VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), announced advancements to VMware Cloud that further the company’s vision for delivering the essential, ubiquitous Digital Foundation to support customers’ and partners’ digital transformation. These advancements include updates to VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vCloud Director, and CloudHealth by VMware, and increased access to Cloud Foundation-based services via new VMware Cloud on AWS regions in Canada, Paris, and Singapore, and more VMware Cloud Verified partners globally.
Every organization is on a multi-cloud journey. According to Gartner, “by 2020, 75 percent of organizations will have deployed a multicloud or hybrid cloud model.” This journey is being supported by two primary cloud strategies: hybrid cloud and native public cloud. While each approach is unique, they are complementary, and most often exist simultaneously within the same customer. Each path is intended to open new opportunities for a business in a way that is differentiating, and to deliver tangible business outcomes. Looking for the best path forward on this multi-cloud journey, VMware’s research shows that 83 percent of cloud buyers are seeking consistent infrastructure and operations from the datacenter to the cloud.
“VMware is helping customers leverage the cloud to build, deploy and deliver the applications that drive their business, and no other vendor spans the cloud industry as broadly or as comprehensively as VMware,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider software business unit, VMware. “VMware provides customers the ability to operate in this multi-cloud reality, providing consistent infrastructure and operations to help them match the needs of applications to the best resources available, without compromise.”
Delivering the Hybrid Cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation
VMware Cloud Foundation is the industry-leading solution for hybrid cloud that expands the definition of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) by unifying the essential cloud infrastructure capabilities of compute, storage, networking, and integrated cloud management. Cloud Foundation is the only full-stack solution delivering consistent infrastructure and operations to help customers modernize their data centers; rapidly migrate applications and entire data centers to the cloud; scale on demand for disaster recovery, global expansion, and seasonal spikes; and deploy next-generation applications in modern data center environments.
VMware announced VMware Cloud Foundation 3.7, which is expected to be available on Dell EMC VxRail in VMware’s Q1FY20, offering customers the industry’s first jointly engineered, hybrid cloud infrastructure stack integrated with VMware’s flexible, full stack HCI architecture, ready for line-of-business applications. Cloud Foundation on VxRail demonstrates the tight integration between Dell EMC and VMware, incorporating unique, jointly-engineered features that simplify and streamline operations, and deliver full stack, end-to-end lifecycle management, through an automated hardware-through-software management experience. Optimized for performance, scalability, user experience and TCO savings, Cloud Foundation on VxRail can lower capital and operational costs while providing unrivaled resiliency, predictability, and ease of deployment. New networking flexibility and integration, as well as deployment options including appliance and integrated rack offerings give customers flexibility when choosing Cloud Foundation on VxRail.
“Demonstrating the strength of Dell Technologies, this unique integration between Dell EMC VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation builds on the history of co-engineering to offer our customers an experience unlike any other infrastructure running VMware Cloud Foundation,” said Gil Shneorson, senior vice president and general manager, Dell EMC VxRail, “With this combination, we have enabled the fastest, simplest and most seamless way to deploy and operate a hybrid cloud with VMware.”
Additionally, the new Cloud Foundation 3.7 release supports fully automated deployment of VMware Horizon 7 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Cloud Foundation accelerates the delivery of Horizon 7 benefits by providing complete infrastructure automation for Horizon 7 environments, including the installation of Horizon 7, App Volumes, User Environment Manager, and Unified Access Gateway. Cloud Foundation couples ready-to-use infrastructure with line-of-business application deployment, enabling customers to deliver infrastructure and applications to business customers at the speed of cloud.
Cloud Foundation is the foundation for cloud infrastructure as a service from VMware and VMware Cloud Verified partners, as well as forthcoming VMware-managed SDDC as-a-service offerings for on-premises and the edge. VMware announced the expanded global availability of Cloud Foundation-based services from VMware and its partners, including:
- More VMware Cloud on AWS Regions:†VMware Cloud on AWS is powered by Cloud Foundation, and is delivered, sold and supported by VMware and its partners. With the addition of the AWS Canada (Central), AWS EU (Paris), and AWS APJ (Singapore) regions VMware Cloud on AWS is now generally available in 13 AWS regions globally. VMware and AWS continue to work to bring the service to major AWS regions worldwide by the end of calendar year 2019.
- More Partners Offering Services for VMware Cloud on AWS: there are more than 60 partners building or delivering managed service offerings for VMware Cloud on AWS, and more than 280 partners have achieved the VMware Cloud on AWS Solution Competency, less than one year from the launch of the VMware Cloud on AWS partner program.
- More VMware Cloud Verified Partners:†VMware now has 35 VMware Cloud Provider Program partners that have achieved Cloud Verified status. VMware Cloud Verified partners are a set of strategic partners offering a complete VMware SDDC as a service as well as value-added services and support from their data centers via Cloud Foundation. The Cloud Verified trust mark gives enterprises confidence their cloud provider offers the most complete and advanced VMware technologies, with consistent infrastructure and operations across clouds.
Powering New VMware Cloud Provider Service Offerings
Collectively, VCPP partners serve more than 150,000 customers with millions of VMs deployed. These customers benefit from a robust, differentiated set of enterprise-class clouds using the latest VMware innovations to simplify hybrid cloud adoption and management with consistent infrastructure and new cloud services.
The new VMware vCloud Director 9.7 release will allow cloud providers to further differentiate their hybrid cloud offerings and deliver new services through centralized global cloud management, expanded scalability, and an enhanced extensibility framework. The vCloud Director platform will unify private and multi-tenant cloud management across a cloud provider’s global footprint of VMware-based environments, simplifying monitoring and management from on-premises vSphere environments to multi-tenant provider clouds. The updated extensibility framework will enable cloud providers to offer new, differentiated services on their multi-tenant platform from industry-leading third-party solutions from ecosystem partners such as Cohesity, Dell EMC and Rubrik.
The new VMware vCloud Availability 3.0 will unify onboarding, migration and disaster recovery services to and between multi-tenant clouds, helping cloud providers offer new availability services with compelling economics. The native integration with vCloud Director and a modern user interface will provide a simple customer experience for rapid service delivery and management.
Accelerating Cloud Success†with†CloudHealth By VMware
Enterprises turn to the cloud for its promise of agility, security and faster time to market, but all too often cost challenges derail these efforts and prevent businesses from capitalizing on the cloud’s full potential for transformation. With more than 4,000 customers, CloudHealth by VMware enables customers to manage, operate and better secure their multi-cloud environments. With CloudHealth, customers collaborate across lines of business to make intelligent decisions related to cost management, security, and governance while scaling their multi-cloud environments. CloudHealth delivers next-generation cost management capabilities that can increase return on investment in-cloud by showing customers where budgets are spent, which applications consume the most resources, and how to right-size their environments – even as they rapidly scale.
New features in CloudHealth will expand on the platform’s robust cost management functionality, and will include enhanced multi-cloud reporting, multidimensional reporting, workspaces reporting, enhanced amortization, convertible Reserved Instance (RI) exchanger automation, container cluster visibility, and cross-family rightsizing for Amazon EC2. Additionally, the CloudHealth platform now integrates with the Wavefront by VMware cloud analytics and monitoring platform. Through this integration, CloudHealth customers can access Wavefront cloud performance metrics via their CloudHealth platform for rightsizing and performance optimization via a business lens. By using CloudHealth and Wavefront together, CloudHealth takes advantage of Wavefront’s vast real-time, highly granular, multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) infrastructure usage metrics, and provides effective recommendations for cost savings to customers.
Customer Commentary
“HM Health Solutions is a Pennsylvania based IT Service Provider that delivers business solutions to health plan payers serving over 10 million members. To serve our customers, we give access to our in-house Windows applications to external customers through VDI running on VMware Cloud Foundation,” said Joe Elliott, Manager, VDI Services, HM Health Solutions. “With VMware Cloud Foundation, we have a scalable and consistent hyperconverged infrastructure that supports anywhere from 10-12 thousand virtual desktops in an active-active environment across multiple data centers. Cloud Foundation enables us to spin up new customer environments in as little as two hours where it used to take days, and we now have a much more resilient architecture. Most importantly, the automated lifecycle management enables us to simply click a button and patch our entire infrastructure stack, which is amazing.”
“VMware Cloud on AWS was a perfect fit for us when we made the decision to move to a new cloud environment,” said John Meyer, Chief Information Officer, United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley. “Getting the initial set up took just a few hours, and our entire environment was up and operational in just 3-4 weeks with zero downtime. This was critical as our small IT team had to migrate clouds during our high season of donations. We particularly like that we can manage our cloud environment through the vCenter portal and that we can access native AWS services. By moving to VMware Cloud on AWS we also now have a more highly available and more secure environment, and a better disaster recovery strategy.”
“Coinstar is one of the world’s largest fully automated networks of self-service kiosks for converting change into cash, e-gift cards or charitable donations,” said Jason Friedlander CTO, Coinstar. “Working with Rackspace, VMware Cloud Verified partner, we successfully migrated thousands of VMs off legacy systems to a modern Rackspace-managed software-defined data center environment based on Cloud Foundation in less than five months, improved business operations and reduced IT costs. We estimate Coinstar is saving 40 percent over our previous spend in our legacy colocation environment with a lot of other pluses to our partnership. In addition, our elastic virtualized infrastructure has allowed us to grow internationally and launch new products.”
