VMware Cloud, a Single Platform for Hybrid Cloud Environments
With the launch of VMware Cloud, VMware has taken a step closer to offering organizations a single platform for shifting resources across multi- and hybrid cloud environments.
Through a single interface, VMware customers can now run VMware Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation on on-premises and Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Previously, this capability was largely limited to AWS environments, for example.
VMware Cloud is intended to address “the central problem” for organizations seeking to deploy applications and extend their operations in distributed multicloud environments, Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, products and cloud services, for VMware, said during an analyst and journalist briefing.
“That is the reality: how do you provide a consistent infrastructure, where all of these applications can run, whether they are traditional applications or modern applications? How do you manage all of these in a consistent way and control the costs and in a consistent way?” Raghuram said. “Most of all, how do you secure them all in a consistent way that we think is going to be the central problem that CIOs are going to grapple with during the next decade.”
The wide range of tools and options on offer under the VMware Cloud umbrella now represents what Raghuram said is the “fastest path to application modernization,” Raghuram said.
Organizations’ applications run 80% faster and digital migrations are 46% faster, while the total cost of ownership is “59% cheaper” with VMware Cloud, Raghuram said, without specifying the metrics to which he was making the comparison. “We are faster, cheaper and better than any other mechanism,” Raghuram said. “And we preserve the choice of the cloud that they want.”
VMware Cloud also represents a “coming together” of VMware’s technologies as the core foundation of VMware’s multicloud strategy, Raghuram said. These include virtual machine (VM) and Kubernetes orchestration platforms, such as vSphere and Tanzu. During his presentation, VMware services 5 million developers and 85 million workloads for a total of 300,000 customers, he said.
By running operations natively on Azure, AWS or Google, DevOps customers can both manage traditional VM applications, as well as more modern Kubernetes and containerized applications “in a consistent way wherever they want,” Raghuram said. “The developers can then connect to the native cloud services on any of these platforms, and IT can manage them all in a centralized fashion and secure the model of the centralized fashion,” Raghuram said. “This really is our vision for VMware Cloud.”
VMware Cloud is also not an all-or-nothing offering, as organizations can pick and choose from different modular services that offer the best fit for their particular needs, Raghuram said.
Customers can opt to just adopt the VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure, or “they can just consume Tanzu on any cloud or our cloud management portfolio on any cloud,” Raghuram said, referring to VMware’s Kubernetes distribution.
“But collectively, VMware Cloud provides a holistic set of multicloud services that all work together. And so, they take all of these together, it operates as an integrated multicloud solution,” Raghuram said. “So, this is what we’ve been up to over the last year in addressing the customer’s problem of living in a cloud-distributed world.”
During the presentation with analyst and journalists, Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president of and general manager of VMware’s Cloud Services business unit, outlined three announcements in support of VMware Cloud:
- VMware Cloud Universal: a “flexible” subscription allows users to purchase and consume VMware multicloud infrastructure management services. The service allows users “to make one upfront commitment, and then effectively redeem that pool of credits flexibly to consume any of the eligible services subscription services in the offer at any time they want during the term of the contact.”
- VMware Cloud Console: a single monitoring and management environment for VMware Cloud infrastructure customers.
- VMware App Navigator: a service offering to help DevOps teams assess and prioritize their application-transformation initiatives “across their entire state of enterprise applications based on the business value of each of those apps.
“Our customers increasingly need to operate in this multicloud world and be able to build, run and deploy applications based on the needs of the business across these different environments,” Lohmeyer said. “We’ve really been working hard to come up with a new set of offers that really help to accelerate our customers’ journey to modernize their existing application environments and accelerate their journey to the cloud… These three new announcements [are] in support of that goal.”
