VMware launches new solutions that modernise applications and infrastructure

• VMware Tanzu Portfolio enables enterprises to adopt cloud-native technologies and automate the modern application lifecycle on any cloud

• VMware Cloud Foundation 4 delivers hybrid cloud platform with native Kubernetes support

• New VMware vSphere 7 powers VMware Cloud Foundation Services

VMware has announced new products and services to help customers modernise their applications and infrastructure, marking a new chapter for the company with the hope that it will accelerate digital infrastructure in the region. 

According to the company, applications are core to successful digital transformation efforts, and enable enterprises to deliver personalised customer experiences that generate new revenue streams. To fully benefit from their investments in modern applications, enterprises also need to modernise their infrastructure at the same time. However, they face challenges from two directions: in delivering better software faster, while still enforcing security and operational stability. 

“In the next five years you will see customers building more apps than they built in the last 40 years,” Sanjay K. Deshmukh, VP and MD, Southeast Asia and Korea, VMware explained.

The traditional way of developing and maintaining software no longer applies, he noted. Today’s apps run in containers, and do not necessarily reside in data centres. They might be in various clouds, or at the edge. With more mobile devices in play, the security aspect has changed, too, he said.

“This is something that VMware has focused on,” Deshmukh said, sharing that VMware’s goal is to build, run, manage, connect and protect any application on any device in any cloud.

To this end, VMware has launched the expanded VMware Tanzu portfolio for modern applications, VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu, and VMware vSphere 7. VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu offers an automated, turnkey hybrid cloud platform featuring the new VMware Cloud Foundation Services using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. VMware vSphere 7, on the other hand, is designed to drive developer productivity.

“Today, we bring to market a comprehensive portfolio for modern apps to help customers accelerate their pace of innovation,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware.

“VMware gives developers the freedom to deliver apps to any cloud, remove barriers to Kubernetes adoption, and help IT administrators transform their skills in support of a new wave of modern apps.” 

“Organisations in today’s burgeoning app economy need to rethink how they can accelerate agility, innovation and time-to-market to respond quick and deliver hyper-personalised experiences to their customers,” said Deshmukh.

“VMware Tanzu can help strengthen Asia’s innovation ecosystem by enabling enterprises tap on next-generation technologies such as Kubernetes to build, run, manage, connect and protect their apps across any cloud and any device.”

VMware Tanzu

VMware Tanzu is a portfolio of products and services that enable enterprises to deliver better software faster. Customers can use the suite to automate the modern app lifecycle, run Kubernetes across clouds, and unify and optimise multicloud operations.

The initial products in the VMware Tanzu portfolio are: 

• VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid – Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is a Kubernetes runtime that helps customers install and run a multicluster Kubernetes environment on the infrastructure of their choice. It is designed to run Kubernetes consistently across any environment including data centres, hyperscalers, service providers, and at the edge. It includes the industry-standard open source technologies needed to stand up and support a cloud-neutral Kubernetes environment, is packaged for enterprise readiness, and is fully supported by VMware.

Hyperscalers refers to companies whose cloud-based services are available globally, such as Alibaba and Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

• VMware Tanzu Mission Control – Previewed in August 2019, Tanzu Mission Control is a centralised management platform for consistently operating and securing Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications across multiple teams and clouds. It provides operators with a single control point for consistent management across environments and increased security and governance. Developers have self-service access to resources so they can get code into production faster. This service is now available.

• VMware Tanzu Application Catalog – The newly-available Tanzu Application Catalog delivers a customisable selection of open-source software from the Bitnami catalogue that is verifiably secured, tested, and maintained for use in production environments. The service gives developers the productivity and agility of pre-packaged apps and components, while enabling operators to meet the stringent security and transparency requirements of enterprise IT. This service was originally previewed as Project Galleon in August 2019.

VMware announced it would acquire Bitnami in May 2019.

VMware has been busy expanding the Tanzu portfolio. Following the close of the Pivotal acquisition in December 2019, VMware has moved quickly to integrate the Pivotal team, technology and products. This includes VMware rebranding Pivotal Application Service (PAS)—purpose-built for developers to boost feature velocity and operations teams to deliver world-class uptime—to the Tanzu Application Service. Additionally, VMware has rebranded Wavefront by VMware to Tanzu Observability by Wavefront and aligned NSX Service Mesh with the portfolio as Tanzu Service Mesh, built on VMware NSX.

The company said these additions to the portfolio will help enterprises to further increase developer velocity, holistically observe and monitor apps running in multicloud environments including Kubernetes-based environments, and simplify the way they connect, monitor and secure microservices. 

VMware Cloud Foundation 4

VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu will provide hybrid cloud infrastructure with consistent management for both virtual machine (VM)-based and container-based applications while delivering intrinsic security and lifecycle management across software-defined compute, storage and network resources. The platform helps to bridge the gap between developers and IT— enabling developers to rapidly build and update apps while providing IT operations with control and enhanced security.

Available across diverse private and public clouds including the hyperscalers, VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu will include the following components: 

• New vSphere 7: Newly-rearchitected using Kubernetes, vSphere is now optimised to run both modern container-based and traditional virtual machine-based workloads. Initially, vSphere 7 with Kubernetes will be available solely through VMware Cloud Foundation 4.

• New vSAN 7: Provides storage virtualisation including file services and cloud-native storage for modern apps.

• New vRealize 8.1: Provides self-driving operations and modern infrastructure automation capabilities for virtualised, cloud-based and containerised workloads and applications.

• NSX-T: To provide full stack networking and security services that connect and protect VMs and containers.

VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu also introduces VMware Cloud Foundation Services, an integrated Kubernetes and RESTful API surface to enable organisations to drive API access to all core services. VMware Cloud Foundation Services will include:

• Tanzu Runtime Services: These services will deliver core Kubernetes development services including an up-to-date distribution of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.   

• Hybrid Infrastructure Services: Powered by VMware vSphere 7, these enhanced services will provide full Kubernetes API access as well as the infrastructure-as-code automation APIs delivered by vRealize Automation to span the world of VM-based applications and cloud-native applications deployed with containers. 

Optimised to run all applications, VMware Cloud Foundation delivers a cloud operating model on-premises in a private cloud that extends to public cloud, enabling developers to use the latest development methodologies and container technologies for faster time to production. Enterprises will benefit from simplified management of containers and VM workloads across heterogenous clouds like AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, Rackspace, and IBM as well as VMware Cloud Verified partners, optimising performance, resilience and availability. 

VMware vSphere 7

VMware has also introduced VMware vSphere 7—the biggest evolution of vSphere in a decade. VMware vSphere 7 was previewed in August 2019 as Project Pacific—which focused on rearchitecting vSphere into an open platform using Kubernetes APIs to provide a cloud-like experience for developers and operators.

A foundational component of the VMware Tanzu portfolio, the new release will support all applications including modern and traditional applications using any combination of virtual machines, containers and Kubernetes. VMware vSphere 7 will further help enterprises to increase developer and operator productivity, enabling faster-time-to-innovation combined with the security, stability, governance, and lower costs of traditional enterprise infrastructure. New capabilities and features will enable enterprises to:

• Boost productivity: Developers will benefit from self-service access to infrastructure and additional productivity capabilities. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is embedded into vSphere 7 with Kubernetes as part of VMware Cloud Foundation 4 to deliver Kubernetes clusters as-a-service to developers.

• Achieve agile operations: IT operations teams will benefit from new application-focused management, simplified lifecycle management capabilities, and a unified platform for consistent operations across clouds, data centres and edge environments.

• Accelerate innovation: Applications will be able to further leverage GPU hardware to accelerate the performance of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) applications using elastic pools

of GPU resources. Additionally, customers will be able increase the performance of latency-sensitive applications using improved Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), enhanced vMotion, and augmented support for persistent memory (PMEM) capabilities. VMotion is VMware’s technology to migrate virtual machines.

VMware vSphere 7 will also allow enterprises to continue to take advantage of existing investments in vSphere technology, tools and skillsets. 

VMware vSphere 7 will be available in two major configurations. The first configuration, vSphere with Kubernetes, will be available in VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu to power container- and VM-based applications. VSphere 7 will also be available in a configuration for VM-based applications in a number of editions including VMware vSphere Standard Edition.

“As the world’s best digital bank, DBS’ aspiration is to be a tech company that happens to provide financial services. That ambition requires significant investment in the latest technology solutions. In the course of our journey, we have found that VMware provides us with two attractive value propositions. One is helping us to solve the challenge of managing large containers and Kubernetes at scale, with technologies like vSphere 7 with Kubernetes and VMware Tanzu Mission Control and the second is the modern application development expertise that we get with VMware Tanzu and Pivotal Labs.

“Both of those matter to us as we are constantly investing in our cloud infrastructure and rearchitecting our applications to be even more cloud-ready so that we can stay one step ahead of our customers,” said Jimmy Ng, CIO, DBS.

"Our goal is to help our customers who are already running our technology in the data centre and transforming apps," said Deshmukh. "The market opportunity is massive. Every single customer of ours is interested in transforming our apps."

He further elaborated, “We are seeing interest in every single customer across industry and across different sizes. Customers who are relatively small in size, the midmarket and small and medium-sized business (SMB) segment, are the ones which are embracing the VMware cloud strategy and taking it up faster.”

Customers are focusing on modernising app infrastructure, moving apps to cloud as well as developing new apps, he shared. He further noted that managed service providers (MSPs), infrastructure providers and independent software vendors (ISVs) will all benefit from Tanzu as they no longer have to build infrastructure in silos.

“Tanzu will help them deliver the app into a multicloud environment,” he said.

Some 70 million workloads run on VMware today.  

Details:
 

VMware Tanzu Application Catalog, VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and VMware Tanzu Mission Control are all available today.  

VMware Cloud Foundation 4, VMware vSphere 7, VMware vSAN 7, VMware vRealize Automation 8.1 and VMware vRealize Operations 8.1 (both on-premises and as software-as-a-service [SaaS]) are all expected to become available by May 1, 2020, the end of VMware’s Q121 fiscal year.