Raghu Raghuram (VMware)
VMware has revealed a stacked line-up of new products spanning enhanced portfolio offerings, new multi-cloud management solutions and cross-cloud services during Explore 2022.
VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram noted the importance of multi-cloud as the 'ultimate' destination for customers in accelerating digital innovation.
“At Explore, VMware and our partners are advancing our technology offerings to help customers gain advantages from a cloud-smart approach", he said.
Advances to Tanzu portfolio
New advances were introduced to the VMware Tanzu portfolio, Tanzu Application Platform and Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, unlocking developer productivity, delivering end-to-end security from build to production, and enabling secure multi-cloud operations at scale, regardless of where they are in their Kubernetes journey.
The advances will help to streamline and simplify Kubernetes delivery, management, and reliability.
VMware Tanzu Mission Control expands multi-cluster and multi-cloud Kubernetes management capabilities with enablement of direct provisioning and management of Amazon EKS cluster, as well as a new integration with VMware Aria Automation to help customers consolidate their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Kubernetes platform operations.
It also now employs clusters via GitOps for consistent Kubernetes cluster configuration and offers more flexibility for applications with cross-cluster backup and restore.
The new Unified Observability Platform by VMware Aria Operations for Applications, formerly VMware Tanzu Observability, provides simplified full-stack visibility wand predictable pricing for multi-cloud environments.
The release of VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0 is designed to help IT teams and developers with a streamlined experiences for managing and provisioning the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters.
VMware Tanzu Application Platform has new capabilities that further enhance developer and application operator experiences for any Kuberentes environment, increase supply chain security, and offer additional ecosystem integrations.
Major updates include availability on RedHat OpenShift, air-gap support, secure software supply chain enhancements, dynamic API specification registration, and Jenkins CI/DI integration.
“For those who are just starting their Kubernetes journey, vSphere with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid helps you get a developer ready platform. For those who have already started with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) or any Kubernetes distribution, they can use Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations and Tanzu Application Platform for scaling your operator and developer experience," VMware senior vice president and general manager, Modern Apps & Management Business Group Ajay Patel said.
Multi-cloud management advancement
VMware Aria was also revealed offering a multi-cloud management portfolio that provides a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud native applications.
Powered by VMware Aria Graph, the graph-based data store captures the complexity of customers’ multi-cloud environments.
“VMware Aria's API-first approach enables developers, SREs and Platform Engineering teams to pull relevant, correlated data from any source for quicker application analysis and debugging, while providing complete visibility into the cost, performance, and configuration of applications and workloads across cloud environments for Platform Ops, IT Ops, and Cloud Ops teams," VMware senior VP and GM of cloud management, Purnima Padmanabhan said.
There are also new and expanded capabilities for cloud native and multi-cloud management across three categories - VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, VMware Aria Operations, and VMware Aria Automation.
"These changes to the product branding, documentation support systems as well as new sku's will happen early 2023", Padmanabhan said.
Evolved cloud and edge infrastructure solutions
VMware also unveiled a new release of its compute and storage solutions vSphere 8 and vSAN 8, aimed at helping customers run the broadest set of workloads on the environments of their choice.
VMware vSphere 8 ushers in a new era of heterogenous computing by bringing DPUs (Data Processing Units) into the fold (previously Project Monterey) along with CPUs and GPUs, making the future of modern infrastructure accessible to all enterprises.
vSphere 8 unleashes key innovations to help customers supercharge workload performance while lowering total cost of ownership, accelerate innovation for DevOps teams, improve operational efficiency and IT productivity, and bring the benefits of the cloud to their on-premises infrastructure.
VMware vSAN 8 introduces a next-generation storage platform optimised for modern hardware with hyperconverged infrastructure.
Edge-native apps join the line-up of new solutions, with enhanced purpose-built edge solutions and their unique performance, autonomy and latency requirements. This includes VMware Edge Compute Stack 2, Managed Edge Solution with NTT and VMware Private Mobile Network.
VMware Cloud Foundation+, VMware vSphere 8, VMware vSAN 8 and VMware Edge Compute Stack 2 are all expected to become available by October.
Redefined networking and security for multi-cloud
Project Northstar was unveiled for multi-cloud networking, security and end-to-end visibility: with the preview of an advancement of its NSX platform, ‘transforms’ how enterprises consume networking and security in a multi-cloud world.
It is also expanding lateral security capabilities by embedding networking detection and visibility into Carbon Black Cloud’s endpoint protection platform, which is now available to select customers in early access.
Project Trinidad extends and advanced VMware’s API security and analytics by deploying sensors on Kubernetes clusters and uses machine learning with business logic inference to detect anomalous behavior in east-west traffic between microservices.
Finally, Project Watch is a new approach to multi-cloud networking and security that provides advanced app to app policy controls to help with continuous risk and compliance assessment.
“With a privileged position in the infrastructure and a scale out distributed software architecture, we’re able to leverage the intrinsic attributes of our platforms and deliver these unique solutions in a consumption-oriented manner," VMware senior VP and GM networking and advanced security business group Tom Gillis said.
Advanced automation to ease implementation of hybrid work model
VMware outlined how autonomous workspace powered by data science will ease the burden of supporting a hybrid work model for IT.
It also unveiled innovations across its Anywhere Workspace platform that will inject automation in organisations’ end user computing environments, enabling IT teams to do more with less.
“The reality of hybrid work is each employee, and each device is a front door into the organisation and its resources. IT must not only make that front door secure, but also welcoming as employees access apps from anywhere”, said Shankar Iyer, senior vice president and general manager of End User Computing at VMware.
“The only way IT teams will be able to support hybrid work is by implementing simplified, unified, and automated processes”.
The future of hybrid work will drive an evolution of the digital workspace – one that injects data science and proactive automations across endpoint management, security and end-user experience. This will enable a context-aware autonomous workspace that delivers primary outcomes including self-configuring, self-healing and self-securing.
These outcomes are advanced through four key technology areas: VDI and DaaS, Digital Employee Experience, Unified Endpoint Management, and Security.
Claudia Muldrew attended VMware Explore 2022 in San Francisco as a guest of VMware.
