give customers more capabilities to deploy, move, connect, and protect applications at scale. Support for VMware Tanzu centralizes operations and management of Kubernetes clusters. VMware Transit Connect provides simple, consistent networking and security across different cloud environments. VMware HCX enhancements make planning and executing zero downtime mass application migrations easier. Broadened support for VMware vRealize Cloud Management services improves IT agility and maximizes uptime and performance, while new and expanded disaster recovery capabilities help minimize business disruptions. The new i3en.metal instance delivers four times the raw storage capacity at roughly half the cost per GB of storage per host of other offerings, and improves storage efficiency for data intensive workloads with VMware vSAN compression.
• Running VMware Applications on Microsoft Azure: the next-generation Azure VMware Solution enables customers to easily extend or migrate on-premises VMware applications to Azure. A first party Microsoft service, Azure VMware Solution integrates with the Azure console, giving customers the flexibility to use existing VMware tools and management experiences, or leverage native Azure capabilities as desired. Customers can achieve cost savings and better TCO for Windows Server and SQL Server workloads running on Azure VMware Solution by taking advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefits.
• Simple, Scalable, More Secure Infrastructure as-a-Service On-Premises: VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, the data center-as-a-service offer of Dell Technologies Cloud, adds new VMware HCX workload migration capabilities, improved performance, new host types, and support for multiple clusters within a single rack. New industry certifications provide expanded support for customers in regulated industries.
• Run Kubernetes Workloads Anywhere: VMware is announcing Tanzu support for VMware Cloud on AWS and preview support for Google Cloud VMware Engine and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. VMware and Microsoft are also working closely together to make the preview available to early adopters soon. These updates provide customers with fast and more secure ways to extend workloads to the cloud, and further bolster VMware’s ability to offer customers a ubiquitous platform for running applications on the infrastructure of their choice.
• Simple Disaster Recovery Service with Cloud Economics: VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery is a new on-demand, easy-to-use disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) that protects on-premises vSphere workloads onto VMware Cloud on AWS. It combines efficient cloud storage with SaaS-based management for IT resiliency at scale. Customers benefit from consistent VMware operations across production and DR sites, and a ‘pay when you need’ failover capacity model for DR resources.
• Single Marketplace Featuring Thousands of Apps and Solutions: with the new consolidated VMware Marketplace, customers can discover thousands of validated third-party, open-source, and first-party solutions. These can be deployed across vSphere, VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and VMware Tanzu environments. With VMware Cloud Director service integration, partners can offer tenants a modern application catalog for developers.

Unifying Multi-Cloud Management and Operations

VMware Cloud Management enables organizations to consistently deploy, operate, and govern applications, infrastructure, and platform services across any cloud environment. New cloud management innovations include the following:

• Innovative Cloud Management Hybrid Subscription Solution: VMware vRealize Cloud Universal combines SaaS and on-premises management software into a single subscription license, enabling customers to use either method of consumption interchangeably without the need to repurchase different licenses to support each option. It includes vRealize AI Cloud and other cloud-first capabilities across operations and automation. These include federation capabilities for a consistent multi-cloud management experience across deployments and VMware Skyline integration, which enables proactive issue avoidance, troubleshooting and automated workflows in a unified management and support experience.
• AI-driven, Cloud-Delivered Application Performance Optimization: formerly Project Magna, VMware vRealize AI Cloud is an intelligent, self-tuning cloud service for application performance optimization. It combines near real-time and historical observability with reinforcement learning to continuously adapt VMware cloud infrastructure to the changing needs of application workloads. VMware vRealize AI Cloud helps assure service-level agreements are met while enabling business agility as customers scale and migrate workloads across environments. At launch, vRealize AI Cloud supports VMware vSAN and will be extended to other VMware solutions and application optimization use cases in the future.
• Multi-Cloud Operations for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: CloudHealth by VMware now supports Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), enabling enterprises to view all public cloud costs from a single platform. Customers can also group assets by business unit, department, cost center, and owner, for cost reporting and showback using OCI tags and CloudHealth’s Perspectives capability.
• Multi-Cloud Security Posture Management and Compliance: CloudHealth Secure State adds real-time monitoring for Google Cloud, as well as 20 new AWS and Azure services, including managed Kubernetes and serverless configurations. Organizations can more effectively scale security and improve collaboration between teams through simplified management of cloud accounts, custom compliance frameworks, and Azure auto-remediation support.

Empowering Cloud Providers with the Complete VMware Multi-Cloud Portfolio

VMware Cloud providers and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are trusted advisors for customers that need expertise and guidance navigating their multi-cloud journey. New cloud services make it easier for these partners to deliver and customers to consume VMware’s expanding portfolio of multi-cloud services. These include:

• VMware Cloud Partner Navigator: formerly Project Path, VMware Cloud Partner Navigator enables partners to expand business opportunities beyond their own clouds to include the growing set of VMware-based clouds and services. Customers gain greater flexibility and choice to run applications in the cloud that best meets their operational and business requirements, with one-click application and service deployment, and access to a robust marketplace. Partners can also provide customers direct access to VMware’s growing portfolio of application modernization, business continuity, and multi-cloud operations services.
• VMware Cloud Director 10.2: adds a set of capabilities that will enable partners to expand their service offerings with enhanced network and security services, lower costs with increased storage flexibility and efficiency, and accelerate support for developers and DevOps engineering with a full development infrastructure.

Availability

Azure VMware Solution, CloudHealth support for OCI, VMware Cloud on AWS support for VMware Tanzu, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC updates, VMware vRealize Cloud Universal, and VMware Marketplace are all available. VMware Cloud Partner Navigator is in preview. All other products and services announced herein are expected to be available in VMware’s fiscal Q3 FY21 which ends on October 30, 2020.