Agility is the essence of the software-defined data center. As the longtime pacesetter in this market, VMware Inc. has built an agile solution portfolio that lets customers deploy virtual machines, containers and other virtualization technologies into a wide range of private, public, hybrid and multicloud configurations.

This week at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, VMware advanced its server, storage, network, cloud and desktop virtualization technologies in many innovative directions. To sustain its rapid growth, VMware made a wide range of product launches and other announcements that evolve its core virtualization technology and extend the benefits of its virtualization portfolio thoughout the public cloud, up the application stack and all the way out to the multicloud’s growing edge.

Here are the highlights from day one of VMworld:

Evolving its core virtualization technology

VMware recognizes that its flagship server-virtualization technology, vSphere, anchors its entire solution portfolio. Consequently, it continues to strengthen its ability to manage, secure and optimize software-defined data centers that deploy vSphere in diverse hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

In its day-one announcements, VMware integrated AppDefense with vSphere’s native security to simplify lockdown of applications, infrastructure, data and access across software-defined data centers. It announced that it is leveraging machine learning and behavioral analytics to ensure rollback of applications and infrastructure to the last “known good” virtual machines state in vSphere. And it added support for nondisruptive migration of active virtual machines between physical servers that run vSphere on Nvidia Corp. virtual graphics processing units.

VMware announced that its hybrid-cloud management suite, vRealize, now supports automated host-based workload placement. Workloads can be automatically moved both within and across vSphere clusters, as well in the cloud and on-premises, in accordance with customer policies around such factors as utilization, compliance and license cost. VMware has also added the ability to automate optimization of virtual machine performance, scaling of distributed workflows and provisioning of capacity across multicloud vSphere deployments.

Extending virtualization throughout the public cloud

VMware’s hybrid-cloud strategy depends on its partnerships with leading public cloud providers. A year ago, it entered into a milestone partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. In addition to steadily expanding the global footprint of VMware Cloud on AWS, the partners have released a steady stream of follow-on enhancements over the past year to support robust cloud computing over a virtualized hybrid multicloud fabric.

As highlighted in the day-one keynote by VMware Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger (pictured, left), the latest round of enhancements to the core VMware Cloud on AWS offering further demonstrate AWS’ commitment to the partnership. These include:

• Expansion of global footprint: VMware announced that VMware Cloud on AWS is now available in AWS’ Asia Pacific (Sydney) region.
• Growth in partner ecosystem: VMware announced that that 150 partners globally have achieved their VMware Cloud on AWS Solution Competency.
• Validation of third-party solutions: VMware announced that the number of solutions from VMware Technology Alliance Partners that have been tested and validated for VMware Cloud on AWS now stands at nearly 100 solutions.
• Improvement in service affordability: VMware announced a 50 percent cut in the entry-level price for VMware Cloud on AWS and now offers a smaller three-host minimum SDDC configuration as a starting point for production workloads.
• Increased pricing flexibility: VMware announced more fine-grained capacity-based pricing for vSphere. Customers running enterprise applications from Oracle and Microsoft can now specify just the number of CPU cores they will need. Furthermore, VMware will now provide customers with access to audit logs for VMware Cloud on AWS at no additional charge.
• Enhanced service functionality: VMware added integration between NSX and AWS Direct Connect to enable private, consistent connectivity between VMware workloads running on VMware Cloud on AWS and those running on-premises. It added the ability to automate cluster scaling on VMware Cloud on AWS. It also added more scalable storage options involving VMware vSAN on Amazon Elastic Block Storage. It added nondisruptive virtual-machine migration, as well as more granular application-centric security features.

VMware announced that it will soon allow users of VMware Cloud on AWS to use Amazon Relational Database Service to run enterprise databases on-premises. Available in coming months, Amazon RDS on VMware is a service that will make it easy for customers to set up, operate, and scale databases in VMware-based software-defined data centers and hybrid environments and also to migrate them to AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS.

It will automate database management regardless of where the database is deployed, enabling users to focus on developing and tuning their applications. Amazon RDS on VMware will support Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB databases.

Gelsinger discussed VMware’s support for running its platform virtualization tools in other public clouds, such as Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud. He announced enhancements to NSX-T Data Center that extend its multicloud networking, workload migration and security to more clouds and on-premises environments, as well as bare-metal and containerized computing platforms.

He also announced VMware’s intent to acquire CloudHealth Technologies, which provides tools for simplifying operations across multiple native public clouds, including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. It helps IT administrators to analyze and manage cloud cost, usage, security and performance centrally for native public clouds.

Also launched on day-one at VMworld 2018 was VMware Secure State. The service, currently in public beta, provides a cloud configuration security and compliance service that:

• Indexes application assets across hybrid and multiclouds running on VMware,
• Automates cloud configuration security and compliance monitoring;
• Identifies cloud-native vulnerabilities and threats;
• Tracking all changes to cloud infrastructure in real time;
• Providing fast notifications for object changes and impacted services; and
• Delivers on-demand compliance benchmark reports.

However, the lack of splashy announcements with any cloud partner other than AWS sent a clear message that VMware is pinning its hybrid and multicloud future primarily on this specific partnership.

Extending virtualization up the application stack

Kubernetes is the springboard for VMware’s attempts to grow its virtualization portfolio up the cloud-native stack into containerized applications.

In his keynote, Gelsinger underlined VMware’s commitment to cloud-native computing by stating that the best practice for running containers and Kubernetes is in VMs. This capability is supported in VMware’s Hybrid Connect solution. Gelsinger also declared that VMware is committed to supporting all industry Kubernetes distributions, though he offered no specific timeframe for this. Currently, the vendor’s vRealize tool can only drive management of Kubernetes clusters over vSphere deployments when used with Pivotal Container Service.

In terms of substantial new product announcements that take its virtualization portfolio further up the cloud-native stack, Gelsinger discussed newly available enhancements to Wavefront. This cloud-native monitoring and analytics platform give DevOps, developer and site reliability engineering teams instant insight into the performance of containerized applications across highly distributed Kubernetes deployments running on Pivotal Container Service.

The solution provides comprehensive analytics on Kubernetes deployments; ingests, analyzes, and visualizes metrics data from an environment running 100,000 containers; supports fast root-cause analysis for troubleshooting of containerized applications; and supports programmatic enforcement of predefined alerts for important Kubernetes cluster performance metrics. It supports quick-start of containerized applications from within Pivotal Container Service and enables developers to deliver serverless code with greater speed, accuracy and reliability.

VMWare also announced new cloud automation services that beef up its DevOps capabilities for all hypervisor, containerized, and microservices applications running on VMware Cloud on AWS, on native AWS and on Microsoft Azure. The new automation tools, all generally available, include:

• VMware Cloud Assembly: This offering unifies provisioning of applications across all clouds through declarative infrastructure as code, enabling IT and cloud operations teams to provision infrastructure and application code in line with DevOps principles.
• VMware Service Broker: This provides self-service access to multicloud infrastructure and application resources from a single catalog, enabling operations teams to govern resource access and enforce security, deployment and business policies across multicloud environments.
• VMware Code Stream: This automates the code and application release process, providing tools for application deployment, testing and troubleshooting.

With these announcements, VMware has significantly deepened its ability to scale and automate provisioning, monitoring, management, testing, analytics, troubleshooting and securing of all types of applications across hybrid and multiclouds.

Extending virtualization to the edge

VMware is placing huge importance on extending its software-defined data center portfolio to edge deployments in the Internet of Things, mobile, and embedded devices. In his keynote, Gelsinger announced that VMware is extending VMware Hybrid Cloud  beyond private and public clouds to fully integrate with edge nodes, in conjunction with VMware Cloud Foundation.

As it builds out its cloud-to-edge strategy, VMware is distinguishing between two types of edge devices and associated gateway hubs in its solution portfolio:

• Device edge: In VMware’s parlance, this is any edge gateway that is either extends the software-defined data center to “optimized for things” devices (and is managed through its Pulse IoT Center offering, which is now scalable up to 500 million devices) or to “optimized for people” devices (and is managed through its established Workspace ONE offering, for which VMware announced many feature enhancements.
• Compute edge: This refers to VMware’s “Project Dimension.” This newly announced initiative is developing a hyperconverged appliance that will extend all VMware virtualization technologies to edge nodes. In addition to the nodes, “Project Dimension” will include a VMware-managed hybrid-cloud control plane that runs on VMware Cloud Foundation and will be managed by VMware as a subscription service. Each edge appliance will be preconfigured with vSphere, vSAN and NSX SD-WAN software and will be built initially by a partnership of Dell and Lenovo.

Going forward, VMware is evolving it cloud-to-edge software-defined data center portfolio to make it more autonomously adaptive to changing workloads throughout a multicloud. To that end, it announced two strategic research and development projects in preview:

• “Project Magna”: This initiative is developing an AI-driven edge-to-edge virtualization environment. VMware Chief Technology Officer Ray O’Farrell (pictured, right) said it is building a “self-driving data center” that leverages machine learning in hundreds of IoT control points. Already, VMware has announced adaptive micro-segmentation, a feature of NSX and AppDefense, that uses machine learning to learn normal application behavior, uses the knowledge to lock down compute and network resource, and adapts to continuous change in the application by shrinking its attack surface nondisruptively.
• “Project Concord”: This is developing an open-source blockchain for cloud-to-edge trust infrastructure. According to O’Farrell, VMware is focusing the project on accelerating consensus algorithms to improve the performance and scalability of the technology.

For commentary on these and other announcements at VMworld 2018, check out the interviews on theCUBE, especially O’Farrell’s discussions of multicloud, edge, the AWS partnership and VMware Cloud Foundation:

Image: VMware/VMworld livestream