VMware unveils new Cross-Cloud Architecture

NEW DELHI: At VMworld 2016, US-based VMware has announced the extension of the company’s hybrid cloud strategy with the new VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture, enabling customers to run, manage, connect, and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment.

In support of the company’s cloud strategy, VMware also announced the following:

VMware Cloud Foundation is a unified Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) platform that makes it easy for customers to manage and run their SDDC clouds;

Technology Preview of Cross-Cloud Services to showcase how customers can manage, govern, and secure applications running in private and public clouds, including AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud;

VMware vCloud Availability, a new family of disaster recovery offerings purpose-built for vCloud Air Network partners;

A new release of VMware vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager to provide VMware vSphere users zero downtime application migration to VMware vCloud Air.

“Customers are increasingly relying on multiple public and private clouds to run their applications, but are daunted by the challenge of managing and securing applications across diverse cloud platforms,” said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president and general manager, Software-Defined Data Center Division, VMware.

“When customers combine a best-in-class private cloud with leading public clouds, all enabled by VMware, they have the strongest, most flexible hybrid cloud strategy. VMware is delivering cloud freedom and control by providing a common operating environment for all clouds with our unique Cross-Cloud Architecture," added Raghuram.

As the world’s most complete and capable hybrid cloud architecture, the Cross-Cloud Architecture enables consistent deployment models, security policies, visibility, and governance for all applications, running on-premises and off-premises, regardless of the underlying cloud, hardware platform or hypervisor. VMware’s Cross-Cloud Architecture builds on its leading private and hybrid cloud capabilities by offering customers the freedom to innovate in multiple clouds, and is delivered through VMware Cloud Foundation, a new set of Cross-Cloud Services which VMware is developing and the VMware vRealize® cloud management platform.

Unified SDDC Platform for the Hybrid Cloud

VMware Cloud Foundation delivers the next-generation hyper-converged infrastructure for building private clouds that for the first time combines VMware’s highly scalable hyper-converged software (VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN) with the world’s leading network virtualization platform, VMware NSX. VMware SDDC Manager, a core component of VMware Cloud Foundation, helps customers and service providers automate the deployment and management of VMware cloud software.

SDDC Manager helps to build and maintain the entire VMware cloud software stack, freeing cloud administrators from the complex and tedious task of installing, configuring, managing and updating their cloud infrastructure, making it possible to build a complete cloud in a matter of hours. The result is that customers can gain a 6-8x reduction in time to deploy cloud infrastructure, and save 30-40 percent on TCO (1).

For the first time, VMware Cloud Foundation offers a new “as-a-service” option that delivers the full power of the SDDC in a hybrid cloud environment. IBM is the first VMware vCloud Air Network partner delivering new offerings based on VMware Cloud Foundation with its VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud offering. VMware Cloud Foundation will be available on additional public clouds, including vCloud Air, in the future. Read more about VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud in this announcement.

For private clouds, customers can procure turnkey VxRack Systems integrated solutions from EMC today, or combine Cloud Foundation software with qualified VMware Virtual SAN Ready Nodes from Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and QCT.

VMware Cloud Foundation runs any traditional or cloud-native application, from business-critical scale-up applications to distributed scale-out applications. Regardless of whether they are in virtual machines or containers, VMware Cloud Foundation provides a consistent infrastructure platform that delivers the unique performance, resiliency, security and manageability benefits of vSphere, Virtual SAN and VMware NSX. VMware Cloud Foundation integrates with existing VMware solutions to support cloud flexibility and choice, and enable business mobility, including:

VMware vRealize Suite delivers a comprehensive enterprise-ready cloud management platform (CMP) that can speed up IT service delivery, improves IT operations, and delivers end-user choice with control, across heterogeneous, multi-cloud environments (vSphere and non-vSphere).

VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will enable developers to innovate faster with secure, multi-tenant self-service access to containers, while IT will be able to leverage existing tools, knowledge, and processes to deploy and manage container services.

VMware Integrated OpenStack gives customers the fastest path to deploy and manage a production-grade OpenStack cloud on top of a VMware-based SDDC infrastructure.

VMware Horizon enables customers to quickly deliver virtualized desktops and applications through a single platform, creating a secure digital workspace.

Tech Preview: Cross-Cloud Services

Cross-Cloud Services are new Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings under development to enable visibility into cloud usage and costs, enhance consistent networking and security policies, and automate the deployment, management, and migration of applications and data across vSphere and non-vSphere private and public clouds. With a common operating environment for both public clouds and on-premises workloads, central IT can protect data and applications and control costs while enabling developers and the business to innovate freely in the clouds they choose. The Cross-Cloud Services VMware will preview at VMworld include:

Discovery and Analytics: enabling discovery, onboarding, and governance of public cloud applications;

Compliance and Security: using micro-segmentation and monitoring to provide security and compliance for applications across clouds;

Deployment and Migration: providing developers the ability to work cross-cloud, and IT the ability to manage cross-cloud applications with security and compliance​.

Continued Innovation for vCloud Air and the vCloud Air Network

VMware vCloud Air and the VMware vCloud Air Network service provider ecosystem remain critical parts of the company’s hybrid cloud strategy. VMware vCloud Air Network partners offer a wide array of services, provide geographic and industry specialization, and help customers meet complex regulatory requirements.

VMware is announcing VMware vCloud Availability for vCloud Director, which will enable partners to offer simple, cost-effective cloud-based disaster recovery services that seamlessly support customers’ vSphere environments by leveraging native vSphere replication capabilities. This solution will be designed expressly for VMware vCloud Air Network service providers to be easy to operate, and foster customer adoption and growth, with a radically simple on premises installation process. The solution will also enable further monetization of existing VMware cloud environments based on VMware vCloud Director’s multi-tenant cloud management capabilities.

To extend a VMware private cloud to VMware vCloud Air, the latest version of Hybrid Cloud Manager offers new enhancements that simplify application migration and improve the performance of the connection between the two environments. vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager enables customers to extend on-premises networks to vCloud Air over an optimized, software-defined WAN, enabling networks to stretch in the cloud, yet perform almost as if they were local. vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager also enables zero downtime, bi-directional migration of entire applications, as well as the migration of NSX security policies to vCloud Air Advanced Networking Services. Customers can move virtual machines up to 20x faster with an optimized network while retaining the same security policies and controls available on-premises, all with the least disruption to the business.

Partner and Customer Commentary

“Ease of implementation and management of a complete Software-Defined Data Center is essential for today’s business driven solutions. EMC and VMware continue to jointly develop and bring to market hyper-converged products such as VxRail and VxRack Systems, and Hybrid Cloud Platforms such as EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud, with the goal to deliver a continuum of solutions that can address a wide range of customer requirements. With VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware and EMC are making it easy for customers to optimally leverage a unified SDDC software platform both on-premises or in the public cloud to achieve agile IT that drives business innovation," said Todd Pavone, chief operating officer, VCE

“IBM continues to help drive and lead the industry in hybrid cloud adoption. We're the first to offer VMware Cloud Foundation as a fully automated service today, while supporting it with more than 4,000 service professional trained and ready to help clients extend their VMware environments to the cloud.” —said Mercer Rowe, vice president of Business Development, IBM Cloud

“Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware helps enable enterprises to run, migrate or extend their on-premises workloads into a dedicated single-tenant private cloud. Rackspace is now extending support beyond compute virtualization to include VMware’s newest innovations in VMware NSX, Virtual SAN and vRealize Suite. This will give customers native access to the full VMware SDDC stack with the enhanced security of a single-tenant private cloud, backed by Fanatical Support," said Kaushik Balasubramanian, senior director of VMware Practice at Rackspace

“Expedient’s partnership in the VMware vCloud Air Network affords our team the opportunity to develop differentiated solutions that simplify complex capabilities for organizations to implement and maintain on their own. Platforms such as VMware NSX bring new capabilities that have led to the development of solutions such as our innovative Expedient Push Button DR 2.0 DRaaS solution which seamlessly moves all components of networking along with computing resources between different locations literally at the push of a button. VMware also continues to invest in new services for vCloud Air Network partners such as the vCloud Availability offerings," said Bryan Smith, senior vice president and chief strategy officer, Expedient

“As we continue to grow as an academic institution, we wanted to ensure our students had ongoing access to the best educational, service, and research opportunities. Making the switch to vCloud Air allowed us to transition our data center to the cloud, avoiding costly on-premises upgrades. There was little to no downtime during migration and it didn’t require any re-architecture or re-designing. We now have a data center off-premises that hosts our workloads, as well as enabling us to easily move workloads from one environment to another," said Jason McConnell, chief information officer, Lincoln Memorial University

Availability

VMware Cloud Foundation is expected be generally available in Q3 2016

VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud is expected to be generally available in Q3 2016

VMware vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager 2.0 is expected be generally available in Q3 2016

VMware vCloud Availability for vCloud Director is generally available