VMware Inc. is doing a lot of cloud-on-premises cross-pollination these days. Its research and development toils in NSX virtualized networking and an software-defined wide area network acquisition are giving the company steam to iron out the kinks of running workloads across hybrid environments.

“People just want that cloud experience, whether they do it at the edge or even on-prem,” said Michael Adams (pictured, right), senior director of cloud platform product marketing at VMware Inc.

Adams and Mark Lohmeyer (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Alan Cohen (@ascohen), tech advisor and investor, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed how VMware and partners are paving an easier path to hybrid cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Core, cloud and edge in a bubbling cauldron

VMware just announced that it will work with partner Amazon Web Services Inc. to bring the latter’s industry-leading Relational Database Service to vSphere on-prem. Other recent news from the company runs down the same vein. Customers may want or need on-prem or edge data centers for a host of reasons; but they don’t want to miss out on cloud agility and flexibility, so VMware’s fusing the two, largely with the help of NSX virtualized networking.

Over the past year, there have been five new releases of VMware Cloud on AWS. The offering brings the full software-defined stack into the AWS cloud and does away with much heavy lifting of the cloud migrations of yore, according to Lohmeyer. In the past, “You’ve got to platform the application; you might have to change your networking infrastructure; you might have to change your storage infrastructure. That process could take years,” he said.

There is zero replatforming with VMware on AWS, Lohmeyer pointed out. “We have customers that have moved thousands of workloads in a few weeks,” he stated.

VMware has augmented its Hybrid Cloud Extension with built-in WAN optimization. It “allows you to create a network that spans your on-prem environment to the public cloud,” Lohmeyer said.

Through the newly announced Project Dimension, VMware patches and manages edge infrastructure (which may run at hospitals, retail locations, or in self-driving cars) for customers. “We deal with this all the time where people don’t have IT capability at certain locations,” Adams said. “And so this is a perfect solution to work with our partners and bring that to life for people that are really investing in the edge.” 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored coverage of VMworld, and some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE