The world of enterprise technology will be one of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, according to VMware, for the foreseeable future and the company sees its mission as making migration to that world as easy possible.
Taking to the stage in Barcelona for the European VMworld, CEO Pat Gelsinger said the company can offer an ‘any cloud’ approach, by simplifying private cloud first, making it easier to deploy, manage and secure, and then easing transition to public cloud – and back again.
With cloud under control and efficiently managed, business can then leverage globally consistent infrastructures to transform further in areas such as mobility and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Announcements
With a raft of product and service announcements, VMware has filled out its offerings across the board, bringing full service stacks to private cloud, hybrid and public cloud, offering more as a service and delivering on security with its AppDefense line.
At the US event in Las Vegas, a significant announcement was the availability on Amazon Web Services (AWS) of VMware Cloud. On stage in Barcelona, Gelsinger demonstrated a virtual reality-enabled migration of a running workload to AWS.
The company announced new cloud services and updates to Integrated OpenStack, vRealize Network Insight and a new HCI Acceleration kit.
Device management
There is a partnership with HP to simplify device lifecycle management with Workspace ONE and HP devices, and a claimed industry first of a unified end user experience, management and security solution for all end-point platforms. And, there was the launch of the Pivotal container service, dubbed PKS, to bring Kubernetes to enterprise customers.
For the European event, VMware announced the availability of its HCX technologies in cloud services, allowing seamless migration of vSphere applications to the public cloud, and back if necessary. There was a debut for VMware Cloud Provider and the VMware Cloud Verified trust mark and a verification programme for cloud partners.
Telco networks
An OpenStack offering for Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) that combines carrier-grade NFV infrastructure with OpenStack and container support. This is aimed initially at the telco industry with new functionality enabling enhanced virtual network functions (VNF) performance, dynamic scaling, multi-tenancy and cloud resource reservation.
Gelsinger said that telcos, a business he described as almost as big as data centres, is “almost untouched by virtualisation”, and is a huge opportunity. This was backed up by the announcement of large deal with carrier Vodafone.
There was a major update to vRealize Suite for 2017, with new lifecycle management capabilities to simplify what is termed “Day 0” through to “Day 2” tasks. It also features optimised application and infrastructure performance, while introducing native operations and enabling what VMware calls “DevOps-ready IT”.
Mobile security alliance
The company’s mobile security alliance has been strengthened with the addition of six new partners. It said that the alliance connects traditionally siloed solutions across endpoint security, application security, cloud security, network security, authentication and analytics.
Support for native Docker container hosts has been added to vSphere Integrated Containers 1.2, with the ability to provision and protect containers, with major security enhancements and a unified management portal.
Strategy
VMware’s overall strategy is reliant on the premise that enterprises will need to be able to manage hybrid environments, as they deal with on-premises infrastructure that may be legacy heavy, public cloud services, and some element of hybrid cloud, as they begin or accelerate migration of mission-critical workloads to the cloud.
Gelsinger said the company wants to ensure that CIOs can have a consistent infrastructure across the cloud world. With mobility and security also catered for with the recent round of developments, this allows CIOs to tackle multiple challenges while delivering agile services to the business as a basis for the transformation journey.
GDPR
As this was the European event, the topic of the upcoming general data protection regulation (GDPR) was not ignored. Gelsinger said that as part of VMware’s overall security strategy, it would help customers protect sensitive data via secure lifecycle management, through secure operations and automated data governance.
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