Cloud

VMworld 2017: VMware Unveils New Services to Help Manage Hybrid Clouds

VMware rolled out new security, networking and analytics tools to help companies oversee their applications across a wide range of cloud environments.

Phil Goldstein

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Phil Goldstein is a former web editor of the CDW family of tech magazines and a veteran technology journalist. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their animals: a dog named Brenna, and two cats, Grady and Princess.

Last year, VMware used its VMworld 2016 conference to declare that it would run a cross-cloud architecture for businesses with apps in private and multiple public cloud environments. A year later, VMware is furthering its hybrid cloud strategy with a host of new services to help companies better manage their multiple clouds.

On Monday at the VMworld 2017 conference in Las Vegas, the company rolled out six new services aimed at making it easier for businesses to run, manage and secure apps across virtually any cloud environment.

“The essence of the VMware strategy is enabling businesses to create and deliver apps for their businesses,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said during the opening keynote of the conference.

VMware wants to give businesses consistent infrastructure across clouds, and consistent operational environments across any cloud, Gelsinger said. The company relies on a rich network of cloud service provider partners, and wants to increase IT agility while reducing complexity and risk, he said.

“Even though we’d love if everyone built to our stack, we realize that we have an opportunity to respond to customers’ desires and uniquely enable experiences across all clouds,” Gelsinger said.

“Customers are accelerating digital transformation by deploying applications across clouds, with upwards of two-thirds of enterprises deploying applications on three or more clouds today,” said Raghu Raghuram, VMware’s COO for products and cloud services, in a statement released today. “VMware Cloud brings a consistent operating model, enterprise control, and investment protection for IT resources and skillsets to a multi-cloud world. With these new services, we are preserving developer agility and freedom to drive innovation.”

The goal is to help businesses run cloud apps in a consistent way, whether they are in a company data center, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM cloud or any combination of the above.

“We can act as cloud Switzerland,” Nick King, VMware’s vice president of cloud product marketing, told Data Center Knowledge.

VMware Unveils New Cross-Cloud Services

VMware’s new cloud services are intended to give businesses a unified approach to “gain end-to-end visibility into cloud usage, costs, network traffic, metrics monitoring, and analytics, and deliver consistent security across public clouds and on-premises environments,” according to a company statement.

A key goal is to help IT teams manage and secure apps across their cloud environments, and thus give them more flexibility, agility and control.

Erik Frieberg, VMware’s senior vice president of product and portfolio marketing, told reporters that companies need to look at the apps they use to run their business and decide what to do with them. Most don’t have a hybrid or on-premises strategy, they simply have a cloud strategy, he said. They might keep an app on-premises, replatform the app, run it in Infrastructure as a Service, or rebuild it natively in the cloud.

VMware wants to provide a consistent application infrastructure, Frieberg said, that allows companies to take apps and extend them to public cloud environments. VMware is betting that its new cloud services can do all of that in a secure fashion. The new services include:

AppDefense, a data center endpoint security solution that protects apps by embedding application control and threat detection and response capabilities into the VMware vSphere environments in which apps and data live. The solution, which VMware has been working on for nearly three years, leverages virtualization to improve app security, according to Tom Corn, senior vice president of security products at VMware.
The service sees which apps are running in cloud environments, as well as all virtual machines used to run the apps, and uses machine learning to detect their “intent,” or what they are supposed to be doing. It then monitors what is actually running to see if it matches what is supposed to be happening and detects anomalies in real time. If the app is not doing what it is supposed to do, the service can then respond by reimaging or quarantining the VMs, or perform whatever incident response a company wants to deploy.
Cost Insight is a cost monitoring and optimization service for public and private clouds that helps IT teams analyze cloud expenditures, find savings and communicate the cost of cloud services to the business.
Discovery is an automated inventory service that improves cloud visibility and helps reduce shadow IT by bringing together inventory information and cloud accounts from multiple clouds, allowing IT teams to easily search for and identify workloads the company has deployed.
Network Insight is a network and security analysis service that is purpose-built for public clouds and software-defined data centers. The service gives IT teams “comprehensive network visibility and granular understanding of traffic flows to enable cloud security planning and network troubleshooting,” according to VMware.
NSX Cloud offers consistent networking and security for applications running in multiple private and public clouds, via a single management console and common application programming interface. IT teams can define a microsegmentation security policy once and then apply it to application workloads running anywhere in a cloud — in virtual networks, regions or availability zones — and across multiple clouds.
Wavefront is a metrics monitoring and analytics platform that handles the high-scale requirements of modern cloud-native applications. The tool can help DevOps teams detect performance anomalies while enabling high availability of key cloud services, according to VMware.