5 Big Partnerships Unveiled At VMware Explore: Nvidia, Oracle, IBM, Dell And Lenovo

In addition to AI offerings with Nvidia and Lenovo, VMware Explore brought enhancements to VxRail from Dell as well as cloud advancements with Oracle and IBM.

At VMware Explore the virtualization all-star unveiled new products that deepen its ties with technology vendors including Nvidia, Oracle, IBM, Dell Technologies and Lenovo with products for channel partners across several lines of business.

“I genuinely believe that VMware is in an interesting situation around engaging with our strategic ecosystem to come up with differentiated solutions,” Zia Yusuf, VMware’s senior vice president of strategic ecosystem and industry solutions, told CRN. “Hopefully our customers will see a very logical story on how we can help them reduce the cost of inference, reduce the cost of training models. Get up and running faster. Leverage stuff that they already have to do that. So much of it is going to be an infrastructure cost issue.”

The biggest news came with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appearing on the main stage with VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram where they showcased VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, which promises generative AI capabilities. VMware said that globally there is an estimated $4 trillion market oppotunity with generative AI.

“This is a giant offering,” Raghurham told the crowd.

Added Huang: “We been working together for many years on this dream that we’re going to talk about. We are reinventing enterprise computing in order to transition to the future in order to transition to accelerated computing,” Huang told the crowd.

Several other industry partners unveiled new products at VMware Explore, including IBM, Oracle, Dell and Lenovo, all of them as part of the ecosystem that Yusuf said is critical to the company’s progress. He said part of the magic is bringing all those partners together with VMware’s global systems integrators, a project his team has spearheaded.

Nvidia

VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia is designed to build the generative AI environments that enterprises will need to deliver on the promise of the technology.

“This is ground-breaking computer science,” Huang told the VMware Explore crowd when he joined Raghuram on stage. “Instead of virtualizing applications to run on CPUs, we virtualized the GPU. We made it possible for VMware to run bare-metal performance with all of its security, all of its manageability, and vMotion capabilities across multiplpe GPUs, multiple nodes, to process these giant language models.”

In addition, it can be deployed end to end across multi-cloud environments to give enterprises private AI capabilities at scale.

“We are able to use up to 16 GPUs in a single VM, where the model is running, in order to make all the compute power available, and getting all the data from storage directly to your GPU memory,” Raghuram said. “There is a lot of technology packed into this.”

Oracle

VMware and Oracle introduced a flexible purchasing and consumption program that helps with the simplification of procurement and speeds the adoption of some VMware Cloud services, the companies said.

This new partnership is designed for organizations that have needs in hybrid cloud architecture, variable cloud migration timelines, or have cloud bursting requirements, the companies said.

“By applying their credits to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution subscriptions, customers will be able to take advantage of a simplified mechanism for managing their cloud-related expenses,” the companies said in statement. “Additionally, the VMware Cloud Acceleration Benefit gives VMware Cloud Universal customers a flexible way to leverage the value of their VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) perpetual licenses as they migrate on-premises workloads to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.”

Because users can manage their cloud infrastructure and VMware consoles with total administrative control, it speeds migrations from on- premises into the cloud without adding new skills or tools to the project.

“The combination of VMware and Oracle drives greater business agility, improves resiliency and enables customers to benefit from cloud economics and scale,” Yusuf said in a statement.

IBM

IBM and VMware are helping customers in regulated industries such as financial services, health care and public sector address the cost, complexity and risk of migrating and modernizing mission-critical workloads in the cloud, VMware said.

As such, IBM will be the first public cloud provider to launch a new partner-managed service based on VMware Cloud editions. This is part of the VMware Cross-Cloud managed service initiative.

Users will have a hybrid cloud that is aligned to a NIST-validated framework and allows for the seamless migration of workloads between on- premises and IBM cloud environments.

“VMware Cross-Cloud managed services can enable customers to lower total cost of ownership, build and modernize applications quickly, and simplify operations while addressing security and industry compliance requirements,” according to a joint statement.

Rajeev Bhardwaj, VMware’s vice president and general manager of cloud service providers, told CRN in an interview that some of the benefits of the joint offerings include greater consistency, flexibility in commercial models and speeding up the process of application modernization.

Customers should have the ability to “focus less on the infrastructure because that’s being delivered by IBM, while they focus more on delivering outcomes around the stack. So they focus more on developer and data services [with a] flexible consumption model, cloud operating model. … As a customer, I can focus more on business outcomes on top.”

Dell Technologies

Dell and VMware unveiled the latest generation of VxRail, which provides 100 percent more processing cores, 63 percent faster memory and a 300 percent increase in PCIe performance compared with older models.

“This powerful hardware package is capable of running the most demanding data-intensive workloads such as virtualization, AI, machine learning and GPU-accelerated workloads,” Dell said in a statement.

Dell said the powerful combination of the technology results in an average 11 months before the system has paid for itself, and it has an average 463 percent return on investment over five years, according to IDC numbers Dell included. The system also is smaller and requires less floor space.

VxRail was introduced seven years ago and in that time it has undergone more than two dozen releases. In the past two years, Dell and VMware have introduced hundreds of new features, according to Dell.

These provide critical functions for partners who are helping customers modernize data centers, deploying multi-cloud environments or running applications in remote edge locations, Dell said.

Lenovo

The global leader in PC sales unveiled a generative AI offering with VMware Cloud that uses Nvidia-accelerated computing and software to give users a GPU-dense platform that is made to manipulate next-generation workloads.

Lenovo also showed off its reference designs for generative AI in partnership with VMware, which is integrated into Lenovo’s ThinkSystem offering.

The product kicks off a newly expanded partnership with VMware, after the company was spun off from Dell in 2021 and began looking for ways to do business with other hardware makers. In a statement, Lenovo said it is also working with VMware and Nvidia to support the new VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia.

“This expanded collaboration with VMware is a pivotal next step in enabling more businesses to seamlessly leverage modern edge, AI and hybrid cloud capabilities powered by Nvidia in order to harness data for accelerated business outcomes,” said Kirk Skaugen, president of Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group, in a statement.