At VMware Explore 2022, VMware unveiled innovations, new offerings, services and expanded partnerships that further its commitment to help customers navigate and thrive in today’s multi-cloud world. As customers continue to evolve and digitize their businesses to innovate faster and better serve their own customers, VMware and its partner ecosystem are enabling businesses to select the right cloud for the right app.
“Whether you’re a challenger born in the cloud or an established player, the ultimate destination for customers is a multi-cloud environment that empowers teams to accelerate their digital innovation,” said Raghu Raghuram, CEO, VMware. “At VMware Explore, VMware and our partners are advancing our technology offerings to help customers gain advantages from a cloud-smart approach.”
Many of these new capabilities are built on the VMware Cross-Cloud™ services the company introduced at VMworld 2021 and are designed to give organizations the strategic advantages of a cloud-smart approach. As organizations increase the number of clouds they support to accelerate their business goals, they experience an increase in operational complexity. VMware Cross-Cloud services deliver a unified and simplified way to build, operate, access, and better secure any application, on any cloud, from any device—across app platform, cloud management, cloud and edge infrastructure, networking and advanced security, and anywhere workspace.
Accelerate Enterprise Cloud Transformation
VMware is introducing cloud and edge infrastructure solutions that help businesses accelerate their enterprise cloud transformation and enable customers to better run, scale and secure enterprise workloads across private and public clouds and at the edge. VMware and its public cloud partners also continue to help customers migrate and run those workloads in the public cloud of their choice. Additionally, VMware unveiled networking and security innovations to help customers further embrace the cloud operating model. Highlights include:
- VMware vSphere 8 ushers in a new era of computing by supporting DPUs (Data Processing Units) alongside CPUs and GPUs—making the future of modern infrastructure accessible to all enterprises. vSphere 8 will also supercharge customers’ workload performance, improve operational efficiency and IT productivity, accelerate innovation for DevOps, and more.
- Through a next-generation storage platform optimized for modern hardware with hyperconverged infrastructure, VMware vSAN 8 introduces breakthrough performance and hyper-efficiency. The new vSAN Express Storage Architecture will enhance the performance, storage efficiency, data protection and management of vSAN running on the latest generation storage devices.
- VMware Cloud Foundation+ will unveil a cloud-connected architecture for managing and operating full stack HCI in data centers.
- VMware Edge Compute Stack 2 will help customers address the needs of simplicity and scale at the edge including support for smaller cluster sizes to run containers efficiently on smaller COTS hardware.
- Project Northstar, a preview of a major advancement of the VMware NSX platform, for multi-cloud networking, security, and end-to-end visibility.
- Project Watch, a new approach to multi-cloud networking and security that will provide advanced app to app policy controls to help with continuous risk and compliance assessment.
Scale Cloud Native Platform Operations
VMware continues to help customers secure, run and manage all cloud native apps. New advances to the VMware Tanzu portfolio unlock developer productivity, deliver end-to-end security from build to production, and enable more secure multi-cloud operations at scale, regardless of where enterprises are in their Kubernetes journey. VMware also introduced a new multi-cloud management portfolio—VMware Aria—which will provide a set of end-to-end solutions for managing cloud native applications and infrastructure. The new offerings will help customers manage their costs, performance, configuration and delivery across public and private clouds. Highlights include:
- VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations—including VMware Tanzu Mission Control, VMware Aria Operations for Apps, and VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid—will simplify Kubernetes delivery, management, and reliability.
- New features in VMware Tanzu Mission Control will extend and optimize multi-cloud, multi-cluster Kubernetes management capabilities. This includes a preview for lifecycle management of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters, integration with VMware Aria Automation, continuous and consistent cluster lifecycle management via GitOps, and application reliability with cross-cluster backup and restore.
- VMware Aria Graph, a graph-based data store technology that will reduce multi-cloud complexity across any cloud, any app, and for every persona.
- VMware Aria Hub, formerly Project Ensemble, which will provide centralized views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment, and leverages VMware Aria Graph to provide a common definition of applications, resources, roles, and accounts.
Empower the Hybrid Workforce
Customers continue seek to enable anywhere work with secure and frictionless experiences. This week’s advancements across VMware Anywhere Workspace will inject automation into the end-user computing environments of organizations, enabling IT teams to do more with less. Updates include:
- The next generation of VMware Horizon Cloud that will enable multi-cloud agility and flexibility
- Broader Digital Employee Experience solutions that go beyond Workspace ONE UEM managed devices to now include VMware Horizon and third-party managed and unmanaged devices.
- The extension of Workspace ONE Freestyle Orchestrator to mobile devices and third-party apps, for multi-platform automation and orchestration.