11.6.18
Today at VMworld 2018 Europe, VMware, Inc. unveiled a new release of its integrated hybrid cloud offering to help customers more easily deploy and operate their cloud environments. VMware introduced Cloud Foundation 3.5 to provide customers with greater deployment options, new Kubernetes support, and the latest innovations from VMware’s leading infrastructure and management portfolio. VMware Cloud Foundation offers the fastest way for customers to build an integrated hybrid cloud by delivering a comprehensive set of software-defined services for compute, storage, networking, security, and cloud management to run enterprise applications in hybrid cloud environments.
In today’s multi-cloud era, organizations are taking two approaches – hybrid cloud and native public cloud – to support their expanding set of applications as well as their adoption of new technologies such as machine learning (ML), Kubernetes, and advanced analytics. While each cloud model is unique, they are complementary, existing simultaneously within the same organization. At their core they share the common drive to deliver innovative services back to the business. VMware is investing in solutions that address multi-cloud environments, advancing the hybrid cloud opportunities from the data center to the cloud to the edge and addressing the needs of native public cloud operations.
“VMware Cloud Foundation sits at the core of VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy as the simplest way to deploy and operate the hybrid cloud. The offering delivers proven, comprehensive cloud infrastructure and management for the broadest, most demanding hybrid cloud environments–providing consistent infrastructure and operations for private cloud, public cloud and edge scenarios,” said John Gilmartin, general manager and vice president, Integrated Systems Business Unit, VMware. “To help support customers’ broad range of needs as well as protect their existing investments, VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 will offer customers increased flexibility to adopt and integrate it into their hybrid cloud strategies.”
VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 to Deliver More Deployment Choice, Kubernetes Support
VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 will deliver even greater flexibility as well as support an ever-growing set of workloads and cloud initiatives. VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 will be validated with Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes on Dell EMC PowerEdge MX with additional integration for composing compute, storage and network on this kinetic infrastructure expected in future releases. This new release will bring composability features to VMware Cloud Foundation with HPE Synergy providing customers the benefits of a composable private cloud infrastructure with even more simplicity and flexibility in managing SDDC environments. Additionally, the new release will feature integration with VMware NSX-T enabling the automated deployment and lifecycle management of the network virtualization software as well as support for containerized applications and Kubernetes. VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 will build on top of the extensive set of new capabilities and integrations delivered in VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0 including the choice of physical network switches (compared to previous versions that only supported a predefined list of supported switches).
VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 will deliver:
• Increased Flexibility:
° New – VMware will validate this latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation with Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes on Dell EMC PowerEdge MX, with increased integration expected over time. PowerEdge MX is Dell EMC’s kinetic infrastructure, which was designed for the software-defined data center, with customizable modules of compute, storage and networking. A proven, complete hyperconverged software solution, VMware Cloud Foundation offers ecosystem support for all VMware vSAN ReadyNodes.
° New – Support for composable features will be delivered through deep integration between VMware SDDC Manager and HPE Synergy Composer which is powered by HPE OneView. Customers can now dynamically compose physical resources using the VMware Cloud Foundation user interface to meet the needs of applications running on Workload Domains, thus increasing overall operational efficiency and automation.
• Expanded Customer Use Cases:
° New – Integration with VMware NSX-T 2.3 – which simplifies the implementation of network and security tasks around Kubernetes – will enable support for containerized and cloud-native application use cases. This includes support for VMware PKS, the enterprise-grade Kubernetes solution.
° Previously, VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0 introduced support for multi-site use cases including the use of vSAN Stretched Clusters as well as the quick and easy movement of workloads across private and public clouds using NSX Hybrid Connect.
• Latest VMware Product Innovations:
° New – VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 will include support for recent VMware product releases including vSphere 6.7 Update 1, featuring simple and efficient management at scale, built-in security for applications, infrastructure, data and access as well as increased support for artificial intelligence (AI) and ML workloads, among other capabilities. Integration with VMware NSX-T 2.3 will enable support for container environments as well as a simplified workflow and a new search interface to allow administrators to search for objects and events within the NSX-T system and perform operations quickly. The new release will also feature VMware vRealize Automation 7.5 with broadened developer use case support through VMware PKS integration for Kubernetes cluster management. VMware vRealize Operations 7.0 will enable customers to adopt a ‘self-driving’ approach to monitoring and managing their data centers and cloud environments.
At VMworld 2018 Europe, Dell EMC announced a preview of VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail. The combination of Dell EMC VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation is expected to offer customers the simplest way to build a private cloud with enterprise-rich features including multi-site and multi-cluster with fully automated deployment and lifecycle management of the entire stack.
VMware Cloud Foundation provides the simplest path to the hybrid cloud through an integrated software offering that delivers a consistent, simple, more secure and agile cloud infrastructure that can be deployed on-premises or consumed as a service from the public cloud via VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, CenturyLink, FUJITSU Cloud Service for VMware, NTT’s Enterprise Cloud (ECL) powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, OVH and Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware.
VMware vRealize Network Insight 4.0 Enables Troubleshooting for Hybrid Cloud Apps
Today, VMware also unveiled vRealize Network Insight 4.0. The latest release will be able to troubleshoot application connectivity in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. New functionality will enable customers to troubleshoot the path between a virtual machine (VM) on-premises to an EC2 instance in Amazon Web Services (AWS). VMware vRealize Network Insight 4.0 will also introduce comprehensive visibility across underlay and overlay networks including sflow support, new visibility for VMware NSX-T topology and events as well as support for Cisco ACI underlay and Cisco ASA firewall. Available as packaged software and as a VMware Cloud Service, VMware vRealize Network Insight helps customers to accelerate application security and networking across private, public and hybrid clouds. For VMware NSX customers, vRealize Network Insight helps drive successful outcomes no matter the stage of NSX adoption.
VMware Skyline Proactive Support for vRealize Operations
VMware Skyline, a proactive customer support technology, automates data collection to proactively review a customer’s VMware environment. The service provides prescriptive recommendations to improve overall environmental health and performance, and includes VMware Skyline Log Assist—which eliminates the time-consuming process of manually uploading log files needed by Technical Support Engineers to assist customers with solving technical challenges. VMware Skyline proactive findings and recommendations will be available within vRealize Operations in early 2019.
Supporting Quotes
“VMware Cloud Foundation offers CM.com–a Cloud Communications, Payments and Identity provider—the best of both worlds. It serves as our system for full-stack applications, front-end applications and databases. CM.com continues its high rate of innovation and is building new containerized applications. VMware Cloud Foundation’s support for PKS—the enterprise-ready Kubernetes solution—will have an immediate business impact enabling us to do way more with the same amount of people.” – Jan Saan, CTO at CM.com
“VMware Cloud Foundation was the right solution for us because we needed a platform that simplified our IT infrastructure, saved us time, and brought us forward from our aging data center to a modern one. Following an extensive review process, it was clear that the platform solved everything we needed it to do to better support our business and customers today and moving forward. As our business grows, IT is poised to grow along with it with relative ease.” – Dustin Plank, IT Manager at Nol-Tec Systems
“Leveraging our long-standing partnership with VMware and joint R&D efforts, HPE is the first to bring composability features to VMware Cloud Foundation with HPE Synergy and HPE OneView, enabling seamless integration with SDDC manager to enhance automation and simplicity in managing composable private cloud and software-defined data center environments. The powerful combination of HPE and VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 is a proven way for enterprise customers to accelerate their journey to the SDDC and hybrid cloud.” – Neil MacDonald, General Manager Compute Solutions GBU at Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Packaging and Availability
VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 and VMware vRealize Network Insight 4.0 are both expected to be available by end of VMware’s fiscal year 2019 (Feb. 1, 2019).
