Last month we introduced the latest release of our Cloud Management Platform (CMP): VMware vRealize Suite 2017. vRealize Suite delivers a comprehensive cloud management platform that can manage multi-cloud environments across on-premises and public (hybrid) clouds, and supports environments that are a mix of traditional and cloud native applications, across VMs, containers and bare metal. With vRealize Suite customers have a common platform for managing all their cloud environments.
While Cloud Management Platforms have been around for a while, IT landscape does not stand still, and CMPs need to adjust to changing trends. In this blog, we will review today’s market context and how VMware addresses customers’ needs.
Market Context
Cloud is everywhere, but not without challenges
Cloud, whether private, public or hybrid has become ubiquitous over the last few years. Nearly every company leverages cloud in some way, shape or form. Numerous analyst studies confirm that most companies favor multi-cloud or hybrid cloud approaches for their applications. Managing users, resources and applications across multiple clouds, however, raises a new set of challenges including governance and control, workload provisioning and placement, capacity management, portability and the need to monitor performance, and cost transparency across clouds.
Applications: traditional or cloud native?
While new development leverages mainly containers and cloud native principles, in most organizations legacy or traditional applications still drive the majority of the business today, and are expected to stay around for at least a few more years. Thus, organizations are beginning to recognize that they will need to build and support heterogeneous environments that are a mix of containers and VMs for the foreseeable future.
From developer laptop to production
Movements like open source and the emergence of freemium pricing models have made it easy for developers to access external resources and technologies. Developers download software from GitHub to their laptop and use it for their dev/test work. However, it’s the IT team that carries the heavy burden to move those applications from a developer laptop to production. They need to support a myriad of snowflakes (different combination of tools) environments from the different lines of business they service. At the same time, they must maintain control over IT expenses, compliance and security while ensuring that business critical applications perform as required by the business.
VMware’s Approach: A Common Approach to Cloud
VMware Cloud delivers consistent infrastructure, operations and management across private and public clouds, supporting both VMs and containers.
VMware Cloud Infrastructure is comprised of VMware Cloud Foundation (vSphere, NSX and vSAN) on private or hybrid cloud, as well as native (non-vSphere) public clouds. But to operationalize a cloud, the infrastructure must be coupled with a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) to manage all cloud environments in a consistent way. VMware delivers a comprehensive CMP through vRealize Suite, which can manage infrastructure and applications resources, and supports VMs and containers. VMware Cloud Foundation coupled with vRealize Suite provides a common approach for building and running an enterprise grade multi-cloud environment. VMware Cloud also gives IT organizations the flexibility to provide choice to their application development teams by supporting multiple models for requesting services (product catalog, API, and CLI) and giving developers the freedom to use the tools of their choice.
VMware Cloud gives customers both cloud freedom and control. It empowers consistent deployment models, security policies, visibility and governance for all applications whether they are running in the customer’s private cloud, on the public cloud, or any combination of those.
To learn more, visit our website, and download vRealize Suite 2017 here.
