VMware Kicks Off Conference With Raft of Cloud-Related Announcements

VMware announced on Monday a tranche of cloud-related services across multiple clouds during the first day of its VMworld conference in Las Vegas.

Before the conference started, VMware announced on Sunday that it had lowered prices for its cloud software suite that runs on Amazon Web Services. While VMware and AWS were formerly rivals, they now have a two-year partnership in place. VMware reduced the cost of deploying its vSphere workloads on AWS by 50%. The lower price will only be available on a three-host minimum configuration.

VMware also said on Sunday that VMware Cloud on AWS is now available in AWS’ Asia Pacific cloud region in Sydney, Australia, which means the service is available in any AWS region in the world.

The new cloud services that were announced today included: VMware Cloud Assembly, VMware Service Broker, VMware Code Stream and VMware Secure State. VMware also said that it had made upgrades to Wavefront, which is the company’s cloud-native and monitoring platform.

With the enhancements, VMware said Wavefront can ingest, analyze and virtualize metrics data from an environment that’s running 100,000 containers. Wavefront also comes with more support for Kubernetes and Pivotal Container Service. There’s also a new Lambda SDK and a series of dashboards available to help developers with serverless code.

“In the telecom market there’s a battle for what the next virtual platform is going to be, and that’s mainly between OpenStack and VMware,” said Lee Doyle, principal analyst at Doyle Research in an interview with FierceTelecom. “Part of what VMware is doing with its announcements today is to enhance its virtualization, notably that there’s improved support for containers. Containers are the next big workload thing, so VMware has to move beyond VMs (virtual machines) and support containers in a wide number of environments. “

VMware said that its Cloud Assembly delivers unified provisioning across all clouds through declarative Infrastructure as Code, including AWS, Azure, and VMware Cloud on AWS. With Cloud Assembly, IT and cloud operations teams can orchestrate and speed up infrastructure and application delivery by using DevOps principles.

VMware adds to NSX platform

VMware also announced the availability of NSX-T Data Center 2.3 today, which extended multicloud networking and security capabilities to AWS, Microsoft Azure and on premise environments.

NSX-T Data Center 2.3 supports bare metal hosts, in addition to hypervisor and container environments, which includes Linux-based workloads running on bare-metal servers, as well as containers running on bare-metal servers without a hypervisor.

Cisco rival Arista and VMware teamed up to drive interoperability between Arista’s CloudVision and VMware NSX. With the partnership, NSX security policies can be enforced natively on Arista switches across a multicloud enterprise, extending security policies across both virtual and physical workloads from mainframes to data centers to public clouds. The partnership also blended Arista’s Macro-Segmentation Services (MSS) with VMware NSX micro-segmentation capabilities.

“They say they’ve significantly enhanced their security capabilities,” Doyle said. So obviously that’s a big deal because security is always a big deal. They’re going beyond microsegmentation by being able to look at what the threats are, what’s in the traffic and what traffic pattern is. They are looking more at traffic anomalies and things like that.

“From a telecommunications standpoint, they are trying to further integrate the whole VeloCloud SD-WAN products into more of an end-to-end story. The reason that’s important in the telecom world is that a significant part of VeloCloud’s revenue comes from leading service providers reselling their product. It’s part of VMware’s strategy to provide a broader range of software products and services in the telecom market.” – Fierce Telecom