VMware, Inc. has announced the next evolution of VMware Cloud, empowering customers with new editions and capabilities that will help them modernise, optimise, and better protect their organisations. With VMware Cloud, customers innovate faster, operate more efficiently, improve threat defenses, and more quickly recover from ransomware attacks.
Commenting on the announcement, Krish Prasad, senior vice president (SVP) and general manager, cloud infrastructure business group, VMware, said, “VMware Cloud is setting a new benchmark for helping customers modernise, optimise, and better protect their businesses. Our latest VMware Cloud advancements further modernise cloud infrastructure and deliver a single cloud operating model that improves developer productivity and advances security.”
VMware Cloud Delivers Flexibility to Support any Cloud Journey
VMware Cloud combines VMware Cloud Foundation Software and VMware Cloud Services. Cloud Foundation combines the best innovations from VMware’s on-premises and public cloud software offerings into a unified stack to deliver a consistent environment across any on-premises, hyperscaler cloud, or partner cloud environment. VMware Cloud services simplify the deployment and operations of VMware Cloud Foundation environments across any cloud or on-premises environment. Customers can take advantage of VMware Cloud services to run enterprise workloads more securely at scale with advanced data protection, cloud-based disaster and ransomware recovery and multi-cloud networking and security. Advanced developer services, built-in Kubernetes, and optimised access to hundreds of native cloud services across leading hyperscalers deliver a pragmatic approach to app modernization.
VMware Cloud is available in five prescriptive VMware Cloud editions (Essentials, Standard, Pro, Advanced, Enterprise) that help customers flexibly modernise infrastructure and management at every stage of their cloud transformation journey. Customers can deploy and manage their VMware Cloud environments in three ways:
- Customer Managed –VMware Cloud editions can be deployed by customers in their own data centres or their choice of colocation partners with full control of the infrastructure environment.
- VMware Managed – VMware Cloud on AWS is a VMware-managed cloud service with fully integrated hardware and software. VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal will be a distributed cloud service that enables customers to purchase software and hardware as a service separately for maximum flexibility.
- Provider Managed – new VMware Cross-Cloud managed services based on VMware Cloud editions from partners such as IBM Cloud enable customers to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for on-premises environments, simplify operations, reduce risk with observability, actionable insight, and performance optimization, and accelerate cloud migrations.
Meanwhile, Kojo Inkumsah, director and SVP, Infrastructure and Cloud, First Citizens Bank, said, “Mergers and acquisition is a major part of our growth strategy, and our multi-cloud approach enables First Citizens Bank to integrate the systems of banks we have acquired more quickly and easily with lower risk. With VMware Cloud, we have access to a consistent multi-cloud infrastructure as a solution that supports our enterprise workloads on-prem today, with the flexibility to run different parts of our business in hyperscale clouds of our choice in the future. This will enable us to optimise our IT environment for both costs and performance and become more resilient to outages and other business disruptions.”
NSX+: New Multi-Cloud Networking, Security and Developer Services for VMware Cloud
VMware is the data centre software-defined networking (SDN) leader with a 70 per cent share in 2022, and VMware NSX has been shown to deliver more than 60 per cent OPEX savings from service automation and reduced hardware administration and 66 per cent savings in day 0-2 operations. Unveiled today, VMware NSX+ is a new cloud-managed service offering of NSX for multi-cloud environments (previously Project NorthStar) that advances core networking and security capabilities for VMware Cloud. With a single cloud operating model that delivers zero tickets, zero custom security or load balancing hardware appliances, and Zero Trust, VMware NSX+ normalizes networking and security across VMware Cloud environments. NSX+ will deliver consistent network and security operations, centralized security policy creation and enforcement, comprehensive network and application visibility, and defense in depth with network detection and response (NDR) as a Service. NSX+ capabilities are delivered as SaaS, simplifying the installation process, and are centrally managed from a single cloud console.
VMware is also introducing NSX+ virtual private clouds (VPCs). NSX+ VPCs provide full isolation of networking, security, and services to multiple tenants on a shared VMware Cloud infrastructure managed by a single global NSX interface. Developers and application teams can select clouds that are optimal for their applications, while benefiting from the self-service and agility of NSX+ VPCs across clouds. Infrastructure teams can maintain supervisory control, set operational guardrails on a per VPC basis, and help ensure changes made within VPC environments have no impact on other tenants. NSX+ VPCs also improve IT productivity, as the infrastructure team can use a consistent operating model across clouds.
Further, Rodney Barnhardt, server administrator at Charlotte Pipe and Foundry, said, “VMware Cloud is a cornerstone of our digital transformation, providing us with a flexible and streamlined platform to manage and automate our workload operations on premises today, with an eye towards the cloud in the future. VMware Cloud Foundation facilitates easy and rapid deployment and lifecycle management of our virtual infrastructure, which has been pivotal in maintaining our agility in a fast-paced industry. VMware NSX has fortified our security through micro-segmentation, reducing the risk of lateral threat movements within our network.”
Boosting Storage Scale and Efficiency with Lower TCO in VMware Cloud
Organisations are utilising advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads to gain customer insights, optimise processes, and drive revenue growth. These workloads require massive data sets that can grow rapidly, so storage solutions must elastically scale out to petabyte capacities while delivering high performance and resiliency at a low total cost of ownership (TCO). Today, VMware is announcing even more scalable, efficient, and cost-effective storage for VMware Cloud with VMware virtual storage access network (vSAN) Max, a new offering within the vSAN family that will deliver petabyte-scale disaggregated storage. With this announcement, VMware’s storage solutions will give customers unparalleled scaling flexibility compared to traditional storage solutions, with the performance, capacity, resiliency, and low TCO for the most demanding applications today. vSAN Max will scale storage elastically and independently from compute to maximize utilisation, up to 8.6 petabytes of capacity and 3.6 million IOPS per cluster. It is designed to withstand failures across sites, hosts, and even discrete storage devices in a stretched cluster topology. Since it is built on the vSAN Express Storage Architecture, vSAN Max is designed to heal from a discrete device failure up to 92 per cent faster. It can lower TCO by up to 30 per cent for mission-critical databases through hardware and license consolidation. The new vSAN Max offering will be licensed separately from existing vSAN editions, will be offered as a subscription, and is planned to be licensed on a per tebibyte metric.
Additionally, Kamran Amini, vice president and general manager of server, storage and software-defined solutions, at Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group, said, “VMware and Lenovo have long partnered to deliver turnkey HCI solutions that accelerate time-to-value and support application and infrastructure modernization in the enterprise and edge. We continue to be one of the fastest-growing data management providers in the world with differentiated technology that empowers our customers’ intelligent transformation. Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Appliances, with vSAN Express Storage Architecture and vSAN Max, can address a broader set of use cases with the performance, resiliency, scale, and reduced TCO required for extremely latency-sensitive databases and cloud-native applications, enabling customers to migrate away from legacy models.”
VMware Cloud Enables Recovery Faster Recovery From Ransomware Attacks
Most ransomware attacks now employ fileless techniques that cannot be detected by scanning idle backups, posing a major threat to organisations. VMware Ransomware Recovery is an award-winning VMware Cloud service available today designed to recover from fileless attacks using behavioural analysis of powered-on VMs in cloud-based isolated recovery environments (IREs). VMware Ransomware Recovery has been shown to resolve unplanned downtime up to 75 per cent faster. To further reduce customer downtime, VMware Ransomware Recovery added concurrent multi-VM recovery operations (available today) and will enable customers to run production workloads in the cloud until forensics are completed and the on-premises datacentre is fortified (expected availability Q3FY24). Additionally, VMware unveiled a technology preview of cybersecure storage that will integrate recovery workflows with native vSAN snapshots for data transfer optimizations. VMware Ransomware Recovery is also expanding VMware Cloud service support to include protection of workloads in Google Cloud VMware Engine (available today).
Also, Alaa Elbanna, infrastructure administrator, VanEck, said, “Nobody likes to think they will get hit with a successful ransomware attack, but VanEck’s systems need to be readily available 24/7 to serve our financial services clients around the world. That means we must have a recovery plan that puts ransomware front and centre. Previously, recovery was complicated and time-consuming. We had to use three-four different products just to get things back up and running. Now with VMware Ransomware Recovery, everything is seamless and orchestrated. It took less than two days to deploy and now we can quickly identify recovery point candidates, test them in an isolated cloud-based environment that’s easily provisioned, and get back to business faster.”
Enhancing Operational Efficiency of VMware Cloud
As part of this wave of key innovations being delivered by VMware Cloud, VMware is announcing the early availability of a new cloud-based elastic sky X integrated (ESXi) lifecycle management service in VMware vSphere+. IT admins will be able to centrally manage upgrades across their entire ESXi fleet in distributed multi-vcenter environments, overcoming silos and completing in just a few operations what may have previously required hundreds or even thousands of operations, especially in larger environments. This will result in significant time savings and simpler upgrade planning and deployments, making it easier for customers to get on to the latest versions and enjoy the benefits of powerful new capabilities of VMware Cloud. Additional updates to vSphere in the upcoming release will also include doubling graphic processing unit (GPU) capacity per VM to support more complex artificial intelligence/ machine learning workloads, enabling smarter load balancing to maximize performance from GPU investments, and enhanced self-service tools to make building and running modern apps even easier for DevOps engineers and developers.
