VMworld 2020 revisited

VMworld always delivers a raft of new products, services and partnerships during their flagship events, and although this year’s had been turned into a virtual event, it was certainly no exception. Now that the dust has settled, here’s a quick summary of some of the key announcements.

• Tanzu: VMware’s portfolio of Kubernetes products and services for modernising applications and infrastructure has been significantly expanded. This includes updates to Tanzu support across VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. The support  for VMware Cloud on AWS, which will centralise operations and management of Kubernetes clusters, is particularly interesting given the surge in momentum for this hybrid cloud offering. In addition there’s also a new partnership with GitLab aimed at unifying app developers and operations teams in order to streamline development pipelines
• Carbon Black Cloud Workload: a new security solution designed to reduce cyberattacks and strengthen the overall security posture. This cloud-native solution provides agentless security and vulnerability management capabilities to protect virtual workloads in the vSphere environment. It combines prioritised vulnerability reporting and foundational workload hardening with prevention, detection and response capabilities
• SaltStack: plans were announced to acquire the open-source based software provider specialising in event-driven automation and configuration management. It will help VMware expand its vRealize automation capabilities for software configuration management, infrastructure and network automation capabilities across both on-premises and cloud environments, ultimately allowing for a more seamless cloud migration and onboarding experience
• Project Monterey: the introduction of this new initiative generated considerable excitement. It will enhance the performance and reliability of next-generation technology including AI, machine learning, 5G, multi-cloud and hybrid apps, and leverage VMware’s smart network interface controller (SmartNIC) to enable customers to solve network performance and security challenges and increase flexibility in delivering storage functionality
• Multi-cloud: a raft of multi-cloud focused were announced, including VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, a new on-demand disaster recovery-as-a-service that protects on-premises vSphere workloads onto VMware Cloud on AWS. Meanwhile, the availability of VMware Horizon 8 for deployment on VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, Google Cloud VMware Engine and Azure VMware Solution was confirmed
• Cloud management: new services were unveiled, including the vRealize Cloud Universal subscription, a SaaS management suite that offers customers the flexibility to deploy workloads on both SaaS and on-premises under a single licence. In addition, the company launched the first version of vRealize AI Cloud for vSAN optimisation to help customers attain consistent and optimal performance of their mixed application workloads
• Lumen:  the partnership with Lumen, a fibre-based networking connectivity company, was strengthened with a view to streamlining and securing edge computing. The partnership will help enterprises move business applications with low latency closer to digital interactions. In particular, Lumen will integrate VMware SD-WAN, VMware Workspace ONE and VMware Carbon Black with its global edge infrastructure to deliver work from anywhere
• NVIDIA: last, but certainly not least, the partnership with NVIDIA, aimed at accelerating AI adoption across enterprises, targeting data centres, cloud and edge systems. AI software on NVIDIA’s GPU Cloud will be integrated into a range of software applications including VMware vSphere, VMware Tanzu, virtual machines and hybrid clouds on VMware Cloud Foundation. According to Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, the intention is to: “… help every enterprise accelerate their use of breakthrough applications to drive their business”.