VMware Inc. will kick off its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco today with a slew of announcements aimed at positioning itself as the company everyone wants to partner with for hybrid cloud management.

In addition to new versions of its operations and automation suites for hybrid cloud, the company will deepen its integration with server technology from parent Dell Technologies Inc. as well as Dell rival Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. while also rolling out new tools to help customers migrate more easily to the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud.

In press briefings last week, VMware executives emphasized the need customers have for platform consistency as they try to harmonize silos of cloud and on-premises applications that have sprouted up in recent years while preparing for an unprecedented and onslaught of new applications.

“We believe there will be as many applications deployed in next five years as in last 40,” said VMware Chief Technology Officer Kit Colbert, “and they’ll be more complex and more diverse.”

“We see a lot of customers reinventing this wheel of how to manage at scale,” added Purnima Padmanabhan, vice president of product management in VMware’s cloud management business unit. “VMware has the resources to solve that problem at scale for all customers.” Investing in consistent operations typically gives customers a more than 300% return on investment, she said.

Shock and awe

VMware is using shock-and-awe statistics to underscore its reach in cloud infrastructure between its own installations and partnerships with major cloud providers and independent software vendors. The company claims it now supports more than 70 million total IT workloads and more than 10 million workloads in the cloud. The network of partners building on top of VMware’s core technology now numbers more than 4,300.

Underscoring its intention to be the grow its influence through partnerships, VMware is strengthening integration with hardware from both Dell and HPE and also offering more flexible delivery options.

VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, which was announced earlier this year, combines VMware’s vSphere virtualization, vSAN storage manager and NSX network virtualization software with Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure delivered as a fully managed service.

“You specify a street address and we’ll deliver the hardware, connect to a VMware cloud and manage it for the customer the same way we do it with VMware on AWS,” Colbert said. The companies also will collaborate on a new disaster-recovery-as-a-service offering based on VMware’s Cloud on AWS compatibility layer.

VMware is also partnering with HPE on technology that will deliver VMware’s Cloud Foundation as a service on top of HPE’s Synergy platform and GreenLake composable infrastructure. The combination provides customers with what HPE said is a fully integrated and managed hybrid cloud environment with consumption-based pricing that requires customers to pay only for what they use. The offering is fully supported by HPE to customer-defined service levels.

Synergy enables dynamic resource allocation and GreenLake provides for metering and capacity management. Cloud Foundation Is VMware’s integrated hybrid cloud stack. Customers can also use HPE’s Right Mix Advisor to identify where to deploy workloads and applications as well to aid in migration.

Customers using a combination of GreenLake and Synergy typically see a 30% reduction in total cost of ownership and 40% savings on infrastructure costs from improved hardware efficiencies and consumption-based pricing, said Paul Miller, vice president of global marketing for the software-defined and cloud group at HPE. “This enables customers with an alternative to cloudifying their apps and getting all their benefits but without a lot of re-platforming,” he said.

The model is similar to that provided by Amazon in its as-yet-unreleased Outposts on-premises offering, but a major difference is that “With Outposts, you have to put your stack in their model, whereas GreenLake wraps around your existing environment,” Miller said. “It’s your cloud, not their cloud.”

Hybrid cloud refresh

On the hybrid cloud front, VMware is adding new capabilities for what it calls “self-driving” hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure operations as well as multicloud monitoring in vRealize Operations 8.0. The aim is to help customers optimize performance by running their own infrastructure like a public cloud. A companion product, vRealize Automation 8.0, is getting performance and availability improvements along with improved ease-of-use.

A new service called CloudHealth Hybrid extends the optimization technology VMware picked up with last year’s acquisition of CloudHealth Technologies Inc. to the hybrid cloud. Customers can use the reports the software generates to optimize cloud infrastructure for each workload as well as to make more informed migration decisions. The software also can be configured to trigger notifications when policies are violated, a feature that VMware said helps IT organizations get a better handle on “shadow IT” operations.

The Wavefront by VMware cloud analytics suite is getting what Padmanabhan called “4D observability” that folds time elements into visualizations for faster correlations and fine-grained alerting.

VMware is also joining the application store craze with Cloud Marketplace, a curated library of products from the company and third parties. The marketplace is now available for VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud Provider Partners and includes hundreds of open-source applications packaged by Bitnami Inc., the open-source integration vendor VMware acquired earlier this year

In addition, VMware is announcing enhancements to its Skyline operational analytics software that include more proactive support features like automated software compatibility checks and automated log bundle upload for its Horizon virtual desktop software.

VMware Cloud on AWS, the product of the three-year-old partnership between the one-time rivals, is getting a new release focused on migration and workload modernization. New capabilities in VMware’s HCX application mobility platform enable simpler migration and better interconnectivity between VMware Cloud on AWS software-defined data centers running in different AWS regions and improved storage scaling.

Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman of SiliconANGLE sister market research company Wikibon shared their analysis of the upcoming VMworld 2019 event and reflected their 10 years of coverage of the event on theCUBE in this video:

Photo: VMware