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Tag: VMworld

  • VMware Looks to Streamline Multi-Cloud Computing Management

    VMware Looks to Streamline Multi-Cloud Computing Management

    VMware today integrated its console for managing cloud instances with its VMware Cloud Foundation to streamline the deployment of its software in on-premises IT environments.

    Announced at the VMware Explore 2023 conference, the latest edition of VMware Cloud will make it simpler to manage multi-cloud computing environments by combining VMware Cloud Foundation Software and VMware Cloud Services into a single platform.

    VMware also announced early access to an ESXi life cycle management cloud service for VMware vSphere+ that enables IT teams to centrally manage upgrades across a distributed vCenter environment. Additional updates to vSphere in the upcoming release include doubling GPU capacity per virtual machine.

    Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager for cloud infrastructure at VMware, said the goal is to improve the overall pace of innovation;  in addition to deploying workloads in on-premises IT environments, organizations are also deploying workloads on multiple cloud computing services.

    VMware Cloud is being made available in five editions that can either be managed by an internal IT team, an external services provider or by VMware. In addition, a VMware Ransomware Recovery service based on VMware Cloud is also generally available. Following a breach of an on-premises IT environment, VMware Ransomware Recovery will enable organizations to run production workloads in the cloud until forensics are completed. The company also unveiled a technology preview of cybersecure storage that will integrate recovery workflows with native vSAN snapshots and add support for Google Cloud VMware Engine.

    In addition, VMware is adding a managed NSX service delivered via the cloud, dubbed NSX+, that manages instances of the virtual networking software that runs on top of its virtual machine software. There is also now an NSX+ virtual private clouds (VPCs) option that isolates instances of the virtual networking platform.

    Finally, VMware is adding a VMware Cloud with VMware vSAN Max, which will make 8.6 petabytes of disaggregated capacity and 3.6 million IOPS per cluster available on demand later this year.

    VMware appears to be streamlining the number of platforms IT teams need to acquire to support and manage IT infrastructure at a time when more organizations are trying to navigate increasing economic headwinds.

    One way or another, IT teams will need to reduce the cost of IT at a time when IT environments are becoming more complex. VMware is betting that, given its dominance in on-premises IT environments, there will be a natural inclination to deploy more of its software in the cloud to create a more homogenous IT environment that is less complex.

    However, it’s not clear whether organizations are willing to pay extra for the privilege. Many organizations are now supporting multiple classes of virtual machines and associated software despite the fact that each additional platform raises the total cost of IT.

    In the meantime, many IT organizations are also awaiting the outcome of Broadcom’s effort to acquire VMware before deciding how to centralize the management of multi-cloud computing environments.

  • DevOps Deeper Dive: VMware Transformed

    DevOps Deeper Dive: VMware Transformed

    At the VMworld 2019 conference this week, VMware in no uncertain teams made it clear it wants to become a major DevOps force.

    Following the acquisition of sister company Pivotal Software last week, VMware is moving to build out an application development framework for building and deploying cloud-native applications based on Kubernetes. That effort coincides with ongoing investments in its vRealize Suite of management tools, through which VMware is committed to automating IT operations across both on-premises IT environments and public cloud computing environments.

    To advance those twin goals, VMware this week launched a series of Tanzu management tools for managing any distribution of Kubernetes while at the same time launching VMware hybrid cloud platform, which combines everything—from vRealize automation tools to the monitoring tools from Wavefront by VMware—to create a central console through which all of IT can be managed.

    [su_box title=”The VMware DevOps Timeline”]

    • October 2015 – Dell Acquires VMware along with EMC
    • April 2017 – VMware acquires Wavefront monitoring service
    • August 2017 – VMware shifts public cloud strategy via Amazon Web Services (AWS) alliance; VMware and sister company Pivotal Software unveil Kubernetes distribution
    • November 2017 – VMware Launches VRealize Management Suite
    • February 2018 – VMware acquires CloudCoreo to gain cloud configuration tools
    • August 2018 – VMware acquires CloudHealth Technologies to gain governance tools; VMware launches AppDefense to provide a zero-trust framework
    • November 2018 – VMware acquires Heptio for Kubernetes expertise
    • December 2018 – Dell acquires all VMware outstanding shares
    • May 2019 – VMware Acquires Bitnami for application packaging tools
    • July 2019 – VMware Acquires Avi Networks to gain Web Application Firewall (WAF); VMware Acquires Bitfusion for machine learning algorithms and GPU virtualization software
    • August 2019 – VMware Acquires Pivotal Software; VMware Acquires Carbon Black; VMware Launches Tanzu Platform to manage Kubernetes; VMware Unveils Hybrid Cloud Platform

    [/su_box]

    After deciding to launch a series of services through which it manages instances of its software on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and local servers from sister company Dell EMC, VMware has been slowly expanding its reach into the realm of applications. The most significant element of that thrust to date has been its acquisition of Pivotal, a provider of the widely used Spring framework based on Java and a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment based on open source software from the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF).

    The CFF is in the process of migrating the application development environment created for Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes, a cloud-native container orchestration engine being developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Both the CFF and the CNCF are arms of the Linux Foundation. The rise of Kubernetes has resulted in many organizations shifting their application development strategies to a platform capable of supporting multiple application development environments.

    Prior to announcing the deal to be acquired by VMware, Pivotal cut its revenue forecast for fiscal 2020 by $40 to $50 million.

    VMware DevOps
    VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger

    Pivotal Software spun out of VMware in 2013, so to a certain degree VMware’s move to acquire Pivotal represents something of a homecoming that last week was valued at $2.7 billion. Pivotal currently has about 350 customers, many of which are hosting a distribution of the Cloud Foundry PaaS on VMware platforms. VMware also tapped Pivotal to jointly develop a curated instance of Kubernetes, dubbed Pivotal Container Service (PKS), that is optimized for VMware platform. As part of that effort, VMware is also developing an instance of VMware vSphere that will run Kubernetes natively.

    At the VMworld 2019 conference, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger made it clear VMware plans to leverage Kubernetes to bridge the historical divide between developers and IT operations teams. In fact, he told attendees Kubernetes was the most important technology to emerge since the virtual machine was created. As part of that effort, Gelsinger noted that the acquisition of Pivotal coupled with the recent acquisition of Bitnami, a provider of tools for packaging applications, means there are now more 5 million developers participating in the VMware ecosystem.

    VMware is clearly hoping the developer ecosystem will expand as VMware makes it easier to launch virtual machines on every major public cloud as well as on-premises IT environments. VMware has faced a major challenge over the last several years as DevOps teams have bypassed internal IT teams to deploy applications on cloud services based on alternative virtual machines by AWS or Microsoft. Thanks to the inherent portability of Kubernetes, VMware is hoping organizations will now deploy cloud-native applications on VMware platforms. It remains to be seen, however, to what degree DevOps teams will embrace VMware on public clouds versus continuing to employ those virtual machines.

    When it comes to cloud-native computing, VMware is clearly playing catchup. VMware has 250 PKS customers today, while rivals such as Red Hat (now an arm of IBM) have already redeployed their application development and deployment platforms on Kubernetes as an alternative to the Cloud Foundry PaaS. On the plus side, VMware now claims to be the third-largest contributor to Kubernetes, thanks in part to its acquisition of Heptio, a provider of Kubernetes tools.

    In the meantime, there’s no question VMware is at the forefront of developing tools for automating the management and securing of IT infrastructure running its virtual machine software. Less clear is to what degree VMware will be able to translate that success to also unify application development and IT operations across multiple platforms a truly meaningful DevOps way, rather than merely bundling a suite of disparate tools together at a discount.

    — Mike Vizard

  • VMware Looks to ‘Ruthlessly’ Automate IT

    VMware Looks to ‘Ruthlessly’ Automate IT

    VMware, at VMworld 2018 this week, advanced an ambitious campaign to automate IT management by announcing a deal to acquire CloudHealth Technologies and then previewing a Project Magna initiative that employs machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) to create what VMware describes as self-driven data centers.

    VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told conference attendees that, as part of achieving that goal in the era of the cloud, every aspect of IT now needs to be automated.

    “The rule of the cloud is to ruthlessly automate everything,” he said.

    Project Magna represents an effort to centralize AI research and development to enable IT organizations to reallocate resources to building applications by eliminating many of the manual tasks that conspire to make IT inflexible.

    At the same time, increased levels of automation will serve to reduce the cost of labor associated with managing IT, which remains the single highest cost within most IT budgets. Without increased levels of automation, those costs inevitably will rise as IT organizations embrace not only public clouds but also emerging new platforms such as Kubernetes.

    Gelsinger this week made it clear VMware views being able to automate the management of Kubernetes as an opportunity to expand the reach and scope of its management offerings.

    The addition of CloudHealth Technologies to the VMware portfolio adds a cloud operations platform that spans Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Once the acquisition is formally closed, VMware has pledged to integrate its cloud automation services, Secure State and Wavefront cloud services with the CloudHealth platform. The CloudHealth platform will be rebranded VMware Cloud Operations. Those moves come on the heels of a significant expansion of the portfolio of DevOps tools the company also announced this week.

    VMware also revealed its is working on the Dimension project with Dell EMC and Lenovo, which will create a hyperconverged architecture optimized for deployment at the network edge. Project Dimension will make use of VMware NSX network virtualization software and the software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) platform gained by the company’s acquisition of VeloCloud to connect servers running at the network edge. That initiative complements the existing Pulse project for managing internet of things (IoT) devices, for which VMware announced REST application programming interface (API) support and which will be available as an on-premises or a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.

    VMware this week also unveiled updates to updates to its vRealize automation portfolio that enable organizations to rightsize workflows and automate host-based placement of those workloads. The core vRealize Automation platform also sports a new user interface and integration with open source Ansible Tower automation software and integration with Pivotal Container Service (PKS), an instance of Kubernetes. Version 7.5 of vRealize Automation 7.5 also features enhanced AWS and Azure support.

    It’s unclear to what degree increased automation will transform how IT is managed within the context of modern DevOps processes. But the one thing that is clear is the economics of IT are being altered. Via automation VMware is sharply reducing the need for IT specialists in favor of “super” administrators capable of managing compute, storage, networking and security at unprecedented levels of scale in a much more integrated fashion. How much of that will be accomplished by AI is still anyone’s guess. But it’s already clear the job of the average IT administrator will soon be transformed utterly.

    — Mike Vizard

  • VMware Cloud on AWS Will Bring DevOps Issues to a Head

    VMware Cloud on AWS Will Bring DevOps Issues to a Head

    Now that instances of VMware are starting to become available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a DevOps ecosystem is starting to emerge around the management of applications workloads moving into and out of AWS.

    Among the more than 4,500 applications that VMware claims already support VMware Cloud on AWS are those from Blue Medora, CA Technologies, Chef, Cloudbees, Dynatrace, Jfrog, Puppet, SaltStack and the Ansible arm of Red Hat.

    VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told attendees at the recent VMworld 2017 conference that VMware and AWS are just now scratching the surface of what they plan to accomplish together. AWS CEO Andy Jassy added that, unlike other alliances, which consisted mainly of marketing, engineers at both companies are working closely together to deliver VMware globally across all AWS availability zones. At present, VMware Cloud on AWS is available in the AWS availability zone hosted in Portland, Oregon. The service soon will be extended to the east coast of the United States, followed by rest of the world over the course of 2018.

    The availability of VMware Cloud on AWS should force several DevOps issues within enterprise IT organizations that have deployed the VMware stack of software mainly on-premises. Many of those organizations have also been employing public clouds such as AWS. But because those environments are based on different hypervisors, it was never easy to migrate workloads between the two platforms. There are plenty of options for running VMware software in the cloud, but because AWS is the largest provider of public cloud services, there are many customers who want to seamlessly move workloads between their on-premises IT environments and AWS via a common stack of VMware software.

    In many organizations the desire to shift applications workloads into AWS will bring many DevOps issues to a head, as VMware and AWS use has occurred in independently of each other. There could be many workloads running on each platform, but for all intents and purposes, IT organizations have managed both platforms in isolation. Now that VMware is becoming available on AWS, all the challenges associated with moving workloads between a public and private cloud come to the fore.

    Most of those DevOps issues will be focused first on moving some classes of workloads running on VMware into AWS. Application workloads that don’t need to run constantly will be among the primary candidates followed by a slew of data protection applications that will enable IT organizations to back up and archive massive amounts of data inexpensively. Next up will be applications that need to be distributed globally to increase availability.

    At the same time, a lot of VMware shops will be moving application development into the cloud. But just because an application is developed in the cloud doesn’t mean it will stay there. Many IT organizations have already discovered that when it comes to long-running applications, the total cost of deploying them on-premises is less than deploying them on a public cloud. The DevOps tasks ahead, of course, will start with figuring out which VMware-based applications make the best candidates from a financial and availability perspective to be deployed on AWS.

    — Mike Vizard

  • VMware Aims to Advance Application Security

    VMware Aims to Advance Application Security

    Most of the tasks associated with maintaining IT security assume that IT security professionals should discover and neutralize all potential threats to an application. At the VMworld 2017 conference this week, VMware is seeking to turn that notion of IT security on its head by focusing the efforts of IT security professionals on the known good.

    Tom Corn, senior vice president for security products at ware, says instead of chasing all the potential bad things that could adversely impact an application, VMware App Defense employs machine-learning algorithms and data VMware collects from its management console and the host on which the applications are running to determine what elements make up an application workload. Those elements are compared to the manifest that was created when the workload was first deployed and, if they have been altered, VMware App Defense will invoke a preloaded library of incident response routines to enforce policy using VMware network virtualization software. Data collected from the host by VMware App Defense is done by inserting code into the kernel rather than deploying agent software.

    Corn says VMware App Defense uniquely provides DevSecOps teams with access to reliable telemetry into the guest operating system environments running on top of VMware. IBM will feed the telemetry data gathered by VMware App Defense into its portfolio of security analytics software, and eventually that data will be fed into the IBM Watson cognitive computing platform to generate application security recommendations. Other vendors pledging support for VMware App Defense include VMware sister companies RSA and SecureWorks, as well as Carbon Black and Puppet.

    Longer term, Corn says VMware expects to also be able to apply this capability to any production environment attached to a VMware NSX virtual network overlay.

    As potentially compelling as VMware App Defense might be, Corn notes that IT organizations should not attempt to boil the IT security ocean. Rather, they should concentrate on new applications currently under development. Otherwise, managing security policies across hundreds of applications made up on thousands of microservices and communicating over microsegmented network overlays might be too complex to manage.

    VMware has been making a case for some time now to employ NSX to take advantage of microsegmentation to limit the flow of east-west traffic in a data center. The idea is that if one node gets compromised by malware, it can only share that malware with nodes participating on the same microsegment of virtual network. VMware is now expanding on that idea in a way that also provides more visibility all the way up the application stack.

    Priced at $500 per CPU per year, VMware App Defense will induce more IT security professionals to recommend deploying its stack over any other available option, VMware hopes. The degree to which IT operations teams and cybersecurity professionals can influence developers in that direction remains to be seen. But VMware App Defense does fulfill its promise, it’s more than likely developers will appreciate the not having to spend as much time defending existing applications instead of writing new ones.

    — Mike Vizard