Virtualization is an inexorable process under which applications become progressively more abstracted and independent from the underlying platforms on which their services execute.

It’s the foundation for software-defined data centers that span hybrid multiclouds. It enables flexible partitioning, aggregation and composition of compute, storage, memory and bandwidth within and across diverse clouds, clusters, servers and other nodes. As a best practice that cuts across all computing platforms, virtualization allows legacy assets to deliver value alongside the newest platforms for the remainder of their useful lives.

When moving their application assets up the stack into cloud-native computing, enterprises require a common virtualization toolchain for migrating their software-defined data centers into the public clouds that are absorbing more workloads. Recognizing this imperative, VMware Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. entered into a milestone partnership a year ago when they announced the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS.

This move gave VMware customers the option of running their apps in virtual machines in a fully managed hybrid environment inside a leading public cloud. It also provided AWS with bona fides for competing with the likes of Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and others in the battle for enterprise hybrid-cloud business opportunities.

In addition to steadily expanding the global footprint of VMware Cloud on AWS, the partners released a steady stream of follow-on enhancements over the past year to support robust cloud computing over a virtualized hybrid multicloud fabric:

• Full-stack big data analytics services: AWS and VMware expanded the scale, network connectivity and security capabilities of VMware Cloud on AWS to provide further support for the most resource-intensive applications such as Oracle, Oracle RAC, Microsoft SQL Server, Apache Spark and Hadoop.
• Nondisruptive application migration services: VMware launched the new VMware vSphere vMotion service, along with new L2 stretched networking features and AWS Direct Connect. This enables joint customers to migrate applications from on-premises VMware clusters into VMware on AWS without any disruptions to the application, and without having to make any changes to the network configuration. In addition, the new VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension add-on SaaS offering for VMware Cloud on AWS supports large-scale migration between on-premises environments running vSphere 5.0+ and VMware Cloud on AWS with no replatforming, retesting or change in tooling.
• Intelligent application troubleshooting services: VMware launched its Wavefront cloud service, which allows customers to visualize, provide alerts for and troubleshoot applications running on VMware Cloud on AWS. It provides an open application programming interface platform supporting more than 80 integrations for collecting time-series data, from application metrics collectors such as for Java, Ruby, Python and Go to service metrics collectors for MySQL, Pivotal, Kubernetes, AWS and more.
• Application protection services: VMware launched new high-availability features that protect applications against different types of failures — ranging from data center and availability zone outages to host and virtual-machine-level failures — when running VMware Cloud on AWS.
• Storage efficiency services: VMware made native VMware compression and deduplication available for VSANs running all-flash storage in a VMware Cloud on AWS.
• Workload migration services: VMware made vMotion available for migrating workloads between on-premises deployments and VMware Cloud on AWS, between hosts across clusters within a VMware Cloud on AWS, and between hosts in a stretched cluster across two AWS availability zones.
• Virtual desktop application deployment services: VMware made Horizon available for customers to deploy and run virtual desktops and applications on VMware Cloud on AWS. This allows customers to extend on-premises desktop services via the cloud without buying additional hardware. It also supports colocation of virtual desktops or published applications near latency-sensitive applications in VMware Cloud on AWS.
• DevOps services: VMware integrated its CloudFormation tools with Hashicorp’s Terraform DevOps offering to help customers automated and accelerate setup, configuration and management on software-defined data centers in VMware Cloud on AWS.
• Log analytics services: VMware introduced a new Log Intelligence service that provides customers with deeper insights into the operations of their VMware Cloud deployments on AWS.

As we look ahead to VMworld 2018, which is taking place Aug. 26-30 in Las Vegas, Wikibon expects VMware to deepen its integration with AWS and to expand its partnerships with other public cloud providers.

In this regard, one of the most telling, albeit low-profile, announcements, that VMware made this past year was to upgrade its Cost Insight service, enabling customers to assess the capacity requirements and costs of migrating workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS or to Microsoft Azure, as well as on VMware private cloud data centers.

VMware is very likely to announce a much deeper integration with Google Cloud Platform, as well as inclusion of GCP support in its Cost Insight service. Last year, Google announced a partnership with VMware to bring Kubernetes container orchestration on-premises with Pivotal Container Service.

That was just for starters. This year Google and VMware have accelerated the pace of partner initiatives. Recently they previewed a plugin that enables VMware users to provision Google Compute VMs and storage buckets to Google’s cloud, though it doesn’t support provisioning of VMware VMs to GCP.

Using the plugin, VMware users can configure Google VMs for specific application needs, including enabling access to Google Compute Engine’s Nvidia Tesla P100 graphics processing units, which can be used to accelerate the training of machine learning models. The plugin also supports other IT infrastructure setup, resource configuration and automated application delivery and container management provisioning capabilities from VMware into Google Cloud Platform.

VMware is also likely to expand its ongoing partnership with IBM Cloud, though in terms of providing a foothold with public cloud accounts, this would seem to be lower-priority for VMware than its relationships with AWS and Google.

Microsoft Azure is the wild card in VMware’s hybrid-cloud strategy. VMware has explicitly stated that it does not plan to support its virtualization offerings on Microsoft Azure. For its part, Microsoft — which already has the most substantial hybrid-cloud stack and server virtualization technology in the public cloud market — is clearly attempting to get VMware customers to defect to Azure. But it would be shocking if the vendors’ joint customers aren’t clamoring for them to integrate their respective offerings more closely, along the lines of the VMware-AWS partnership.

For VMware, there is no turning back from integration with third-party public clouds. But that raises the issue of how it can continue to hold its own against these deep-pocketed cloud providers, which boast enviable momentum in customer adoption, cross-portfolio product innovation and partner ecosystem growth.

VMware has been able to deflect these long-term strategic concerns by continuing to rack up strong bottom-line growth. But Wikibon is not alone in wondering whether it’s setting itself up for a rude awakening if its public cloud partners can ride new application virtualization technologies — most notably, containers and serverless fabrics — to sustained profitability, thereby eclipsing the VM-based platform virtualization that has been VMware’s ticket to profitability since Day One.

Is public cloud the “Hotel California” endgame that virtualized private clouds — upon which VMware has built a substantial business, most recently under majority shareholder Dell EMC — can never leave? Will VMware’s big customer accounts be usurped by its newly ascendant public cloud partners? Will VMware’s channel and ISV partners be able to sustain a healthy business if they’re eclipsed by the broader global partner ecosystems of the public-cloud partners? Will VMware be successful in deepening its own solution portfolio’s ability to provide a common development, security and management layer spanning its disparate public cloud partners and its own premises-based deployments?

VMware Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger recently spoke about the company’s vision, strategy and innovations on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s video studio:

Image: VMware