by: VMware Sr. Staff Architect for Sustainable Software Solutions Zhelong Pan, VMware Sustainability Advisor Nicola Peill-Moelter and VMware Sr. Product Manager Mike Polson
Virtualization, the cornerstone of VMware technology, helps enterprises be greener by reducing power consumption in comparison to physical servers. The result is avoided emissions, even as IT workloads continue to grow. By reducing the number of hosts and servers required to support customer workloads, reductions in material consumption and data center footprints of physical IT equipment, VMware has made great strides. However, with the growing adoption of cloud, the proliferation of devices, consumer adoption of all things tech and increased interest in artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), enterprises face challenges trying to integrate sustainability into their operations and products.
Building on the foundation of virtualization, VMware IT is taking the lead in developing sustainable clouds, workload energy and carbon efficiency, green disaster recovery deployments, and more. It’s part of our 2030 Agenda, an environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategy of 30 goals designed to drive three outcomes—sustainability, equity and trust. These goals guide VMware efforts to decarbonize digital infrastructures, increase equitable access to opportunities through distributed workforce technology, and maintain trust with enhanced security and transparency.
Turning theory into reality
VMware Tanzu® CloudHealth®, with the help of Amazon Web Services (AWS), is incorporating sustainable practices into its software development lifecycles and embedding green operations (GreenOps) into our business operations. We are doing this by applying the concepts from the Sustainability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework to our design principles, operational guidance, and best-practices for meeting sustainability targets. The AWS Well-Architected Framework for Sustainability focuses on building buy-in across the entire enterprise, from technology leaders like CIOs and CTOs, to cloud architects, developers, and operations teams.
It all starts with building a culture of sustainability. And that’s where AWS comes in for the Tanzu CloudHealth R&D team. Together, we set up the cultural foundations, with AWS sharing best practices around sustainable development, and providing guidance with a Well Architected Review for a production workload. We also worked toward developing our Tanzu CloudHealth Green Score, a new feature that will enable customers to gain deeper insights into designing and measuring sustainable solutions. “We are excited to expand our partnership with AWS for such an important endeavor as establishing recommendations and best practices for sustainable infrastructure and application development,” said VMware SVP and GM of the Cloud Management business unit, Purnima Padmanabhan.
About VMware Tanzu CloudHealth
Tanzu CloudHealth is a multi-cloud FinOps platform that helps organizations make sense of their cloud data, optimize and control cloud spend, and enhance their cloud management practice. The platform collects and consolidates cloud data into a centralized interface and provides analysis, recommendations, and reporting on cost, usage, performance, and security.
FinOps is an evolving clodfinancial management discipline and cultural practice that revolves around the idea that everyone in the organization is responsible for controlling cloud usage and costs. But it can be challenging to control cloud spend, especially in a multi-cloud environment without the right solution. The goal is to simplify financial management, streamline operations and improve cross-organizational collaboration across your multi-cloud environment, and for more than a decade, Tanzu CloudHeath has helped more than 20,000 customers to build, manage, and optimize FinOps practices. As the first premier vendor member of the FinOps Foundation, Tanzu CloudHealth contributes to working groups, collaborates with practitioners, and helps establish best practices for the industry.
Tanzu CloudHealth is now providing VMware and selected customers with a beta preview its new GreenOps capabilities. The goal of these new features is to give organizations visibility into their workload consumption, surface opportunities to reduce carbon emissions, and give teams the data they need to easily consider trade-offs between workload cost, performance, and environmental impact when rightsizing infrastructure. Tanzu CloudHealth’s GreenOps capabilities enable users to perform in-depth analysis of emissions by organization, account, resource, and region, among other parameters.
Tanzu CloudHealth delivers insights into our Scope 3 (indirect) emissions generated from using third-party infrastructure supplied by IaaS providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and VMware Cloud™ on AWS. Tanzu CloudHealth ingests a variety of data sources that are then processed and stored as time-series metrics that can be analyzed, visualized, and alerted upon for optimization, status reporting, anomaly detection, and troubleshooting of modern multi-cloud infrastructure.
A significant aspect of our methodology for calculating operational emission is the carbon intensity for the region in which the data is hosted. Across the three largest hyperscalers, AWS, Azure, and GCP, there are 118 distinct locations. To obtain the carbon intensity of the location in which those data centers reside, we partner with WattTime, an environmental tech nonprofit, to provide location-based, daily average emissions. “We are thrilled to partner with WattTime, especially for such impactful work as delivering software to help organizations reduce carbon emissions and meet sustainability goals,” said Purnima Padmanabhan.
These data reveal the real-world impact of consuming energy at a specific time and location, based on the intricacies of the power grid and the ever-changing mix of generators in each region. “VMware is an incredible partner when it comes to exploring innovative emissions reduction opportunities for their customers and bringing them to life. The GreenOps feature for VMware Tanzu CloudHealth is truly just the beginning.” said Gavin McCormick, founder and executive director of WattTime.
Leveraging this data, Tanzu CloudHealth plans to add Regional Workload Placement recommendations, which identify alternative data center regions to host your resources, based on your sensitivity and priority for lowering carbon emissions and cost.
Changing the culture
A sustainable digital infrastructure supports the transition to net zero emissions for VMware, and our customers’ supply chain and operations. These green initiatives aren’t just theory; they have real-world benefits that offer enterprises significant competitive advantages, such as higher infrastructure productivity and lower costs per workload, while also building a strong brand based on sustainability, regardless of industry. That is certainly true for VMware and VMware products.
The advantages don’t end there. Companies and communities can realize additional sustainability benefits through avoided emissions, reductions in the need for additional fossil-fuel-powered data centers, water savings and decreased electronic waste.
What’s next
Corporate sustainability has become increasingly important, as our customers focus on creating long-term value for consumers, shareholders, employees, and societies. Delivering on this sustainability agenda will require building a more environmentally conscious supply chain as well as crafting a sustainable engineering culture. AWS and VMware are committed to helping our customers achieve their sustainability goals through innovations that drive green transformation and foster the attendant cultural shift.
Looking ahead
VMware IT is in the process of building a cloud-agnostic solution that provides VMware IT the ability to extend our applications to a multi-cloud environment. Tanzu CloudHealth will be integral to optimizing our cloud usage and controlling spending, while gaining the advantages of high availability, greater scalability and increased agility.
If you’re ready to take the next step toward sustainable engineering, using Tanzu CloudHealth in conjunction with the AWS Well-Architected Review can help build a culture of sustainability. By incorporating telemetry to measure the impact of changes, you can make carbon reduction a nonfunctional requirement in all future features.
This topic continues to evolve, so contact your account team to schedule a briefing with a VMware IT expert to hear the latest. And check out our related sustainability blogs:
- How VMware partnered with AWS to nurture a culture of sustainability
- How VMware Made Sustainable Computing and the Green Enterprise a Reality
- Going Green: How VMware IT Employed Technology Estate Optimization as the Foundation to Sustainable Engineering
- Leveraging Webhooks to Shift FinOps Left
- How VMware IT Is Increasing Its Sustainability Green Score
- Empowering Sustainability: Carbon Emissions Explorer Dashboard for VMware Aria Operations
- VMware Green Score in Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations)
- How VMware IT Reduces Carbon Footprint and Promotes Sustainability
- Sustainability Dashboards in vRealize Operations 8.6
For questions, or to schedule a 1:1 customer briefing on this topic with a VMware IT subject matter expert, contact [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.
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