Pivotal

This is a quick post to summerise all the key announcements from VMworld 2017 US event and share my thoughts and insights of the strategy and the direction of VMware, the way I see it.

Key Announcements

A number of announcements were made during the week on products and solutions and below is a high level list of those to recap.

• Announced the launch of the VMware Cloud Services which consists of 2 main components
  • VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC)
    • Consist of VMware vSphere + vSAN + NSX
    • Running on AWS data centers (bare metal)
    • A complete Public Cloud platform consisting of VMware Software Defined Data Center components
    • Available as a
  • A complete Hybrid-Cloud infrastructure security, management & monitoring & Automation solution made available through a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform
    • Work natively with VMware Cloud on AWS
    • Also work with legacy, on-premises VMware data center
    • Also work with native AWS, Azure and Google public cloud platforms

• Next generation of network virtualisation solution based NSX-T (aka NSX Multi hypervisor)
  • Version 2.0 announced
  • Supports vSphere & KVM
  • Likely going to be strategically more important to VMware than the NSX-v (vSphere specific NSX that is commongly used today by vSphere customers). Think What ESXi was for VMware when ESX was still around, during early days!

 

• VMware vSAN packaging & Future roadmap capabilities
  • New HCI acceleration kit
  • Improvements & Capabilities for vSAN including native data protection capabilities such as native vSAN snapshots
  • vSAN integration with Kubernetes

 

• Next version of vRealize Network Insight (version 3.5) released
  • Various cloud platform integrations
  • Additional on-premises 3rd party integrations (Check Point FW, HP OneView, Brocade MLX)
  • Support for additional NSX component integration (IPFIX, Edge dashboard, NSX-v DFW PCI dashboard)

 

• VMware AppDefense
  • A brand new application security solution that is available via VMware Cloud Services subscription

 

• VMware Pivotal Container Services (PKS) as a joint collaboration between VMware, Pivotal & Google (Kubernetes)
  • Kubernetes support across the full VMware stack including NSX & vSAN
  • Support for Sever-Less solution capabilities using Functions as a Service (Similar to AWS Lambda or Azure Functions)
  • Enabling persistent storage for stateful applications via the vSphere Cloud Provider, which provides access to vSphere storage powered by vSAN or traditional SAN and NAS storage,
  • Automation and governance via vRealize Automation and provisioning of service provider clouds with vCloud Director,
  • Monitoring and troubleshooting of virtual infrastructure via VMware vRealize Operations
  • Metrics monitoring of containerized applications via Wavefront.

 

• Workspace One enhancements and updates
  • Single UEM platform for Windows, MacOS, Chrome OS, IOS and Android
  • Integration with unique 3rd party endpoint platform API’s
  • Offer cloud based peer-to-peer SW distribution to deploy large apps at scale
  • Support for managing Chrome devices
  • Provides customers the ability to enforce & manage O365 security policies and DLP alongside all of their applications and devices
  • Workspace One intelligence to provide Insights and automation to enhance user experience (GA Q4 FY18)

• VMware Integrated OpenStack 4.0 announced
  • OpenStack Ocata integration
  • Additional features include
    • Containerized apps alongside traditional apps in production on OpenStack
    • vRealize Automation integration to enable OpenStack users to use vRealize Automation-based policies and to consume OpenStack components within vRealize Automation blueprints
    • Increased scale and isolation for OpenStack clouds enabled through new multi-VMware vCenter support
  • New pricing & Packaging tier (not free anymore)

• VMware Skyline
  • A new proactive support offering aligned to global support services
  • Available to Premier support customers (North America initially)
  • Requires an appliance deployment on premise
  • Quicker time to incident resolution

Cross Cloud Architecture Strategy & My Thoughts

VMware announced the Cross Cloud Architecture (CCA) back in VMworld 2016 where they set the vision for VMware to provide the capability to customers to run & manage any application, on any cloud using any device. This was ambitious and was seen as the first step towards VMware recognising that running vSphere on premise should no longer be VMware’s main focus and they want to provide customers with choice.

This choice of platform options were to be,

• Continue to run vSphere on premise if that is what you want to do
• OR, let customers run the same vSphere based SDDC stack on the cloud which can be spun up in minutes in a fully automated way (IaaS)
• OR, run the same workload that used to run on a VMware SDDC platform on a native public cloud platform such as AWS or Azure or Google cloud or IBM Cloud

During that VMworld, VMware also demoed the capability of NSX to bridge all these various private and public cloud platforms through the clever use of NSX to extend networks across all of those platforms. Well, VMworld 2017 has shown additional steps VMware have taken to make this cross cloud architecture even more of a reality. VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) now lets you spin up a complete VMware based Software Defined Data Center running vSphere on vSAN connected by NSX through a simple web page, much similar to how Azure and AWS native infrastructure platforms allows you to provision VM based infrastructure on demand. Based on some initial articles, this could even be cheaper than running vSphere on-premise which is great news for customers. In addition to this price advantage, when you factor in the rest of Total Cost of Ownership factors such as maintaining on premise skill to set up and manage the infrastructure platforms that are no longer needed, the VMC platform is likely going to be extremely interesting to most customers. And most importantly, most customers will NOT need to go through costly re-architecting of their monolithic application estate to fit a native cloud IaaS platform which simplifies cloud migration of their monolithic application stack. And if that is not enough, you also can carry on managing & securing that workload using the same VMware management and security toolset, even on the cloud too.

When you then consider the announcement of VMware Cloud Services (VCS) offering as a SaaS solution, it now enables integrating a complete VMware hybrid cloud management toolset in to various platforms and workloads, irrespective of where they reside. VCS enables the discovery, monitoring, management and securing of those workloads across different platforms, all through a single pane of glass which is a pretty powerful message that no other public cloud provider can claim to provide in such a heterogeneous manner. This holistic management and security platform allows customers to provision, manage and secure any workload (Monolithic or Microservices based) on any platform (vSphere on premise, VMC on AWS, native AWS, native Azure, Native Google cloud) to be accessed on any device (workstation, laptop, Pad or a mobile). That to me is a true Cross Cloud vision becoming a reality and my guess is once the platform matures and capabilities increase, this is going to be very popular amongst almost all customers.

In addition to this CCA capabilities, VMware obviously appear to be shifting their focus from the infrastructure layer (read “virtual machine”) to the actual application layer, focusing more on enabling application transformation and application security which is great to see. As many have already, VMware too are embracing the concept of containers, not only as a better application architecture but also as the best way to decouple the application from the underlying infrastructure and using containers as a shipping mechanism to enable moving applications across to public cloud (& back). The announcement of various integrations within their infrastructure stack to Docker ecosystem such as Kubernetes testifies to this and would likely be welcomed by customers. I’d expect such integration to continue to improve across all of VMware’s SDDC infrastructure stack. With VMware solutions, you can now deploy container based applications on on-premise vSphere using VIC or Photon or even VMC or a native public cloud platform, store them on vSAN with volume plugins on premise or on cloud, extend the network to the container instance via NSX (on premise or on cloud), extend visibility in to container instance via vRNI and vROPS (on premise or cloud) and also automate provisioning or most importantly, migration of these container apps across on-premise or public cloud platforms as you see fit.

NSX cloud for example will let you extend all the unique capabilities of software defined networking such as micro-segmentation, security groups and overlay network extensions to not just within private data centers but also to native public cloud platforms such as AWS & Azure (roadmap) which enriches the capabilities of a public cloud platform and increases the security available within the network.

My Thoughts

All in all, it was a great VMworld where VMware have genuinely showcased their Hybrid Cloud and Cross Cloud Architecture strategy. As a technologist that have been working with VMware for a while, it was pretty obvious that a software centric organisation like VMware, similar to the likes of Microsoft was always gonna embrace changes, especially changes driven by software such as the public cloud. However most people, especially sales people in the industry I work in as well as some of the customers were starting to worry about the future of VMware and their relevance in the increasingly Cloudy world ahead. This VMworld has showcased to all of those how VMware has got a very good working strategy to embrace that software defined cloud adoption and empower customers by giving them the choice to do the same, without any tie in to a specific cloud platform. The soaring, all time high VMware share price is a testament that analysts and industry experts agree with this too.

If I was a customer, I would want nothing more!

Keen to get your thoughts, please submit via comments below

Other Minor VMworld 2017 (Vegas) Announcements

• New VMware & HPe partnership for DaaS
  • Include Workspace ONE to HPe DaaS
  • Include Unified Endpoint Management through Airwatch
• Dell EMC to offer data protection to VMC (VMware Cloud on AWS)
  • Include Data Domain & Data protection app suite
  • Self-service capability
• VCF related announcements
  • CenturyLink, Fujitsu & Rackspace to offer VCF + Services
  • New HCI and CI platforms (VxRack SDDC, HDS UCP-RS, Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX, QCT QxStack
  • New VCF HW partners
    • Cisco
    • HDS
    • Fujitsu
    • Lenovo
• vCloud Director v9 announced
  • GA Q3 FY18
• New vSphere scale-out edition
  • Aimed at Big data and HPC workloads
  • Attractive price point
  • Big data specific features and resource optimisation within vSphere
  • Includes vDS
• VMware Validated Design (VVD) 4.1 released
  • Include a new optional consolidated DC architecture for small deployments
• New VMware and Fujitsu partnerships
  • Fujitsu Cloud Services to delivery VMware Cloud Services
• DXC Technology partnership
  • Managed Cloud service with VMC
  • Workload portability between VMC, DXC DCs and customer’s own DCs
• Re-announced VMware Pulse IoT Center  with further integration to VMware solutions stack to manage IoT components

 

Cheers

Chan