VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram kicked off the company’s main user conference in San Francisco by noting the event’s new name and its return to in-person after two years of the pandemic. What used to be called VMworld is now VMware Explore, a converter that lets you know how the viewer has changed over the years.
“VMworld was a community of data center professionals when we started. But over the years we’ve expanded; It’s now a community for application developers, platform engineering teams, cloud operations teams and security teams,” says Raghuram. “It’s about all those roles…not just in the data center, but on the cloud. It’s really a multi-cloud community.”
VMware product news also covers the IT spectrum, including application development, data center infrastructure, network security and multi-cloud management. VMware technology previews and announcements include:
- Project Northstar, a family of multi-cloud networking and security services available through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) consumption model.
- The newly released vSphere server virtualization and vSAN storage virtualization software, along with new resource-based consumption models, are designed to align costs with application needs.
- Launch of Aria, a software portfolio designed to centralize the provisioning, management and security of infrastructure and applications in a multi-cloud environment.
- Updates to the Tanzu application platform, including support for Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes orchestration platform.
Overcoming cloud chaos
The new and improved VMware products are part of an overall theme Raghuram introduced in his keynote: Enterprises need a smarter, more consistent and less chaotic approach to the cloud.
IT organizations of all sizes face similar challenges as they try to accelerate the pace of innovation, drive greater automation and increase productivity, he said. Digital transformation depends on expanding further into the cloud, “reengineering everything in the enterprise,” Raghuram said, but CIOs and CEOs tell him it’s not happening fast enough.
“Roadblocks are very common regardless of industry,” Raghuram said. The top three barriers are: lack of skills, the weight and complexity of enterprise applications that need to be updated, and fragmented development, operations, and security models.
“All of your teams are building applications across multiple clouds in the data center, following different models. There’s no consistent developer experience — that slows them down. There’s a fragmented operations model — that slows them down. There’s a fragmented security model — that increases risk. All of these things are delaying the great replatforming.” He said.
At last year’s conference, VMware talked about its vision for VMware Cross-Cloud Services, a collection of technology services and platforms that enable enterprises to become “cloud smart,” and this year the company is introducing some of those products, Raghuram said.
An example is VMware vSphere 8. It took two years to build, and according to Raghuram, it lays the foundation for modern computing for the next decade – a single computing infrastructure that supports various CPUs, GPUs and DPUs (data processing units).
“vSphere will be a single platform for deploying and managing workloads and allowing you to run them efficiently and securely regardless of the underlying processor technology,” said Raghuram. And that allows you to run not just today’s applications, but the next decade’s AI and machine learning applications and data applications, real-time applications, telco applications.
VMware Aria is another key release targeting multi-cloud management. Aria’s portfolio includes product suites for cost, performance, configuration and management of infrastructure and cloud-native applications. It is powered by VMware Aria Graph, a graph-based data warehouse that captures the elements of a multi-cloud environment.
“We’ve created a graph of all your cloud assets, hundreds or thousands of you. [virtual private clouds] And Kubernetes clusters, and serverless, and on-prem, and so on and so forth,” Raghuram said. “And using this graph, we can do all kinds of management and security and automation that you couldn’t imagine before. That’s VMware Aria. It’s the foundation of our multi-cloud management strategy.”
Continuing the multi-cloud theme, Raghuram announced that VMware’s Cloud Universal program will support Microsoft Azure.
“When we introduce [the Cloud Universal program] Last year we introduced it for private cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS. You: That’s great, but that’s not a lot of clouds. So we got back to work. Earlier this year we added support for Google. And today I am happy to announce that Microsoft Azure VMware solution will be part of VMware Cloud Universal.
With Cloud Universal, he says, “You don’t have to predict or wonder where your developers are going to build the next great app, whose cloud services they want to connect to it, how they’re going to manage them, and so on.” “You can dynamically choose to build your applications on-prem, move them to the cloud, build them on one cloud, run them on another cloud, go crazy. It’s all covered by one business model.”
Broadcom plans for VMware
Early in his keynote, Raghuram mentioned Broadcom’s plans to acquire VMware, and took the opportunity to welcome Broadcom Chairman and CEO Hock Tan, who was in the audience, to the VMware Explore community. But Raghuram was tight-lipped about the $61 billion deal that was announced earlier in May.
At the media briefing after the keynote, Raghuram pressed on the pending deal.
“Things are on the right track,” he said. “On the one hand, they are going through all the regulatory approvals. On the other hand, we are working with the Broadcom team, helping them understand the depth and breadth of our business and product portfolio.
“And in the meantime, we’re operating as a completely independent, independent company with our own execution path and strategy.”
Broadcom expects the acquisition to close in fiscal year 2023, which begins in November and ends in October of next year.
When Raghuram was asked about the pre-purchase jitters, the tension between VMware staff and customers seemed to calm. Any major transaction is expected to raise questions and concerns, he said. “This was initially with our employees, but many of them have been confirmed. The employees know what the roadmap is before us.
“In terms of clients, I think it’s more of the same. Clients are very mature. They’ve done a lot of big company transactions in the past, and they’re seeing us execute every day.”
Copyright © 2022 IDG Communications, Inc.
