VMware Explore: VMware Cloud Helps Modernize, Optimize, and Better Protect Multi-Cloud Enterprises with New Offerings and Capabilities

At VMware Explore 2023, VMware, Inc. announced the next evolution of VMware Cloud, empowering customers with new editions and capabilities that will help them modernize, optimize, and better protect their organizations.

With VMware Cloud, customers innovate faster, operate more efficiently, improve threat defenses, and more quickly recover from ransomware attacks.

“VMware Cloud is setting a new benchmark for helping customers modernize, optimize, and better protect their businesses,” said Krish Prasad, SVP and GM, cloud infrastructure business group. “Our latest VMware Cloud advancements further modernize cloud infrastructure and deliver a single cloud operating model that improves developer productivity and advances security.”

VMware Cloud delivers flexibility to support any cloud journey
VMware Cloud combines VMware Cloud Foundation Software and VMware Cloud Services. Cloud Foundation combines the best innovations from the company’s on-premises and public cloud software offerings into a unified stack to deliver a consistent environment across any on-premises, hyperscaler cloud, or partner cloud environment. VMware Cloud services simplify the deployment and operations of VMware Cloud Foundation environments across any cloud or on-premises environment. Customers can take advantage of VMware Cloud services to run enterprise workloads more securely at scale with data protection, cloud-based disaster and ransomware recovery and multi-cloud networking and security. Advanced developer services, built-in Kubernetes, and optimized access to hundreds of native cloud services across leading hyperscalers deliver a pragmatic approach to app modernization.

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VMware Cloud is available in 5 prescriptive VMware Cloud editions (Essentials, Standard, Pro, Advanced, Enterprise) that help customers flexibly modernize infrastructure and management at every stage of their cloud transformation journey.

Customers can deploy and manage their VMware Cloud environments in 3 ways:

• Customer Managed  – VMware Cloud editions can be deployed by customers in their own data centers or their choice of colocation partners with full control of the infrastructure environment.

• VMware Managed – VMware Cloud on AWS is a VMware-managed cloud service with integrated hardware and software. VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal will be a distributed cloud service that enables customers to purchase software and hardware as a service separately for maximum flexibility.

• Provider Managed – new VMware Cross-Cloud managed services based on VMware Cloud editions from partners such as IBM Cloud enable customers to lower TCO for on-premises environments, simplify operations, reduce risk with observability, actionable insight, and performance optimization, and accelerate cloud migrations.

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“M&A is a major part of our growth strategy, and our multi-cloud approach enables First Citizens Bank to integrate the systems of banks we have acquired more quickly and easily with lower risk,” said Kojo Inkumsah, director and SVP, infrastructure and cloud, First Citizens Bank. “With VMware Cloud, we have access to a consistent multi-cloud infrastructure as a solution that supports our enterprise workloads on prem today, with the flexibility to run different parts of our business in hyperscale clouds of our choice in the future. This will enable us to optimize our IT environment for both costs and performance and become more resilient to outages and other business disruptions.”

NSX+: new multi-cloud networking, security and developer services for VMware cloud

The company is the data center SDN leader with 70% share in 2022 ⁽¹⁾, and VMware NSX has been shown to deliver more than 60% OPEX savings from service automation and reduced hardware administration and 66% savings in day 0-2 operations ⁽²⁾. Unveiled today, VMware NSX+ is a new cloud-managed service offering of NSX for multi-cloud environments (previously Project NorthStar) that advances core networking and security capabilities for VMware Cloud. With a single cloud operating model that delivers zero tickets, zero custom security or load balancing hardware appliances, and Zero Trust, VMware NSX+ normalizes networking and security across VMware Cloud environments. NSX+ will deliver consistent network and security operations, centralized security policy creation and enforcement, network and application visibility, and defense in depth with network detection and response (NDR) as a Service. NSX+ capabilities are delivered as SaaS, simplifying the installation process, and are centrally managed from a single cloud console.

The firm is also introducing NSX+ virtual private clouds (VPCs). NSX+ VPCs provide full isolation of networking, security, and services to multiple tenants on a shared VMware Cloud infrastructure managed by a single global NSX interface. Developers and application teams can select clouds that are optimal for their applications, while benefiting from the self-service and agility of NSX+ VPCs across clouds. Infrastructure teams can maintain supervisory control, set operational guardrails on a per VPC basis, and help ensure changes made within VPC environments have no impact on other tenants. NSX+ VPCs also improve IT productivity, as the infrastructure team can use a consistent operating model across clouds.

“VMware Cloud is a cornerstone of our digital transformation, providing us with a flexible and streamlined platform to manage and automate our workload operations on premises today, with an eye towards the cloud in the future,” said Rodney Barnhardt, server administrator, Charlotte Pipe and Foundry. “VMware Cloud Foundation facilitates easy and rapid deployment and lifecycle management of our virtual infrastructure, which has been pivotal in maintaining our agility in a fast-paced industry. VMware NSX has fortified our security through micro-segmentation, reducing the risk of lateral threat movements within our network.”

Boosting storage scale and efficiency with lower TCO in VMware Cloud

Organizations are utilizing advanced analytics and AI workloads to gain customer insights, optimize processes, and drive revenue growth. These workloads require massive data sets that can grow rapidly, so storage solutions must elastically scale out to petabyte capacities while delivering high performance and resiliency at low TCO.

Common use cases for vSAN Max
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The company is announcing even more scalable, efficient, and cost-effective storage for VMware Cloud with VMware vSAN Max, a new offering within the vSAN family that will deliver petabyte-scale disaggregated storage. With this announcement, the firm’s storage solutions will give customers unparalleled scaling flexibility compared to traditional storage solutions, with the performance, capacity, resiliency, and low TCO for the most demanding applications today. vSAN Max will scale storage elastically and independently from compute to maximize utilization, up to 8.6PB of capacity and 3.6 million IOs/cluster. It is designed to withstand failures across sites, hosts, and even discrete storage devices in a stretched cluster topology. Since it is built on the vSAN Express Storage Architecture, vSAN Max is designed to heal from a discrete device failure up to 92% faster ⁽³⁾. It can lower TCO up to 30% for mission-critical databases through hardware and license consolidation ⁽⁴⁾. The vSAN Max offering is expected to be available in 2HFY24, will be licensed separately from existing vSAN editions, will be offered as a subscription, and is planned to be licensed on a per tebibyte metric.

“VMware and Lenovo have long partnered to deliver turnkey HCI solutions that accelerate time-to-value and support application and infrastructure modernization in the enterprise and edge,” said Kamran Amini, VP and GM, server, storage and software defined solutions, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group. “We continue to be one of the fastest growing data management providers in the world with differentiated technology that empowers our customers’ intelligent transformation. Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Appliances, with vSAN Express Storage Architecture and vSAN Max, can address a broader set of use cases with the performance, resiliency, scale, and reduced TCO required for extremely latency sensitive databases and cloud-native applications, enabling customers to migrate away from legacy models.”

VMware Cloud enables faster recovery from ransomware attacks

Most ransomware attacks now employ fileless techniques that cannot be detected by scanning idle backups, posing a major threat to organizations. VMware Ransomware Recovery is a VMware Cloud service available designed to recover from fileless attacks using behavioral analysis of powered-on VMs in cloud-based isolated recovery environments (IREs). VMware Ransomware Recovery has been shown to resolve unplanned downtime up to 75% faster ⁽⁵⁾. To further reduce customer downtime, VMware Ransomware Recovery added concurrent multi-VM recovery operations (available) and will enable customers to run production workloads in the cloud until forensics are completed and the on-premises datacenter is fortified (expected availability 3FQ24). Additionally, the company unveiled a technology preview of cybersecure storage that will integrate recovery workflows with native vSAN snapshots for data transfer optimizations. VMware Ransomware Recovery is also expanding VMware Cloud service support to include protection of workloads in Google Cloud VMware Engine (available).

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“Nobody likes to think they will get hit with a successful ransomware attack, but VanEck’s systems need to be readily available 24/7 to serve our financial services clients around the world. That means we must have a recovery plan that puts ransomware front and center,” said Alaa Elbanna, global director, infrastructure, VanEck. “Previously, recovery was complicated and time consuming. We had to use 3-4 different products just to get things back up and running. Now with VMware Ransomware Recovery, everything is seamless and orchestrated. It took less than two days to deploy and now we can quickly identify recovery point candidates, test them in an isolated cloud-based environment that’s easily provisioned, and get back to business faster.”

Enhancing operational efficiency of VMware Cloud

As part of this wave of key innovations being delivered by VMware Cloud, the firm is announcing early availability of a cloud-based ESXi lifecycle management service in VMware vSphere+. IT admins will be able to centrally manage upgrades across their entire ESXi fleet in distributed multi-vCenter environments, overcoming silos and completing in just a few operations what may have previously required 100s or even 1,000s of operations, especially in larger environments. This will result in significant time savings and simpler upgrade planning and deployments, making it easier for customers to get on to the latest versions and enjoy the benefits of new capabilities of VMware Cloud. Additional updates to vSphere in the upcoming release will also include doubling GPU capacity per VM to support more complex AI/ML workloads, enabling smarter load balancing to maximize performance from GPU investments, and enhanced self-service tools to make building and running modern apps even easier for DevOps engineers and developers.

Resources:
Blog: VMware Cloud on AWS at VMware Explore Las Vegas 2023!
Blog : Presenting the Evolution of VMware Cloud
Blog : Introducing vSAN Max
Blog : Introducing VPC Peering for External Storage 

⁽¹⁾ IDC Worldwide Quarterly Network Infrastructure Tracker, 1Q23 Release
⁽²⁾ Estimates based on VMware’s DICE ROI and Value Modeling tool which contains detailed real-world data from more than 5,000 customers, June 2022
⁽³⁾ VMware internal analysis, August 2023
⁽⁴⁾ VMware internal analysis, July 2023
⁽⁵⁾ IDC, The Business Value of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, August 2023, doc #US51113923