

Platform and application virtualization are rapidly coming to the edge of the cloud. Paving the way are the multicore processors at the heart of devices for the most demanding “internet of things,” mobile and embedded applications.
As virtualization takes hold at the cloud’s edge, it’s finding its first applications in the industrial IoT. Virtualization allows a smart edge device, such as an industrial robot, to run virtual machines and containers to manage concurrently such artificial intelligence-driven application workloads as sensing, data ingestion, signal processing, computer vision, adaptive control and human-machine engagement.
In the process, edge-embedded hypervisors and other virtualization technologies can save space, use power more efficiently and streamline monitoring, diagnostics, troubleshooting and support requirements associated with managing intelligent systems.
More broadly, virtualization technology can ensure that two or more edge devices can be elastically and adaptively combined to handle dynamic workloads. It can enable those devices to adapt seamlessly and in real time to the peaks and lulls of many edge application scenarios, such as the industrial IoT and real-time congestion management in private, public and hybrid clouds. And it can boost cloud-to-edge infrastructure efficiency by helping to allocate workloads dynamically across intermediate layers of computation, networking and storage.
As VMworld 2018 nears, Wikibon expects VMware Inc. to put greater emphasis on opportunities in cloud-to-edge virtualization. Key to this push is NSX Data Center, which is the centerpiece of VMware’s software-defined networking strategy. It is VMware’s top priority for multicloud and edge deployments. In the past two years, the company has been steadily expanding NSX’s reach, scale and simplicity all the way to the edge.
NSX now integrates with VMware’s vSphere server virtualization, ESXi bare-metal hypervisor and growing portfolio of containerized microservices offerings. Going forward, the company’s strategic focus is on making NSX platform services consumable at the software layer, with more routing, load-balancer, firewall and traffic microsegmentation functions moving into that layer.
This intelligent networking is necessary to expand VMware’s software-defined data center reach so that it can move computation transparently and securely to and among IoT edge devices. It will enable VMware users to treat a collection of IoT devices as a virtualized data center running diverse VMs, containerized microservices and other workloads within a cloud-to-edge computing fabric.
Over the past two years, VMware has made a series of significant moves that hint at a more comprehensive software-defined edge strategy to come. Key recent milestones in this regard include releases of the following solutions:
Just as important, VMware over the past year has expanded the edge virtualization focus of its partnerships. The key partnership announcements in this push are the following:
Increasingly, Dell/VMware’s server, network and device virtualization platforms — including VSphere, NSX and Pulse — will manage diverse real-time application workloads. These platforms will need to play together seamlessly in virtual cloud-to-edge fabrics to ensure that AI and other workloads — running in VMs, containers and serverless environments — can run in parallel on the edge devices with assured service levels managed across the distributed edge.
Wikibon expects VMware to deepen its focus on Pulse IoT Center in its edge virtualization roadmap. The platform, which was introduced last year, provides enterprise information technology professionals with visibility into IoT infrastructure performance metrics, such as CPU utilization and battery life, and correlate it with historic data, as well as information from other devices, to help identify anomalies and optimize device performance. It incorporates Liota, which is a client-side module that resides on edge gateways or can be embedded in devices, enabling the transmission of edge operational data — such as that associated with performance of device-embedded AI workloads — for centralized management of cloud-to-edge optimization.
For VMware parent Dell Technologies Inc., partnerships are important in its distributed-core SDDC strategy, as Michael Dell, the company’s founder and chief executive officer, said during an interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile TV studio at Dell Technologies World conference in May. Dell and its subsidiary VMware are positioning themselves as the premier infrastructure providers for compute power at the network edge, especially for AI in IoT devices.
“We’ve positioned ourselves as the central infrastructure company,” said Dell. “We’re on the [network] edge, [we] have a distributed core.”
You can catch Dell and other Dell EMC, VMware and partner executives interviewed live on theCUBE from VMworld 2018, which takes place Aug. 27-29 in Las Vegas.
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