The main keynote topic for today at VMworld was how to address the coming cloud tsunami. Pat citing his own researchers believes that 50% of all workloads (OS instances) will be running in public and private cloud by 2021 and by 2030, 50% of all workloads will be running in the Public Cloud alone. So today VMware announced two new offerings: VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Cross-Cloud Services.
Cloud Foundation
Cloud Foundation appears to be a bundling of VMware’s SDDC, NSX®, Virtual SAN™ (VSAN) and vSphere® solutions, into a single, integrated stack/package that can be sold and licensed together. No pricing was provided at the show but essentially VMware want’s to allow customers a simple way to deploy a VMware private cloud.
VMware states that Cloud Foundation offers customers up to 6-8X faster cloud deployment at a TCO savings of >40%.
VMware also announced a joint partnership with IBM to sell Cloud Foundation services residing on the IBM Cloud to their customer base. This broaden’s the availability of VMware cloud service offerings beyond vCloud and on premises Cloud Foundation environments.
Cross-Cloud Services
Everyone wants to minimize cloud vendor lockin but that’s not possible today except in a few special cases (NetApp Private Storage and similar capabilities from other vendors, cloud storage gateway services, cloud archive services, etc.).
VMware Cross-Cloud Services is the next step down this path, attempting to provide easier workload/data migration, consolidated cost and workload management and security deployment across the public and private cloud boundaries.
Cross-Cloud Services was in tech preview at the show but it’s intended to make use of standard public cloud defined APIs to provide specialized targeted services to allow better cross-cloud migration and management.
The tech preview showed VMware Cross-Cloud Services deploying an NSX gateway in AWS which allowed NSX to control public cloud IP addresses and then once that was done, one could apply security templates to deploy network encryption between apps and its services. VMware used a sniffer to show the before plain text traffic and the after with encrypted traffic, all done in a matter of minutes. They also showed cost trending information for workloads running across the private and public cloud.
Next they showed a demo (movie) of VMware migrating/cloning a simple app to other public and private cloud environments. They had a public cloud Unicycle IOT app running in Ireland/AWS (I think) with a three tier (web, app, database) app structure/instances and then migrated/cloned that single site 3-tier app to be deployed across multiple cloud (web and app tiers) sites with a single database instance running in a private cloud.
I started thinking this is getting us down the path towards cloud virtualization but in the end, it’s much more targeted services, which run in instances/gateways in the public and private cloud to do very specific migration or management activities. Nonetheless a great first step towards more flexible cross-cloud deployment and management.
VMworld Day 2 looks to be more on current products and enhancements, stay tuned.
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