At the opening day of VMworld 2021 today, CTO Kit Colbert shared what we’ve been working on to enable the agility and innovation of multi-cloud computing. From the virtualized data center to new cloud-native apps, every business will have to make the right choices to take advantage of cloud infrastructure, without getting caught in its complexity.
For many companies, multi-cloud has become the default, whether they planned it or not. Cloud services bring amazing benefits—but a lot of challenges too. The promise of multi-cloud is its flexibility, innovative services, and ultimately the ability to create a secure and efficient software supply chain. You want to take advantage of the best services from the cloud providers you choose, while data centers and edge locations do the jobs they’re best at. But how can that be accomplished?
VMware Cloud is designed to solve these problems, with an architecture that employs familiar tools to help your business and IT teams evolve and get to success faster. Whether you use VMware infrastructure, native services, or any variety of Kubernetes (including our own Tanzu), you’ll have a consistent operating model that simplifies your path to the cloud and accelerates your ability to build and ship innovative apps.
There are two essential components: VMware Cloud Foundation, the infrastructure building block that can live in any platform, on-premises or cloud-based. Just as critical are multi-cloud infrastructure building blocks with vRealize Suite and Cloud Health. Today’s announcements at VMworld 2021 bolster each of those areas to anticipate the modern needs of a digital business. Everything we’ve announced can bring you closer to your goals of speed, security, and better TCO for your infrastructure. You can watch the full solutions keynote anytime and get additional details in the multi-cloud track keynote.
What’s New in Multi-Cloud at VMworld 2021
VMware Cloud on AWS
AWS is our preferred cloud provider for vSphere-based workloads. We’ve jointly engineered solutions for the past few years and continue the momentum with the following innovations:
- Tanzu Services for VMware Cloud on AWS, now generally available, gives you Tanzu—our Kubernetes offering—as a service, integrated with Tanzu Mission Control Essentials for Kubernetes management out of the box.
- VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery adds more capabilities, with Ransomware Protection now available. This lets you restore just a single file, even within a block device. You can enable it in the case of corruption or other issues. Stretch cluster is also now available, enabling load-balancing across two availability zones. Also available are advanced security features to protect workloads with the NSX Distributed Firewall for IPS, IDS, and others.
- VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts brings the VMware SDDC, delivered as an on-premises service, that contains vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T, and vCenter, all managed by VMware. You get a performance-optimized rack enabled with the essential AWS cloud services while keeping the familiarity and agility of VMware Cloud in your own data center. It’s an easy way to create a hybrid cloud environment that allows for scale and resiliency and lets you retain those apps that need to reside locally.
Learn more:
VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts: Bring VMware Cloud to Your Data Center
Migrate and Modernize Applications with VMware Cloud on AWS—What’s New
App Modernization Deep Dive with VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Tanzu
In addition, we announced expanded availability and services across hyperscalers (Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle, and Alibaba) as we continue expanding the value you can get from these providers. Highlights include supporting more regions or support for more VMware services in solutions, depending on the provider. We’re also supporting more certifications.
We also have two exciting announcements in our VMware Cloud Provider program, which consists of over 4,000 partners around the world. First, the Sovereign Cloud Initiative announced today lets you ensure data locality to comply with any industry- or country-specific regulations your business needs to follow. Also announced: Zero Carbon Committed Clouds, a set of cloud partners that have committed to us that they’ll use 100% renewable energy to power their data centers by 2030.
Dell APEX Cloud Services with VMware Cloud
This new collaboration between Dell and VMware represents, essentially, an API into Dell’s APEX Cloud Services capabilities combined with VMware Cloud. This new option is an easy subscription that lets you get up and running in as little as 14 days, and includes a financially backed SLA of 99.99% uptime.
Learn more:
The Future of Local and Distributed Cloud with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC
Announcing Dell Technologies APEX Cloud Services with VMware Cloud
VMware Edge Compute Stack
VMware Cloud has proven itself ably in large-scale environments, like data centers and public cloud deployments and we have heard from customers that they are increasing their deployments at the edge. We’re launching VMware Edge Compute Stack for smaller edge locations, like manufacturing sites or retail stores. VMware Edge Compute Stack is a purpose-built, integrated stack for small-scale VM and container compute, bringing edge-optimized HCI and SDN to ensure performance and scale. Here’s a look at how it fits into a typical deployment:
Learn more: Why Edge Is the Next Evolution of Cloud
Project Cascade
Now in tech preview, Project Cascade takes our support of Kubernetes further to embrace the openness of the Kubernetes ecosystem. This represents a continuing evolution of vSphere, starting with Project Pacific to integrate Kubernetes deeply into vSphere and Project Cascade uses that and the Kubernetes operator model to make Kubernetes the infrastructure abstraction layer to VMware Cloud. The goal is a model for features operational teams endorse, a cloud consumption surface that gives operators flexibility for geographic spanning, governance, resiliency across (any) Kubernetes landscape.
Project Capitola
Memory improvements are key to successfully running data-hungry, memory-intensive current and next-generation cloud apps. Following on last year’s tech preview of Project Monterey, which uses GPUs, Project Capitola takes advantage of new memory technologies like host interconnects to give you the best price-to-performance ratio for your clusters. This software-defined approach simplifies your memory infrastructure operations to eliminate siloes and cut overhead, so you can scale quickly and cost-effectively—for example, when you need to support more memory than a single host even has.
Learn more: Introducing VMware Project Capitola: Unbounding the “Memory Bound”
AI-Ready Enterprise Platform on vSphere with Tanzu
This is a joint project between VMware and Nvidia, the leader in GPU/DPU, AI and ML technologies. This combines the power of GPUs and VMware Cloud and helps accelerate AI workloads that use Nvidia’s AI and data science tools and frameworks.
Learn more: What’s New from Nvidia and VMware for Enterprise AI
Project Ensemble
The management layer of cloud requires unified governance and operations across clouds, so a consistent operating model is essential to success. Now in tech preview, Project Ensemble integrates and automates multi-cloud management with vRealize. This means that all the different VMware cloud management capabilities—self-service, elasticity, metering, and more—are in one place. You can access all the data, analytics, and workflows to easily manage your cloud deployments at scale.
Learn more: Introducing Project Ensemble Tech Preview
Project Arctic
Now in tech preview, Project Arctic is designed to be a first step to a multi-cloud and as-a-service model to your on-prem environment. Project Arctic makes vSphere cloud-aware and integrates cloud connectivity. Never overprovision or worry about capacity with on-demand elastic capacity available from any VMware Cloud endpoint. Seamlessly manage any VMware Cloud endpoint whether in private, hyperscale or VCPP clouds from within your existing vCenter deployment with enhanced multi-vCenter workflows Plus, leverage unique attributes of VMware Cloud endpoints such as geographic location and sovereignty, performance, and cost to tailor deployments for your business requirements.
