VMware touts multi-cloud strategy with expanded hybrid cloud portfolio
VMware has used the first day of VMworld in Las Vegas to announce a handful of innovations across its hybrid cloud portfolio of infrastructure and management software, pushing its multi-cloud business strategy as offering flexibility to customers.
Newly announced is the vSphere Platinum Edition, a new release of vSAN to further ease hyperconverged infrastructure adoption, and new updates across the VMware vRealize cloud management platform, which VMware said will help customers deliver developer-friendly infrastructure from any cloud with more secure and consistent operations.
Speaking with press ahead of the announcement, VMware VP and CTO for the Americas Cameron Haight said consistent infrastructure allows for the datacentre, the cloud, and now the edge to operate harmoniously.
"We want to make sure we provide a consistent operation environment ... we want to make that digital foundation ubiquitous," Haight said. "That digital foundation is going to enable any device to access any app on any cloud.
"These workloads can be moved securely and robustly depending on where the business needs take them."
To Haight, a successful digital business requires a secure, flexible digital foundation.
"We see our customers pursuing a multi-cloud journey. We divide this up into hybrid cloud as well as cloud-native, and they could be occurring at the same time in the enterprise," he added.
"How we define hybrid cloud is a cloud existing characteristics of consistent infrastructure -- basically based upon VMware cloud foundation, and that cloud foundation would be running again in the datacentre, in the cloud, and the edge.
"But with that, however, there are cases where we realise that customers want to have the native cloud experience, so to that effect we're also delivering capabilities in those as well. An example would be what we announced the beta of not too long ago, VMware on Kubernetes engine."
Read more: VMware partners with Pivotal, Google Cloud to launch Kubernetes-based container service (TechRepublic)
Further expanding, Haight said VMware's strategy looks at the entire journey to the cloud as being multi-cloud, but with two potential paths. The first is cloud-native, where the organisation wants to take advantage of the native services of that public cloud provider; while the other is a hybrid cloud path.
"They may live side by side in an organisation, which is fine, and at the end of the day, we're going to support both editions," he said.
Expected to help businesses address the security threats and regulatory pressure to control risks, VMware has introduced the vSphere Platinum Edition, combining vSphere's native security capabilities with VMware AppDefense.
Using machine learning and behavioural analytics, the new solution will enable vSphere administrators to deliver more secure applications and infrastructure by enabling virtual machines to run in a "known good" state.
VMware will also unveil vSphere 6.7 Update 1, which will deliver new features and enhancements, such as the fully featured HTML5-based vSphere Client to help admins manage virtual infrastructure. Additionally, vSphere 6.7 Update 1 will increase support for intelligent workloads by introducing vMotion and snapshot capabilities for Nvidia Quadro vDWS powered VMs.
VMware
VMware has also launched vSAN 6.7 Update 1, with the new release touted as reducing maintenance operations time with built-in intelligence capabilities. It will also enable admins to spin up new HCI clusters faster.
The company has also unveiled a new private beta program for vSAN to gather feedback on potential ways to further simplify the datacentre through native data protection, file services, and cloud-native storage capabilities.
VMware will unveil new releases across its comprehensive vRealize Cloud Management Platform to help customers automate and standardise how their digital foundation is operated across hybrid cloud environments and consumed by developers for VM- and container-based application development. The platform helps customers address three key use cases: Self-driving operations, programmable provisioning, and application operations, the company explained.
NSX multi-cloud networking and security has also been extended to more clouds and environments, with support for workloads running in AWS, Azure, VMware Cloud on AWS, and on-premises software-defined datacentres, and both Linux-based and containerised workloads running on bare-metal servers without a hypervisor.
The solution is available as both on-premises software and as software as a service (SaaS).
"We're trying to deliver a consistent operational experience in a hybrid cloud environment -- they may be different under the covers, but it's the surface that's common," Haight added.
VMware vSphere Platinum Edition, VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 1, VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 1, VMware vRealize Suite 2018, VMware vRealize Operations 7.0, VMware vRealize Automation 7.5, and vRealize Network Insight 3.9 are expected to become available by November 2, 2018.
Disclosure: Asha Barbaschow travelled as a guest of VMware to VMworld in Las Vegas
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