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Without the cloud and all its glorious potential, VMworld 2017 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas certainly would be a dull, quiet place for 23,000 people to meet.
In fact, the entire world would be a dull, quiet place. Without the cloud, nothing of what we now take for granted would be happening: mobile devices and apps, big data workloads, driverless cars, music and video on demand, international video games, drones, virtual reality—nothing. While we’d still have on-premises enterprise and home computing, with everything wired and locked down (and probably more secure), we’d never have on-demand anything and could not get projects started and completed faster than we can do them today.
VMware has become one of the world’s leading bricklayers in the foundation of cloud software and services. On Aug. 28, Day 1 of its big conference, the company kept moving forward to release yet another new set of products and services as part of VMware Cloud that are available through VMware and partners.
New and updated offerings announced include:
- VMware Cloud on AWS is now initially available in AWS U.S. West (Oregon) region; read eWEEK’s full story here.
- New VMware Cloud Services that enable end-to-end visibility into cloud usage, costs, and networks, with consistent networking and security across public clouds and on-premises environments; read eWEEK’s story on the new security offering, AppDefense, here.
- New VMware Cloud Provider services and partner offerings based on VMware Cloud Foundation;
- Expanded VMware NSX support of networking and security for clouds and cloud-native apps; and
- New VMware Cloud Provider innovations including VMware vCloud Director 9.0.
VMware Cloud Services: Managing, Automating Cloud Infrastructure, Applications
VMware Cloud Services provide a unified approach to gain end-to-end visibility into cloud usage, costs, network traffic, metrics monitoring and analytics while delivering consistent security across public clouds and on-premises environments. VMware on Aug. 28 announced its initial set of cloud services:
- VMware AppDefense: This is a new, app-centric data center endpoint security package that protects applications by embedding application control, threat detection and response capabilities into the VMware vSphere-based environments on which applications and data live. By using vSphere, AppDefense gains a deep understanding of the intended state and behavior of the applications running on virtual machines and can detect and respond to unauthorized changes.
- VMware Cost Insight: This is a cost-monitoring and optimization service for public and private clouds that helps IT analyze cloud spend, find savings opportunities, and communicate the cost of services to the business. With Cost Insight, users can understand aggregated cloud costs and identify key cost drivers.
- VMware Discovery: An automated inventory service that improves cloud visibility and tames shadow IT by bringing together inventory information and cloud accounts from multiple clouds, making it easy for IT to search for and identify workloads deployed from their enterprise. Using native cloud tags and properties that have been identified, customers can group cloud resources even if they span across multiple clouds.
- VMware Network Insight: A network and security analysis service offering purpose-built for public clouds and software-defined data centers. Network Insight provides network visibility and granular understanding of traffic flows to enable cloud security planning and network troubleshooting.
- VMware NSX Cloud: This service provides consistent networking and security for applications running in multiple private and public clouds via a single management console and common API. Micro-segmentation security policy is defined once and applied to application workloads running anywhere –in cloud virtual networks, regions, availability zones–and across multiple clouds.
- Wavefront by VMware: A metrics monitoring and analytics platform that handles the high-scale requirements of modern cloud-native applications. Wavefront by VMware’s speed, scale, and flexibility empowers DevOps and developer teams with insight into the performance of highly-distributed cloud-native services.
VMware Cloud Foundation News
VMware Cloud Foundation is an advanced cloud infrastructure platform. It can be flexibly deployed on-premises or deployed as a service in the cloud and used to run traditional and cloud-native containerized applications.
With new built-in lifecycle-management automation, customers can eliminate the overhead of infrastructure-level Day 0 to Day 2 operations, the company said. Here are some new public cloud services, turnkey integrated systems and certified server options:
- New cloud services: VMware partners delivering services based on Cloud Foundation now include CenturyLink, Rackspace and Fujitsu.
- New integrated systems: VMware partners announcing new solutions at VMworld include the newly updated version of Dell EMC VxRack SDDC and the new releases of HDS UCP-RS, Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX and QCT QxStack.
- New certified servers: VMware announced an expanded list of Cloud Foundation certified server options from Cisco, HDS, Fujitsu and Lenovo.
Availability
VMware Cloud Services, including VMware Discovery, VMware Cost Insight, VMware Network Insight, VMware NSX Cloud, Wavefront by VMware and VMware AppDefense, are now available in the U.S. VMware vCloud Director 9.0 will be generally available in Q3 FY2018, the company said.