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Hoping to extend its hard-won leadership in corporate data centers into the cloud computing era, VMware Inc. is using its VMworld 2018 conference that opens today to showcase its growing cloud credentials — especially in managing operations on multiple clouds.

During a keynote this morning with VMware Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger (pictured) and other executives and partners, the company announced major updates to its core software and storage virtualization platforms in order to help enterprises build and secure modern software applications across a range of information technology infrastructures.

The latest innovations come as VMware bids to play a more central role in helping enterprises to virtualize their on-premises data centers inside public clouds. Enterprises are scrambling to do this in order to take advantage of new trends in IT, including container technologies and serverless infrastructure that can facilitate faster and more agile business application development and help them stay more competitive.

“Businesses are on a multicloud journey,” Gelsinger said in his keynote address this morning. “What VMware has been uniquely able to do is bridge across these silos of innovation.”

With its cloud push, VMware is targeting enterprises whose applications are mostly based on legacy compute infrastructure that isn’t “cloud-native,” meaning they need heavy support in order to manage their workloads across multiple cloud platforms in order to take advantage of these latest trends.

VMware offers a number of products that combine to provide this support. These include its core vSphere platform, which is used to virtualize operating systems and applications so these can run on the same physical computers located on-premises or in cloud environments. Other essentials include vSAN, which is VMware’s virtualized storage product; vRealize, its hybrid cloud management platform; and NSX, which is a network virtualization platform to enable software-defined data centers.

The new stuff

Today, vSphere not only gets a new update but also an entirely new version that’s aimed at providing better security for cloud-based infrastructure. VSphere Platinum Edition, as it’s called, is integrated with VMware AppDefense, which is an endpoint security product that protects applications by monitoring their behavior for any changes that might indicate a threat, and taking remedial action should it find anything amiss. “This is going to make everybody’s life easier and make them all part of the security solution, Mike Adams, VMware’s senior director of Cloud Platform product marketing, said in a briefing last week.

Using machine learning and behavioral analytics, it will enable vSphere administrators to deliver secure applications and infrastructure by enabling virtual machines to run in a “known good” state, company officials said. It will also offer direct visibility into “VM intent and application behavior” to provide faster and more accurate threat detection and response.

The company also announced an update to its standard vSphere offering. The main new feature with vSphere 6.7 Update 1 is a new HTML5-based client that helps system administrators to manage their virtual infrastructure better. VMware has also thrown in additional support for “intelligent workloads” thanks to new vMotion and snapshot capabilities for Nvidia Corp.’s virtual graphics processing unit chips.

VMware’s vSAN, meanwhile, gains new “built-in intelligence capabilities” that are designed to simplify operations and reduce maintenance time. These capabilities also make it faster to create hyperconverged storage clusters with a new “Quickstart” guided cluster creation and extension wizard. The update also introduces a new “automated capacity reclamation” feature that helps to better manage available storage resources.

As for vRealize, the company’s suite of cloud management tools that includes vRealize Operations, vRealize Automation and vRealize Suite, each one gains new features and capabilities designed to help customers automate and standardize their IT infrastructures across hybrid cloud environments. The upgrades across the vRealize suite are designed to enable the “self-driving operations,” “programmable provisioning” and “application operations” of container-based apps, the company said.

Networking updates

Not least, VMware is also updating its NSX networking portfolio for building virtual cloud networks that connect and protect applications hosted across various cloud and on-premises infrastructures. The company is adding support for workloads running on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, VMware Cloud on AWS and on-premises software-defined data centers, as well as both Linux-based and containerized workloads running on bare-metal servers without a hypervisor, or virtual-machine monitor.

James Kobielus, an analyst with SiliconANGLE sister company Wikibon, said the new features strengthen NSX’s flexibility, security and manageability. But he noted that “VMware has no specific announcements of any roadmap for applying these features in the mobile, embedded, ‘internet of things’ and other edge nodes in a growing range of enterprise virtual networks.”

The central idea behind all of these updates is to provide a new “digital foundation” that combines a consistent architecture and IT operations with intrinsic security to support applications and processes across a multitude of cloud and on-premises architectures, VMware officials said.

“While our customers’ needs and priorities stretch far and wide, we’re focused on driving innovations that will provide them with a digital foundation to meet their future IT needs while creating critical linkage that will help them get the most out of their existing IT investments,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, chief operating officer for products and cloud services.

Overall, Kobielus said, the announcements show that VMware is keen to keep strengthening its core platform and storage virtualization offerings.

“Today’s announcement of enhancements to vSphere, vSAN and vRealize addresses VMware customers’ requirements for continued enhancements in manageability, security and flexibility in its core platforms and tools, with a specific emphasis on ensuring that these features are consistently and easily applicable across virtualized software-defined data centers that span hybrid and multiclouds,” the analyst said.

VMware said the updates will become available later this year, by the end of its fiscal 2019 third quarter.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: VMware