Attendees at VMware Explore were introduced to the enhanced iteration of VMware Cloud. This pivotal update equips customers with fresh editions and capabilities, facilitating a holistic transformation towards modernization, optimization, and improved security. The new VMware Cloud enhancements allow customers to accelerate innovation, enhance operational efficiency, bolster threat resistance, and swiftly rebound from ransomware incidents.
Attendees at VMware Explore were introduced to the enhanced iteration of VMware Cloud. This pivotal update equips customers with fresh editions and capabilities, facilitating a holistic transformation towards modernization, optimization, and improved security. The new VMware Cloud enhancements allow customers to accelerate innovation, enhance operational efficiency, bolster threat resistance, and swiftly rebound from ransomware incidents.
VMware’s Krish Prasad, senior vice president, and general manager cloud infrastructure business group, said:
“VMware Cloud is setting a new benchmark for helping customers modernize, optimize, and better protect their businesses. Our latest VMware Cloud advancements further modernize cloud infrastructure and deliver a single cloud operating model that improves developer productivity and advances security.”
VMware Cloud Combines Flexibility, Resiliency, Security
VMware Cloud combines VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Cloud Services, simplifying the journey to the cloud. VMware Cloud Foundation combines the best innovations from VMware’s on-premises and public cloud software offerings into a unified stack to deliver a consistent environment across any on-premises, hyperscaler cloud, or VMware Cloud provider environment.
VMware Cloud services simplify the deployment and operations of Cloud Foundation environments across any cloud or on-prem environment. Customers can take advantage of VMware Cloud services to run enterprise workloads more securely at scale with advanced data protection, cloud-based disaster and ransomware recovery, and multi-cloud networking and security. Advanced developer services, built-in Kubernetes, and optimized access to hundreds of native cloud services across leading hyperscalers deliver a pragmatic approach to app modernization.
VMware Cloud is available in five prescriptive VMware Cloud editions (Essentials, Standard, Pro, Advanced, Enterprise) that help customers flexibly modernize infrastructure and management at every stage of their cloud transformation journey. Customers can deploy and manage their VMware Cloud environments in three ways:
- Customer Managed –customers can deploy VMware Cloud editions in their own data centers or their choice of colocation partners with full control of the infrastructure environment.
- VMware Managed – VMware Cloud on AWS is a VMware-managed cloud service with fully integrated hardware and software. VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal will be a distributed cloud service that enables customers to purchase software and hardware as a service separately for maximum flexibility.
- Provider Managed – new VMware Cross-Cloud managed services based on VMware Cloud editions from partners such as IBM Cloud enable customers to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for on-premises environments, simplify operations, reduce risk with observability, actionable insight, and performance optimization, and accelerate cloud migrations.
NSX+ Delivers Multi-Cloud Networking, Security, and Developer Services
VMware NSX+, previously known as Project NorthStar, is unveiled as the new cloud-managed service offering of NSX for multi-cloud environments. NSX+ normalizes core networking and security capabilities across VMware Cloud environments, providing a single-cloud operating model that delivers zero tickets, zero custom security or load-balancing hardware appliances, and Zero Trust.
NSX+ provides a centralized security policy creation and enforcement, comprehensive network and application visibility, and deep security with network detection and response (NDR) as a Service. Centrally managed from a single cloud console, NSX+ capabilities are delivered as SaaS and simplify the installation process.
VMware also introduced NSX+ virtual private clouds (VPCs), providing complete isolation of networking, security, and services to multiple tenants on a shared VMware Cloud infrastructure managed by a single NSX instance. Developers and application teams can select clouds that are optimal for their applications. Infrastructure teams can maintain supervisory control, set operational guardrails on a per-VPC basis, and help ensure changes made within VPC environments do not impact other tenants.
vSAN Max Boosts Storage Scale and Efficiency and Lowers TCO in VMware Cloud
The use of advanced analytics and AI workloads to gain customer insights, optimize processes, and drive revenue growth, require massive data sets that can grow rapidly, meaning storage solutions must scale out to petabyte capacities and still deliver high performance and resiliency at a low total cost of ownership (TCO).
To meet the demands for scalable, efficient, and cost-effective storage for VMware Cloud, VMware introduced vSAN Max, giving customers greater scaling flexibility compared to traditional storage solutions while continuing to provide the performance, capacity, resiliency, and low TCO demanded by today’s modern applications.
Built on vSAN Express Storage Architecture, vSAN Max will scale storage elastically and independently from compute to maximize utilization, up to 8.6 petabytes of capacity and 3.6 million IOPS per cluster. It is designed to withstand failures across sites, hosts, and even discrete storage devices in a stretched cluster topology.
According to VMware, vSAN Max is designed to recover from a discrete device failure up to 92 percent faster and can lower TCO up to 30 percent for mission-critical databases through hardware and license consolidation. The new vSAN Max offering will be licensed separately from existing vSAN editions. vSAN Max will be offered as a subscription software and is planned to be licensed on a per tebibyte metric.
VMware Cloud Enables Faster Recovery From Fileless Attacks
Most ransomware attacks employ fileless techniques that cannot be detected by scanning idle backups, posing a significant threat to organizations. VMware Ransomware Recovery is available today as a VMware Cloud service designed to recover from fileless attacks using behavioral analysis of powered-on VMs in cloud-based isolated recovery environments (IREs).
VMware Ransomware Recovery, said to resolve unplanned downtime 75 percent faster, has added concurrent multi-VM recovery operations and lets customers run production workloads in the cloud until forensics are complete and the on-premises data center is fortified. Availability is expected in Q3 2024.
VMware also unveiled a technology preview of cybersecure storage that will integrate recovery workflows with native vSAN snapshots for data transfer optimizations. VMware Ransomware Recovery is also expanding VMware Cloud service support to include protection of workloads in Google Cloud VMware Engine (available today).
VMware Cloud Adds Cloud-Based ESXi LMS
VMware announced the early availability of a new cloud-based ESXi lifecycle management service (LMS) in vSphere+. IT admins can centrally manage upgrades across their entire ESXi fleet in distributed multi-vCenter environments, overcoming silos and simplifying operations, especially in larger environments. Additional updates to vSphere in the upcoming release includes doubling GPU capacity per VM to support more complex AI/ML workloads, enabling smarter load balancing to maximize performance from GPU investments, and enhanced self-service tools to make building and running modern apps even easier for DevOps engineers and developers.
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