Last year at VMworld, we introduced Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) to enable Hybrid Cloud deployments with IBM and OVH US. Since then, we added HCX into our VMware Cloud on AWS offering, enabling a seamless hybrid cloud spanning the world’s leading private and public cloud offerings. We’ve continued to drive adoption of HCX enabling hybrid cloud deployments between enterprises and select VMware Cloud Provider Partners, such as NTT, Fujitsu, CTC, Rackspace, and OVH group in France.
More recently, we leveraged HCX to bring NSX Hybrid Connect to market as part of VMware’s VMware Cloud Network (VCN) vision. This enables our enterprise customers to modernize their data centers by setting up hybrid connections between their existing and modern data centers, taking advantage of bulk migration of workloads to the newly created modern data centers.
With VMworld upon us, it’s a good time to reflect on what we’ve learned through this journey, what new announcements we’re making at VMworld, and to give you a sense of where we’re headed going forward.
Key Learnings:
Over the past year, it has become clear that our customers are embracing cloud-based innovation, including hybrid cloud strategy (where they look at the public cloud as an extension of their on-prem strategy), as well as multi-cloud strategy (where they are purchasing cloud services from multiple cloud providers).
From the perspective of enterprise app developers, DevOps and line of business , customers are embracing these new cloud strategies because:
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- They want to develop, deploy, and operate modern apps on premise or on any cloud that provides the requisite service (any infrastructure).
- They want to seamlessly migrate app landscapes across clouds as the needs of the business evolve (which usually includes a migration journey).
- They want to mix and match parts of the app across multiple sites and/or clouds (which involves hybridity).
- From an enterprise IT perspective:
- Customers want to enable apps, evOps and business units to meet their objectives by providing a private cloud, embracing public cloud(s) and bridging the two (hybrid cloud).
- They want to do this in such a way that business continuity is ensured, meaning zero downtime as the organization embraces these private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures.
- They also want to ensure that on-prem and cloud infrastructures are operationally consistent with business practices (identity, GRC, security, lifecycle, etc).
One key finding is there has been a move from a public cloud and DevOps-centric world, back to a more collaborative attitude between DevOps and IT. This is happening as organizations recognize the need to embrace the cloud, yet retain all the governance, security and business continuity advances they have made over the last couple of decades.
HCX: Facilitating a smoother journey to hybrid and multi-cloud.:
To enable the journey to the hybrid and multi-cloud worlds, HCX was architected to resolve three fundamental problems:
- Infrastructure Abstraction: HCX downloads runtimes on source/destination, to abstract the underlying infrastructure and ensure compatibility.
- Hybrid Connect: Provide seamless, high performance “hybrid highways” between enterprise and cloud data centers, making the WAN look like a LAN, and stretching SDDC constructs like vMotion, vSphere Replication and VLANs across clouds. Key is to do this without re-mapping IPs and retaining business continuity.
- App Mobility: Enabling app landscape portability across these data centers, leveraging the hybrid highway. In particular, this app mobility enables bulk cloud migration at scale.
HCX Going Forward
HCX is clearly seeing product-market fit, and is fast becoming a catalyst for enterprises to embrace the hybrid cloud and multi-cloud future. Even more additional capabilities will be added as we expand our scale and reach.
We announced ‘Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication’, which enables the migration of 1000s of VMs to cloud at an accelerated rate with zero downtime. This promises to be a game changer, by unleashing app portability at unprecedented scale.
The introduction of multi-cloud connectivity and hybridity is the first step towards next-generation multi-cloud strategy. Some of our customers already have a hybrid cloud and multiple public clouds deployed – this promises to become the norm, not the exception.
With its presence in multiple types of cloud, private and public, along with multiple cloud provider offerings, and multiple types of OS and workload support, HCX is strategically positioned to add multi-cloud to its hybrid story. HCX, as the hybrid-multi cloud service, will help customers eliminate cloud provider lock-ins, and will give unified control to customers. Customers will be able to utilize best capabilities of different clouds, without the need for retrofit, redesign, or upgrade. Customers will have the same known tooling, efficient migration and hybridity services, will reduce their TCO, and will be able to provide flexibility to customers for a better cloud experience.
We plan to continue to abstract various clouds, deploy a hybrid highway system, and drive app portability. VMware encourages you to get to know HCX at VMworld 2018 and participate in our journey to make multi-cloud a reality.
I will be hosting a VMworld session on Monday at 11 AM with a couple of our customers who have already progressed successfully along their journeys to hybrid and multi-clouds. Join me to see how they successfully transformed their organizations, and check out these additional HCX sessions.
To learn more about Hybrid Cloud Extension, visit our website.
