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Pat kicked off the VMworld keynote session today with a series of announcements covering areas including cloud, data center and Kubernetes. It is hard to keep up with all of these announcements at VMworld. Here is a list of most (if not all) of the announcements that were made today. I will be writing a series of blog posts covering the specifics of each of the announcements and this post is intended to provide a quick list of announcements and the resources that will help you learn more about them.

Project Pacific

Project Pacific brings the container and Virtual Machine worlds together. VMware’s previous attempt at this was with offerings like vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) but this is a whole new solution that brings containers, Kubernetes and VMs natively into vSphere, running as peers on ESXi.

Product page: https://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/projectpacific.html

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/08/introducing-project-pacific.html

VMware Tanzu

As Pat mentioned in his keynote, Kubernetes community is growing and is a technology that is sought out by most of the enterprise customers. As this adoption grows, it bridges the gap between developers and IT operators. Project Tanzu is VMware’s answer to how their customers can transform the way they build applications on Kubernetes.

Tanzu portal: https://cloud.vmware.com/tanzu

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/2019/08/26/vmware-completes-approach-to-modern-applications/

Tanzu Mission Control

This has been an ask for a long time. A manager of a manager kind of setup where a customer can manage their Kubernetes deployments across different cloud and on-premises environments in a single management pane. Tanzu Mission control is the answer to this requirement.

Product page: https://cloud.vmware.com/tanzu-mission-control

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/2019/08/26/vmware-tanzu-mission-control/

CloudHealth Hybrid

CloudHealth has done a great job in providing cost optimization benefits to customers for many years now. Fitting into the VMware story of hybrid cloud, it was announced today that Cloudhealth will start supporting vSphere and VMC on AWS environments, making it a single platform that can provide visibility into usage and cost across entire hybrid cloud deployments.

Product page: https://go.cloudhealthtech.com/cloudhealth-hybrid.html

Announcement Blog: https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/blog/cloudhealth-hybrid

Secure state

In the ecosystem consisting of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments, security becomes crucial. Secure state provides the ability to understand your cloud’s security and compliance posture by visualizing object relationships and mapping associated violations, metadata, and changes to objects.

Product page: https://go.cloudhealthtech.com/vmware-secure-state

Announcement Blog: https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/blog/advancing-cloud-security-vmware-secure-state

vRealize Automation Cloud

VMware Cloud Automation Services (CAS) has been around for a while and has been providing a SaaS option for customers who are planning to leverage native clouds and cloud-agnostic blueprints. CAS has been renamed into VMware vRealize Automation Cloud (vRAC). VMware vRealize Automation Cloud streamlines multi-cloud infrastructure and application delivery, enhances visibility and cross-functional collaboration and provides continuous delivery and release automation. It is a bundle comprised of three services: Cloud Assembly, Service Broker, and Code Stream.

vRealize Automation 8.0

vRealize Automation 8.0 comes with feature parity with the vRealize Automation Cloud (formerly Cloud Automation Services) SaaS service that was announced today. vRealize Automation 8 removes the need to run Windows VMs for IaaS services and packs all the required services into a single VM that run these services as separate containers. This makes it easy to develop and fix each service independently without affecting the other services. The new version also supports Action Based Extensibility (ABX) which is an alternate way of developing workflows as opposed to creating them on vRO.

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2019/08/vrealize-automation-8-whats-new-overview.html

vRealize Operations 8.0

vRealize Operations 8.0 has a lot of feature enhancements with support for VMC on AWS and CloudHelath integration. It also comes with continuous support along with the HA feature it had in the previous versions. The new version also introduces intent-driven performance optimization for VMware Cloud on AWS with cross-cluster workload balancing and rightsizing.

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2019/08/whats-new-in-vrealize-operations-8-0.html

vRealize Operations Cloud

This has been a long-pending announcement. vRealize Operations is now available as a SaaS service which can be used to monitor the multi-cloud workloads in a pay-as-you- go model. This fits in very well with VMware’s story of developing products on the cloud and then rolling them out to on-prem customers.

Announcement Blog: https://cloud.vmware.com/community/2019/08/26/vrealize-operations-self-driving-operations/

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.0

This version of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) finally catches up with the rest of the vRealize Suite of products. The vRSLCM product has evolved to be the go-to deployment tool that can deploy vRealize Suite of products in an automated way saving many hours in deployment time and resulting in faster time to value of vRealize Suite of products.

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2019/08/vrslcm-8-0-whats-new.html

Azure VMware Solutions: General Availability

Azure VMware solutions was announced during the Dell Tech World this year delivered by Virtustream and CloudSimple. This is an offering that makes the VMware’s enterprise-class SDDC solution available on the native Azure cloud. It was announced that the Azure VMware Solutions will go GA on some of the Azure regions and customers will be able to leverage this to migrate their existing vSphere workloads into Azure-hosted VMware environments.

Product page: https://cloud.vmware.com/providers/azure-vmware-solutions

Announcement Blog: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/updates/azure-vmware-solutions-is-now-generally-available/

VMC on DellEMC : Initial Availabilty

This was a much-awaited announcement at VMworld 2019. This is a very good option for a customer who is looking to deploy and consume infrastructure in a pay-as-you-go managed service model. The solution will be delivered on VxRail hardware and also comes with SD-WAN integration. This is a block under the overall Project Dimension story that VMware announced at VMworld 2018

Announcement Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/08/announcing-initial-availability-of-vmware-cloud-on-dell-emc.html

NSX Intelligence

Pat mentioned this while talking about the Virtual Cloud Networking (VCN). While vRNI provides the traffic flows and visibility across the products in the VCN and other portfolios, NSX intelligence provides an in-depth analysis of network layer and suggestions on how to improve the performance and design of your network infrastructure.

AVI Network integration into NSX portfolio

AVI network will now be part of the NSX and VCN portfolio and will bridge the crucial gap that the portfolio has in the space of advanced firewall and Application load balancing.

Let me know if I have missed any announcement and I will add it to the list.

A brief history :

Back in 2015, when Pat Gelsinger got on the stage at VMworld and spoke about the VMware vision : One Cloud, Any Application and Any Device, we thought it could be a powerful story. The on-prem Software Defined Data-center (SDDC) and the public cloud businesses were evolving simultaneously and we were discussing about how we need a unified hybrid cloud approach to bring it all together. The approach back then used VMware on-prem infrastructure and vCloud Air to form a hybrid cloud architecture.

The fundamental idea of this architecture was to enable customers to run their on-prem infra and consume managed platforms through a public cloud model either by VMware hosted vCloud Air cloud or through other vCloud Air network (vCAN) partners. This was to offer customers choice, freedom and flexibility. Of course, VMware realized that running a public cloud is not an easy task and sold that business off to OVH. That did not stop them innovating in the hybrid cloud space. The real issue with the hybrid cloud model even today is that it is only hybrid in the sense of management and not on the workload mobility aspect. You cannot seamlessly move workloads across on-prem vSphere and native clouds without re-factoring/re-platforming the application.

VMware Cloud foundation was introduced to solve that exact challenge and many more. Bringing in consistency across different platforms unlocks the true hybridity model/architecture. The below image was from VMworld 2016 keynote. Back then, this was just a possibility and not a reality yet. No one thought that VMware would be hosting their SDDC in each of these clouds someday. And even if someone mentioned it, people would call them insane. Why would you need a private cloud inside a public cloud, right?

In 2017, VMware changed their vision to Any Cloud, Any Application, Any Device and that should have given us a hint about the direction that the company was heading in. VMware Cloud foundation became the building block of this vision. The layer that enabled consistent infrastructure across multi-cloud scenarios and led to the invention on true hybrid cloud model by hosting it on native clouds.

VMware announced their first partnership with AWS to launch VMware Cloud on AWS in 2017 and the service is currently available across 15+ regions globally. This was very well received by enterprise customers and we can see that by the expanding customer base on VMC on AWS.

VMware also announced their partnership with Azure in Q2 2019. This will be available for consumption in Q4, 2019. The Azure Solutions (that’s what it’s called) will be delivered by Cloudsimple and DellEMC’s Virtustream as opposed to VMC on AWS which is owned and delivered by VMware.

Fast forward to 2019

Google today announced that they are going to make the VMware Cloud Foundation stack available on Google Cloud Platform for enterprise customers. This goes to show that there is a huge opportunity in the hybrid cloud space that companies want to tap into and grow their sales.

VMC on gcp — Source : https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/07/30/googs_vmware.jpg

Who knew in a matter of two years VMware will have their SDDC stack running in all three major public cloud platforms. I would not have believed it. But here we are.

The major reason why these partnerships are seeing success is that the market they are capturing is unique. Most of the times customers try to compare VMC on AWS to native cloud options like AWS and Azure. That’s not what these companies are trying to solve. The market demands for a solution that can give them true hybridity which will enable them to move to a public cloud without facing the challenges like

Re-skiling their resources
Using discrete tools to manage the platforms
Longer migration windows
CapEx investment

And that is exactly what these partnerships are here to deliver.

VMworld US 2019 – Day 1 announcements : Tech in the age of Any