VMware Expands Reach of VMware Cloud on AWS for Cloud Providers and MSPs with VMware Cloud Director Service

At VMworld 2019 Europe, VMware, Inc. announced a new multi-tenancy service for VMware Cloud on AWS that will make it even more attractive and available to customers of all sizes through managed service providers (MSPs). VMware also announced a tech preview of Project Path which will help cloud providers and MSPs adopt new business models that will help generate new value, revenue and improved margins to their cloud businesses.

According to 451 Research the vast majority of enterprises are going toward an integrated hybrid IT environment, with 57 percent of organizations moving toward an integrated on-premises/off-premises hybrid IT environment. IDC research finds that 62 percent of public cloud IaaS users surveyed use multiple IaaS providers. Many enterprises are pursuing a strategy that brings together native public cloud services and a consistent hybrid cloud environment into a single cloud strategy. In response to this shift in customers’ cloud strategies, cloud providers, too, are evolving their own multi-cloud journey. VMware is innovating to support partners’ diverse business models.

“VMware’s strategy is to offer partners consistent cloud infrastructure and operations that support their customers’ multi-cloud strategies, and enable them to simultaneously employ both asset heavy and asset light business models,” said Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president of products, Cloud Provider Software Business Unit, VMware. “For the first time, VMware Cloud on AWS will support multi-tenancy through the new VMware Cloud Director service, enabling MSPs to more quickly and easily create full software defined data centers in the AWS cloud for small- and medium-sized enterprises. With Project Path, partners will be able to accelerate their delivery of both VMware-based and native public cloud services, to more efficiently support customer operations across clouds, and better meet customer needs by deploying applications to whichever cloud best suits their business or IT requirements.”

Expanding MSP’s Reach of VMware Cloud on AWS with Multi-Tenancy

The new VMware Cloud Director service is a SaaS version of the popular and proven VMware vCloud Director service-delivery platform. With multi-tenant capabilities, MSPs will be able to easily share a pool of VMware Cloud on AWS capacity across multiple tenants. This will reduce providers’ overall costs while providing the flexibility to right-size VMware Cloud on AWS environments for mid-market enterprise customers. Initially, the VMware Cloud Director service will support VMware Cloud on AWS and will evolve to operate and manage other VMware-based clouds.

Project Path: Multi-Cloud Service Delivery and Operations for Cloud Providers

Today, cloud providers are delivering highly differentiated and profitable cloud services from their own VMware-based clouds. Increasingly, cloud providers are looking to expand their business model to offer VMware Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) running in the major public clouds without owning and operating the underlying cloud infrastructure. These asset-light business models have created the need for Project Path, which will enable cloud providers to unify service delivery and operations for VMware-based clouds running both in their own data centers and in public clouds.

Project Path will build on and expand on foundational capabilities of the VMware Cloud Provider Platform-VMware vCloud Director and VMware Cloud Provider Hub-and be rolled out in phases to unify management and operations across all VMware cloud endpoints. These include the partners’ own clouds; VMware SDDCs running in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, or Oracle Cloud; and native public clouds. Cloud providers will be able to deliver a suite of services-self-service multi-tenant IaaS, containers, migration, backup, disaster recovery, object storage, database as a service, security, application templates, and more-on any VMware cloud endpoint. Additionally, Project Path will help unify cloud provider operations such as customer management, customer usage, billing, and customer support across all VMware-cloud endpoints.

Expanding The Multi-Cloud Opportunity For Cloud Providers

VMware continues to release new innovations in the VMware Cloud Provider Platform to help cloud providers deliver a VMware-based service that is on par with native public clouds, and support customers’ needs in native public clouds. VMware is enabling cloud providers with additional areas of growth through the following offerings:

• VMware vCloud Availability 3.5: this update delivers new innovations that help partners offer a compelling, cost-efficient DRaaS solutions by simplifying disaster recovery, lowering operating cost and delivering critical business resiliency. It provides additional data protection at scale, simplified enterprise application mobility and faster recovery with VM grouping and intelligence.
  
  
• Expansion of VMware Cloud Provider Hub Services: with the addition of VMware vRealize Automation Cloud, which is comprised of the Cloud Assembly, Service Broker, and Code Stream services, providers can offer application and developer services to customers by helping them define, aggregate and deploy applications across clouds. Cloud providers also offer CloudHealth by VMware to help customers collaborate across lines of business to make more intelligent decisions related to cost management, security, and governance while scaling their multi-cloud environments.
  
  
• VMware vCloud Director / Bitnami Community Catalog Integration: Bitnami Community Catalog is now available from VMware Cloud Providers to customers through vCloud Director. Bitnami provides customers with access to a rich set of workload solutions such as developer tools, databases and network and security solutions. These pre-packaged solutions form the building blocks of new applications and can shorten the “builder’s journey” – an end-to-end process that tracks an application’s lifecycle from initial requirements to going live. With Bitnami, Cloud Providers can now attract developer workloads into their clouds and manage them with vCloud Director.
  
  
• New VMware Cloud Provider Pod on Dell EMC: Dell EMC infrastructure is now certified for VMware Cloud Provider Pod with configurations that can be easily tailored to cloud provider customer requirements, including new Dell EMC VxRail and Dell EMC vSAN ReadyNode for SAP environments. Targeted Cloud Provider Pod support will include Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), Converged Infrastructure (CI) and vSAN ReadyNodes. With these new Dell EMC offerings, business critical applications such as SAP HANA can now take advantage of higher performance and resiliency to drive business continuity and operational simplicity.

Introducing IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions Shared

VMware and IBM continue to offer enterprises more options for hybrid cloud adoption, with IBM announcing plans to release an exclusive beta later this year of IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions Shared. A new multi-tenant solution on the IBM public cloud using VMware vCloud Director, it will be offered as an alternative to IBM’s single-tenant solution that provides a client-managed environment with full control for the user. IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions Shared will give enterprises of all sizes a flexible, managed environment where they can directly provision their virtual machines on-demand to address the needs of diverse set of projects and businesses. This will free clients from manually installing and managing updates to their virtual infrastructure or managing multiple third-party vendors, instead allowing them to focus on driving innovation. The new solution will be available through IBM partners or directly to end users and enables enterprises to utilize IBM’s public cloud with greater flexibility.Availability

VMware vCloud Availability 3.5 and VMware vRealize Automation Cloud for Cloud Provider Hub are expected to be available in VMware Q4 FY20 ending on January 31, 2020. VMware Cloud Director is expected to be in beta in Q4 FY20.