10 New VMware Cloud Services And Products Launched At VMWorld
From new capabilities for VMware Cloud on AWS and vRealize to the VMware Hybrid Cloud Platform, here are 10 new services and products launched at VMWorld 2019 that you need to know about.
10 Biggest Services And Products Unveiled At VMWorld
VMware is making waves in the cloud world as the virtualization superstar unleashed a slew of new and enhanced solutions around vRealize, VMware Cloud on AWS and integration with Dell Technologies.
Purnima Padmanabhan, vice president of product management for VMware’s Cloud Management Business Unit, said VMware’s slew of new offerings bring consistent infrastructure and operations together to solve the problem of “dual priorities.”
“We’re able to truly address the idea of operating priorities around ensuring SLAs, ensuring security and governance, making sure the platform is robust and stable—while still delivering the ability to build, run, migrate and integrate their applications, support containers and VMs, and orchestrate deployments across various clouds,” said Padmanabhan.
CRN breaks down 10 new and enhanced VMware offerings unveiled Monday at VMWorld 2019 in San Francisco.
VMware Hybrid Cloud Platform
One of the biggest highlights of VMWorld Monday was the unveiling of the company’s VMware Hybrid Cloud Platform. The goal is to bring together an abundance of VMware innovation and services under one platform where customers can build, run and manage workloads and applications on a consistent infrastructure across data centers, the edge and public clouds.
VMware Hybrid Cloud Platform includes VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud Marketplace and a slew of services around vRealize, AppDefense and many others. The single-pane-of-glass offering aims to simplify cloud planning, deployment, costs and ongoing operations.
The platform spans all major public clouds including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and more than 60 VMware Cloud Verified partners worldwide. It can also be sold on-premises in data center and edge environments through VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and through various VMware hardware partners. VMware Hybrid Cloud Platform can be managed by either the customer, channel partner or by VMware.
VMware Cloud on AWS With New HCX Capabilities
Over the past 12 months, VMware Cloud on AWS has tripled its customer base and seen a 150 percent spike in partners achieving VMware Cloud on AWS competencies.
With a focus on modernizing and migrating workloads, VMware launched new HCX capabilities to enable push-button migration and interconnectivity between VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs (software-defined data centers) running in different AWS Regions and new Elastic vSAN support to improve storage scaling. VMware HCX provides seamless migration of workloads between public and private cloud environments without any application or configuration modifications.
Once applications are migrated, customers now can extend the capabilities of applications through integration of native AWS Services. By leveraging 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.
Cloud Migration For VMware Cloud on AWS
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company unveiled its new VMware Cloud Solutions designed to streamline and simplify cloud adoption. Businesses can access integrated solutions that deliver prescriptive workflows to achieve specific use cases, including cloud migration, Desktop as a Service, Disaster Recovery as a Service, self-service applications and managed Kubernetes.
Cloud Migration for VMware Cloud on AWS is now available with integration with VMware Network Insight and VMware HCX as well as inline documentation and on-boarding handbooks. Additional features include workflow management across assessment, building and migration of workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS. Over time other workflows will 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.
“We want to make super streamlined, integrated cloud solutions,” said Kit Colbert, vice president and cloud CTO of VMware’s Cloud Platforms business unit. “This is a simple wizard-like experience that customers are really looking for.”
CloudHealth Hybrid For Hybrid Cloud Environments
Based on VMware’s acquisition of CloudHealth, CloudHealth Hybrid now delivers optimization, migration assessment governance and security functionality to VMware hybrid cloud environments. The CloudHealth offering was previously available only in public cloud environments.
“Now you can have a single layer of policy and governance that applies across all clouds,” said Padmanabhan. “You can now optimize your costs across your hybrid environments whether it’s VMware Cloud on AWS or other VMware Cloud form factors. You can do migration assessment. You can understand how your environment looks on-premise and decide which cloud to migrate to or which workloads to migrate based on cost and performance.”
With the ability to create policies for hybrid cloud resource usage and trigger notifications when policies are violated, customers gain flexibility with guardrails to prevent unauthorized services and security vulnerabilities.
VMware vRealize Operations 8.0 With AI, ML
The new vRealize Operations 8.0 includes new intelligent remediation, capabilities for self-driving hybrid cloud and hyper-converged infrastructure operations as well as multi-cloud monitoring.
“We’re doubling down on monitoring and troubleshooting with our AI and ML-based self-driving operations to make sure the capabilities that we have today around performance optimization, monitoring and troubleshooting, capacity optimization, cost optimization and reporting, and compliance management, is all extended not only to your core on-premise environments in the data center, but it is now available across all SDDC form factors including VMware Cloud on AWS and other VMware Cloud environments,” said Padmanabhan. “So vRealize Operations will not only allow you to manage your on-premise environments, but also all your cloud environments on VMware.”
Padmanabhan said that by using AI and machine-learning techniques, VMware can now pinpoint and predict problems quickly to identify probable causes to do root cause analysis. “We also have included the intelligence around applications so that the entire troubleshooting is application-aware,” she said.
VMware vRealize Automation 8.0 With ServiceNow, Terraform and Git Integrations
VMware is introducing a container-based microservices architecture with vRealize Automation 8.0 with improved performance and high availability. The cloud automation platform enhances operational agility and developer productivity through a series of new capabilities that improve ease of use.
“Now you can leverage vRealize Automation to create that cloud-like experience across all your VMware environments, including VMware Hybrid Cloud,” said Padmanabhan. “It’s a modern container-based architecture, fully micro-services-based, that is very easy to install and have it up and running very quickly. Ease of use is something that we focused very heavily on. It’s truly-API driven and true infrastructure as code.”
vRealize Automation 8.0 increases user experience and multi-cloud readiness with broad extensibility across VMware Cloud on AWS for all major public clouds as well as enhanced ServiceNow, Terraform and Git integrations.
VMware Cloud on Dell EMC
The highly anticipated VMware Cloud on Dell EMC co-engineered architecture is now available for channel partners to sell in the U.S. The consumption-based management service is being sold to customers as the Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service. The tightly VMware-Dell integrated offering includes VMware Cloud Foundation and Dell and VMware’s market-leading hyper-converged infrastructure solution. It also consists of VMware high-performance compute, storage and networking software powered by vSphere, vSAN and NSX.
“Customers don’t need to know about our infrastructure at all, they can consume it as a service just like they do with their cloud service. It just so happens that it’s running on-premise,” said VMware’s Colbert. “We think this is a really powerful model. We believe this is going to be more and more how customers consume infrastructure on-premise. The great part about this is it frees customers from needing to manage their underlying infrastructure.”
VMware Cloud on Dell EMC provides bi-directional connection to public clouds for application and data portability via a hybrid cloud control plane. The cloud service is fully managed by Dell Technologies.
VMware and Dell EMC DRaaS and Data Protection With AWS S3
Dell EMC and VMware have been tightening their engineering integration around a number of solutions from hyper-converged infrastructure to Unified Workspace.
VMware has now partnered once again with Dell EMC across multiple areas to bring customers greater choice in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Data Protection solutions. The two companies have created a new DRaaS solution using AWS’ S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) for VMware Cloud on AWS. With this offering, customers gain improved cost and storage efficiency using AWS S3, which is an object storage service.
VMware and Dell EMC have also collaborated to enable Dell EMC to offer best-in-class data protection solutions for VMware workloads running at the edge, core and cloud.
WaveFront by VMware With 4D
WaveFront by VMware provides customers with real-time streaming metrics and analytics for application performance. Using its UX dashboard, the company helps Kubernetes teams, DevOps and developers to create customized visuals to watch over their services. Kubernetes monitoring is enhanced with automatic service discovery for Kubernetes environments, including the discovery of application and infrastructure components.
Padmanabhan said VMware has increased Wavefront’s capability by adding 4-D observability. “What I mean by four-dimensional observability is in addition to metrics and histograms, now you can also do distributed tracing of applications,” she said. “So we’re bringing together all these metrics and capabilities so you can do faster troubleshooting of your applications. We’re also seeing customers leverage Wavefront for getting a full stack visibility, especially for the enterprise observability solutions.”
In addition, the new offering has advanced query language for faster visualization and fine-grained alerting.
New Availability For The VMware Cloud Marketplace
The VMware Cloud Marketplace is now available for VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud Provider Partners.
From the entire catalog—which includes hundreds of open-source solutions packaged by Bitnami— customers can browse, filter and select the specialized tools that are right for them. For technology vendors, it offers a way to easily publish solutions for VMware customers globally, and for multiple VMware platforms. “We have the ability to curate solutions from third-party vendors as well as our own set of open source solutions from our Bitnami acquisition,” said Padmanabhan.
The marketplace meets a variety of common use-case requirements such as backup and security, through third-party ISV solutions and popular open-source options.