At VMworld 2017 the focus was on cloud and big strides forwards were made by the Dell Technologies subsidiary. Contributing to this progress is an array of newly unveiled services and products to support customers in areas such as security.
First and foremost, VMware Cloud was given a plethora of new services, pitched as a way for businesses to succeed in the multi-cloud era. With the broadened set of services, VMware Cloud looks to enable customers to run, manage, connect and secure any application across clouds and devices.
“Customers are accelerating digital transformation by deploying applications across clouds, with upwards of two-thirds of enterprises deploying applications on three or more clouds today,” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware.
“VMware Cloud brings a consistent operating model, enterprise control, and investment protection for IT resources and skillsets to a multi-cloud world. With these new services, we are preserving developer agility and freedom to drive innovation.”
Security is obviously also of paramount importance, and VMware launched its new AppDefense product for data center endpoint security. This new security solution leverages the virtual infrastructure to monitor running applications against their intended state, and can detect and automate response to attacks that attempt to manipulate those applications.
Some other tools launched to benefit customers include VMware Integrated OpenStack and VMware vRealize Network insight, geared towards modernising data centers and increasing customer agility.
The transition to digital is a much talked about subject within the enterprise, but the process of actually making the transition has been an unclear path so far. VMware’s new plans and offerings announced at VMworld 2017 mark progress toward fortifying and equipping customers sufficiently to weather the storm of digital transformation.
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Customers will be provided with software for the cloud, mobile and security, meaning that they can tailor the VMware offering to suit their needs, making them more formidable in the transformation process.
At the core of the announcements coming out of VMworld 2017 are the high profile partnerships that have been engaged in, providing VMware with support in its mission to pave the way of the enterprise into digital transformation.
AWS
Perhaps the biggest news from the event, VMware Cloud on AWS is now live, a plan that began with the two companies connecting in October 2016.
VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) to the AWS Cloud, allowing customers to run applications across operationally consistent VMware vSphere-based private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, with optimised access to AWS services.
VMware will be in full control of selling this service, while it will also be responsible for its delivery for customers. Customers will gain a set of software-defined services that will target areas including security, networking and compute storage.
“With the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS, for the first time customers can operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment that combines the VMware software they love with the unmatched functionality, security, and operational expertise of the AWS Cloud,” said Andy Jassy, chief executive officer, AWS.
“The majority of the world’s enterprises have virtualized their data centers with VMware, and now these customers can easily move applications between their on-premises environments and AWS without having to purchase any new hardware, rewrite their applications, or modify their operations.”
HPE
VMware’s partnership with HPE is also top news from VMworld 2017, this is because HPE is set to deliver a composable infrastructure for VMware private clouds, and it is being regarded as an industry first.
The composable platform for VMware Cloud Foundation is rooted in the HPE Synergy offering; composable infrastructure intended to accelerate application delivery. The solution will enable IT organizations to simplify their transformation to a hybrid IT infrastructure, deploy infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and private clouds in minutes and lower virtual machine (VM) costs compared to public clouds and traditional server racks.
The combination of HPE Synergy with VMware Cloud Foundation will enable customers to become an internal service provider of IaaS and private clouds, while also allowing customers to perform at speed – HPE Synergy recently set the world record VMmark 2.x Performance Benchmark, performing 41 percent faster than the previous top scoring server. Customers will also be able to operate a single platform to run traditional bare metal, virtualized SAN-based environments and new vSAN-based workloads.
“HPE Synergy powered by Cloud Foundation will provide a powerful solution to consolidate traditional, private and cloud native workloads onto a single integrated infrastructure platform that is simple to deploy and operate,” said John Gilmartin, vice president and general manager, Integrated Systems Business Unit, VMware.
“Customers will benefit from a highly dynamic, programmable infrastructure foundation that eliminates the operational overhead of traditional deployments thanks to new built-in lifecycle automation capabilities. We are excited about the value that HPE Synergy powered by Cloud Foundation will unlock to our mutual customers.”
HP
VMware and HP announced a partnership at VMworld that will add VMware Workspace ONE to HP’s Device as a Service (DaaS) technology platform.
Workspace ONE, an integrated platform powered by VMware AirWatch Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) technology, provides a holistic and user-centric approach to managing all endpoints in an organisation – from mobile and desktop to Internet of Things (IoT). HP DaaS offers a modern consumption model for computing in which hardware and lifecycle services are combined to improve the user experience and free up IT resources to drive growth.
“VMware Workspace ONE powered by AirWatch provides next-generation unified endpoint management that enables our customers to manage the complete lifecycle of the end points and applications over-the-air and in real-time,” said Sumit Dhawan, senior vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware.
“This partnership brings two industry-leading players together to deliver a complete solution for mutual customers looking to transform their end points from procurement to management into a predictable consumption-based service.”
Carbon Black
Security has become a top concern across the tech industry, and is quickly becoming prominent across other industries and the rest of the world more generally. When advancing into the digital frontier, it is absolutely essential.
Announced at VMworld, VMware has subsequently launched its AppDefense product, and this draws upon the Carbon Black Collective Defense Cloud so as to enhance the capabilities in application classification. This technology is crucial, with analysts and cybersecurity professionals drowning in the huge volumes of data, as it can ascertain which behaviours need to be further investigated.
VMware AppDefense will leverage Carbon Black’s Collective Defense Cloud (CDC) to classify process reputation, helping security teams determine which behaviours require additional verification and which behaviours can be pre-approved.
“With AppDefense, VMware is redefining security for the software-defined data centere,” said Tom Corn, senior vice president, Security Products, VMware. “By working with Carbon Black, we are moving the industry toward a new security model and empowering customers to protect their virtualised environments from the latest advanced threats.”
Rackspace
Another partnership announced at VMworld is with Rackspace, and it is set to build on its relationship with VMware to offer Fanatical Support. Mutual customers will be able to have more multi-cloud choice with Rackspace helping customers to run their VMware workloads out of the datacentre and in the best-fit location, whether in Rackspace datacentres or VMware Cloud on AWS.
Through Fanatical Support for VMware Cloud on AWS, Rackspace will also provide architecture, provisioning and management guidance, as well as assist customers with capacity management and workload mobility between Rackspace data centres and AWS data centres.
“With the same architecture and operational experience on-premises and in the cloud, customers can quickly derive business value from a hybrid cloud experience based on AWS, Rackspace and VMware,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager of Product Development for Cloud Services at VMware.
“Rackspace has extended its Fanatical Support to VMware technologies for more than 10 years, and VMware Cloud on AWS presents another opportunity to help mutual customers architect, manage and optimise their existing and future VMware-based applications. We’re excited to take this next step and collaborate with Rackspace as they grow and evolve with VMware to meet our mutual customers’ needs.”
Palo Alto Networks
Proving that security is of central importance to the announcements at VMworld 2017, a partnership with Palo Alto Networks based on security was also unveiled at the event.
Within this move Palo Alto Networks will be providing its Next-Generation Security Platform. Via an integrated security offering, customers will be able to secure their environment; this is an example of power being handed to the customer to help with digital transformation.
In working together, VMware and Palo Alto Networks aim to achieve a layer of security that spans cloud environments including virtualised, cloud and physical. While providing enhanced security is central to the partnership, efficiency and heightened visibility are also expected to be benefits of the initiative.
Pivotal
Also announced at VMworld, VMware and Pivotal have entered into the container business together, with the two companies launching the Pivotal Container Service (PKS) in collaboration with Google Cloud.
PKS enables enterprises and service providers to deliver production-ready Kubernetes on VMware vSphere and Google Cloud Platform, with constant compatibility to Google Container Engine. The new offering is expected to become available in calendar Q4 2017, and ship as a standalone product able to integrate with Pivotal Cloud Foundry and VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) infrastructure.
“There is very high interest by enterprises today in Kubernetes for container orchestration,” says Gary Chen, Research Manager, Software-Defined Compute, IDC.
“Pivotal Container Service’s focus on operationalizing Kubernetes with built-in cluster deployment and lifecycle management, security and network connectivity for containers via NSX and constant compatibility with the latest release of Kubernetes and Google Container Engine, offers IT shops plenty to consider. IDC research shows that most enterprises are seeking a commercially supported Kubernetes solution and PKS has VMware, Pivotal and Google lined up to support it.”
PKS is a commercial release of the open source Kubo technology, with PKS looking to help Global 2000 companies operationalize Kubernetes. PKS will help operations teams deliver a hardened, maintainable container platform, while giving developers on-demand access to a production-ready environment featuring high availability, security, and multi-tenancy across private and public clouds.
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“We see an open hybrid cloud ecosystem forming based on many technologists and providers coming together on Kubernetes, and Pivotal Container Service is a great way to run containers and Kubernetes on premises,” says Sam Ramji, VP Product Management, Developer Platforms, Google Cloud.
“It gives you native access to Google Cloud services, and it’s on the same release cadence as Google Container Engine. With Pivotal Container Service plus Google Container Engine, you get constant compatibility, and your services, and workloads are deployed the same way, anywhere you need them.”
