UPDATED 08:00 EDT / SEPTEMBER 29 2020

CLOUD

At VMworld, distributed data center project leads cavalcade of new VMware products

Seeking to underscore its aim to be the nonpartisan mediator of the multicloud, VMware Inc. today opened its virtual VMworld 2020 conference with a cavalcade of announcements and partnerships that blur the line between on-premises and cloud computing.

Perhaps the most interesting announcement isn’t a product at all, but a new initiative called Project Monterey that’s intended to break down walls between bare-metal, on-premises and cloud infrastructure. It uses SmartNICs – or network interface cards equipped with an Arm microprocessor  – to enable customers to shift processing workloads around between servers without taxing CPUs.

VMware is partnering with Intel Corp., Nvidia Corp. and Pensando Systems Inc. on hardware for the project. It said it has commitments from Dell Technologies Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Lenovo Group Ltd. to deliver integrated systems that use it.

“This is the next big set of changes we’re making not only to our platform but to the ecosystem,” Rajiv Ramaswami, chief operating officer of products and cloud services, said in a press briefing. Host CPUs aren’t able to use all the capacity in a data center or server room because of network constraints, he said. SmartNICs offload functions such as parceling out tasks to graphics or data processing units and manage storage and networking capacity “dynamically so that you have access to all the elements,” Ramaswami said. The result, utilizing all bandwidth, is what he termed a “massive increase in performance.”

Project Monterey is emblematic of a recent trend toward incorporating purpose-built hardware into the computing stack, said Paul Delory, a Gartner Inc. research director. “You build a subsystem with its own dedicated processor and memory that is highly optimized for one specific function; then your CPU can subcontract that function to your dedicated hardware,” he said. “You get higher performance because the optimized subsystem is better at this one particular task and it doesn’t have to context-switch.”

VMware said it will rebuild its Cloud Foundation hybrid cloud platform to support bare-metal servers and enable server resources to be “disaggregated” so that an application running on one physical server can consume hardware accelerator resources such as field-programmable gate arrays from other physical servers using application program interfaces or policies.

The SmartNICs will run ESXi, VMware’s bare-metal hypervisor, enabling servers without ESXi installed to access network services. “There was a lot of head-scratching when VMware announced support for running ESXi on Arm, but they’re reaping one of the benefits here,” Delory said.

Each SmartNIC can also run its own firewall, enabling thousands of application-specific firewalls to be deployed and tuned to protect the particular services that make up the application. Project Monterey is a technology preview and no availability has been announced.

‘Any, any, any’

“Our strategy for the last three to four years has been what we call ‘any, any, any,’” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer of products and services at the virtualization giant. “Our role is to help build, manage, run, connect and protect apps running on any cloud and being delivered to any device.”

VMware’s commitment to multicloud will be evident in a range of enhanced services developed in partnership with the three largest cloud companies as well as Oracle Corp. They include Amazon Web Services Inc. support for VMware’s Tanzu application modernization portfolio, enhancements to VMware’s HCX application mobility platform on AWS and broadened support for vRealize cloud management services. AWS is also the first to get VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, a service that protects on-premises vSphere workloads.

Users of Microsoft Corp.’s Azure platform are getting an integrated management console that gives them the flexibility to use VMware tools or native Azure capabilities. Users of Google LLC’s cloud and Oracle Cloud are also getting support for Tanzu on a preview basis.

Tanzu, which VMware recently declared has “put to bed the debate about containers versus virtual machines,” enables applications to run in virtual machines or containers interchangeably, even on the same physical server. Tanzu is now “basically embedded into every vSphere instance our customers are using,” Raghuram said.

The company also pledged enhancements to its Virtual Cloud Network, which is not a product as much as a vision, that are intended to make the on-premises virtualization experience look more like a public cloud. The company said it will add more cloud-like automation, scale and resiliency as well as predictive analytics and support for larger global deployments.

In addition, it intends to double the size of networks that can be managed with NSX Federation, add API-driven routing and multicasting, and support Terraform Providers. Those are plugins that are used to manage software-defined infrastructure with Hashicorp’s Terraform platform.

The Virtual Cloud Network will also be extended with the addition of Tanzu Service Mesh powered by NSX and support for Project Antrea, an open-source networking and security projects for Kubernetes clusters. Security will be improved by the forthcoming ability of NSX to run on selected SmartNICs.

Carbon Black everywhere

On the security front, VMware is continuing to grow the security footprint it acquired with the purchase of Carbon Black Inc. a year ago. It’s unveiling a new service called Carbon Black Cloud Workload that combines prioritized vulnerability reporting and workload behavioral monitoring with antivirus protection and endpoint detection and response.

The company said its approach essentially builds security into the virtual fabric. A six-month free trial is being offered to all current vSphere 6.5 and VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 customers.

Finally, the company’s Future-Ready Workforce endpoint management system is getting secure access service edge capabilities. SASE is an increasingly popular approach to security that combines wide-area network capabilities with security functions such as zero-trust security.

VMware said it will combine its global software defined wide-area network presence with zero-trust network access a secure Web Gateway, cloud access service broker and native remote browser isolation capabilities. A stateful layer 7 firewall will also be integrated into the platform.

The new service is specifically being targeted at information technology organizations that will need to support large remote workforces for the long term. “It doesn’t matter where users are working from,” Ramaswami said. “We are able to take their traffic, serve it into one of the 150 points of presence we operate and deliver a full suite of networking and security services.”

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE

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