August 26, 2019 / By VMware PR

VMworld 2019 and Our Relentless Pursuit of the Possible

Chris Wolf, Vice President & CTO, Global Field and Industry, VMware

We know you need unimaginable flexibility in how your organization runs and manages applications. Because, ultimately, that’s how your business drives innovation and beats the competition. And over the years, we’ve helped customers like you turn the impossible into reality.

Five years ago, we unveiled a vision to make it simple for organizations to run any application on any cloud and access it from any device. Then, we brought our hybrid cloud vision to life: to run an application anywhere with globally consistent infrastructure and operations.

Finally, we delivered products and services that help companies make the most of their multi-cloud and native-cloud services of choice.

Now, we intend to further accelerate our customers’ cloud journeys with our next chapter in cloud innovation. That happens today with our announcements at VMworld 2019 US.

Modern Apps for Modern Businesses

Enterprises are expected to build more apps over the next several years than they built over previous decades. That’s a massive acceleration in innovation velocity. To handle it, IT needs greater agility while providing the flexibility and control critical to many organizations.

What is a “modern app?” Apps built with cloud-native technologies and methods.

Today, we revealed a new vision to help customers build, run and manage software on Kubernetes. Read the highlights below and take a deep dive in the press release.

Building Modern Apps

Bitnami

Bitnami provides the largest catalog of pre-built, scanned, tested, and continuously maintained application content for Kubernetes clusters. Loved by developers and trusted by IT organizations, the Bitnami application catalog supports and has been certified for all major Kubernetes platforms, including VMware PKS.

Today, VMware introduced a beta offering of Project Galleon, which will enable enterprise IT to deliver customized, up-to-date application stacks and formats to developers.

Running Modern Apps

Modern apps are highly dynamic and highly distributed.

For example, VMware’s IT organization spins up and tears down an average of 500,000-plus containers and more than 1.4 million virtual machines each week. While your scale might not be as robust, developers need to innovate without friction. And operational teams need to manage consistently and dynamically at scale. These requirements have led to some of the most meaningful innovations to VMware’s vSphere platform in the past decade.

Today, VMware announced a technology preview of Project Pacific focused on transforming VMware vSphere into a Kubernetes native platform in a future release. This will enable enterprises to accelerate development and operation of modern apps on vSphere, while continuing to take advantage of existing investments in technology, tools, and skillsets. And by embedding Kubernetes into the control plane of vSphere, containers and VMs will converge onto a single platform.

To be clear, Project Pacific is about much more than Kubernetes. Developers will now be able to run Kubernetes clusters and pods directly on VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC). Our ecosystem partners can use those same APIs to port their platforms and control planes to VMware SDDC, allowing their services to run anywhere a VMware footprint exists.

That is why this announcement is so strategic. This new technology offers a control plane for control planes, and the potential extensibility it provides is practically without limit.

Read more about Project Pacific:

Managing Kubernetes Clusters

Oftentimes, moving or deploying an application or container is the easy part. The long operational and governance tail that follows is where the most difficult challenges lie.

Our vision goes beyond the value proposition of Build once, run anywhere. Instead, with our announced tech preview of Tanzu Mission Control, we are making it possible to “Build once, run and operate anywhere.”

Tanzu Mission Control will provide enterprises with visibility and control over all their Kubernetes clusters, regardless of where they reside, with a wide set of capabilities (powered by VMware’s extended product portfolio and by open source projects), including:

Administrator visibility of all Kubernetes clusters.
Operator control of policy.
Developer independence.

Hybrid Cloud Innovation

Hybrid cloud is on full display at VMworld this week with numerous announcements fueling our drive to enable flexibility as a design principal for all applications. We do this by providing consistent infrastructure and a consistent operational plane practically anywhere our customers run and operate applications.

Expanding Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

VMware Cloud Foundation is the key building block for our hybrid cloud, providing the full SDDC. Through our cloud partnerships, VMware has a footprint on-premises and in major clouds, including AWS, Google, Microsoft and IBM. Today at VMworld, we pushed it further:

VMware Cloud on Dell EMC Availability: VMware Cloud on Dell EMC delivers infrastructure as a service (IaaS) anywhere, fully managed by VMware.
VMware Cloud on AWS: New VMware HCX capabilities enable, among many other features, push-button migration and interconnectivity between VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs running in different AWS Regions. [Read More: VMware Cloud on AWS – New capabilities to migrate, manage and modernize enterprise workloads]
VMware Cloud Solutions: Designed to streamline and simplify cloud adoption, customers can access integrated solutions that will deliver prescriptive workflows to achieve specific use cases, including Cloud Migration, Desktop As-a-Service, Disaster Recovery as-a-Service, Self Service Applications, and Managed Kubernetes.

Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Operations

Our VMware Hybrid Cloud Operations portfolio complements our hybrid cloud infrastructure with automation, cost management, compliance, resource governance, security and visibility to applications and services. Today, we announced several new capabilities across the portfolio, including:

VMware vRealize Operations 8.0

The latest release delivers Intent-Driven continuous performance optimization, more efficient capacity management, intelligent remediation and integrated compliance and configuration. [Read More: What’s New in vRealize Operations 8.0]

VMware vRealize Automation 8.0

This is a major release that introduces a container-based microservices architecture which is easier and simpler to install, with improved performance and high availability.

CloudHealth Hybrid

This new service will extend the same rich cost optimization, migration assessment governance and security functionality that CloudHealth delivers to public cloud environments, to VMware hybrid cloud environments.

Wavefront by VMware

Wavefront now automates full-stack Kubernetes discovery and observability, combined with application observability powered by:

Metrics
Traces
Trace logs
Histograms

It provides instant insights into the health and performance of Kubernetes, containerized applications and microservices at scale.

VMware Skyline

New proactive support enhancements include automated software compatibility checks, automated log bundle upload for Horizon 7.10 and above via Log Assist, and integration with Dell EMC SupportAssist, enabling a richer proactive support experience for customers running VMware and Dell.

Digital Workspace

Creating the optimal digital employee experience is all about:

Connecting people to the applications and data necessary to do their jobs.

When you also prioritize enabling a consumer-grade experience, you’re at the essence of our VMware Workspace ONE strategy.

Today’s digital workspace advancements include:

Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub

Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub is the central launchpad for employees to more securely access apps, workflows and notifications, and connect with colleagues. Workspace ONE is the first digital workspace platform to integrate an AI-powered virtual assistant.

Multi-cloud Virtual Desktop and Application Support

New VMware Horizon Services for Multi-Cloud will enable IT administrators to automate brokering and management across multi-site environments. This allows policy (e.g., proximity) to determine the optimal virtual workspace for an employee – either on-premises or in the cloud.

In addition, Horizon is planned to be integrated with the Avi Networks’ application services platform – a software-based application delivery controller (ADC) - to deliver fast, scalable, and more secure desktop and app access from anywhere, removing legacy hardware ADC dependencies.

Continuous Verification of Device and User Risk Scores

With continuous verification leveraging machine learning, Workspace ONE Intelligence can identify behavioral anomalies and in turn trigger the application of a conditional access policy or automate a remediation action such as forcing multi-factor authentication.

As you can see, we’ve made massive progress in helping enterprises to provide a consumer-simple user experience for all devices and applications, while also enabling enterprise security mandates to be enforced.

Make Your Mark

As a community, it’s our inquisitive nature and creativity that brought us to technology in the first place. Yet, we often get caught up in the day-to-day firefighting common to many IT organizations.

At VMware, we relentlessly pursue ways to free IT from the chaos and mundane tasks that impede innovation.

Together, let’s keep our eye on the prize. Let’s make our mark.

Note: * There is no commitment or obligation that technology preview or beta features will become generally available.