Kathy Gibson reports from VMworld in Barcelona – The world we live in is becoming increasingly liquid. The old rigid structures have melted and it’s become a dynamic, shape-shifting environment.
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, points out that the structures in the world are becoming more liquid. For instance, education is not about the classroom; work is not where you are but what you do; governments are being held accountable; and financial markets are changing.
The difference with the new world, Gelsinger says, is that competitors are new dynamics and rules; assets are not necessarily owned; innovation is happening very quickly; companies are going from millions to billions and have to be built to change. “This all changes the status quo: the way of doing things in the past is not the way to be successful in the future.”
Companies and leaders that win will be thoughtful, decisive and bold. “The brave will thrive in this new environment,” he says. Braver, he explains, is about understanding the risks, then making solid decisions and moving forward boldly.
Gelsinger cites examples that include Hertz bringing up 6 000 virtual desktops very quickly in 1 000 locations around the world, managed from two data centres.
There are opportunities for all ICT people to lead, he says. “Every business is looking to you as their most competent IT leader on their team. They are looking to you to lead the way,” he says. “This is your moment to go forward bravely.”
Among the challenges that need to be overcome to reach this goal, Gelsinger says, include the fact that silos are still a reality.
Traditional apps are still seen as versus cloud-native apps; it’s IT versus developers; on-premise versus off-premise; safe, secure and complaint versus instant, elastic and self-service.
“We see our role in making this ‘and’,” Gelsinger says. “In the brave new IT world, it’s about the power of ‘and’.”
In the new world, IT is fluid, secure, instant and offers choice, he adds. “It’s these characteristics that form the basis of innovation from VMware.”
He explains that the infrastructure is designed to enable app building and delivery.
The heart of the strategy is the software defined data centre (SDDC), enabled both on and off premise with hybrid cloud, extending to end user computing.
“We have made powerful progress on all three legs of the strategy, which together enable the SDDC,” Gelsinger says.
The SDDC embodies the vision of virtualising all aspects of the data centre: not only compute but networking, storage and management or automation that delivers services to the users.
Gelsinger points out that VMware is a leader in cloud management, Gelsinger says, with a significant margin that is increasing. Today the company has launched the vRealize Suite 6, a single unified management platform that operates across both physical and virtual worlds and into the cloud, available both on-premise and as a service.
The company also unveiled a major update of VMware vRealize Operation (formerly VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite), the new VMware vRealize Code Stream to enable DevOps teams to deliver frequent, reliable software releases, and the beta launch of VMware vRealize Air Compliance, a new addition to VMware’s family of cloud management software as a service (SaaS) offerings.
“CIOs and IT organisations are seeking greater agility without sacrificing security, efficiency and cost,” says Ramin Sayar, senior vice-president and GM: Cloud Management Business Unit at VMware. “IT infrastructure and development teams are being asked to account for managing multiple private and public clouds, incorporating newer frameworks such as OpenStack along with adopting continuous delivery of new and modern applications and DevOps processes. VMware vRealize Suite presents enterprises with a single solution to manage through and capitalize on the wealth of IT choices available to them with the requisite agility and control.”
To help IT support agile development and DevOps processes, VMware vRealize Code Stream will accelerate application releases and extend the agility provided by continuous integration to continuous delivery by enabling frequent, reliable software releases while reducing operational risks. The solution will automate the entire software release process and enforce governance across release stages. It will provide a single dashboard for end-to-end visibility of the release process across Dev and Ops teams. VMware vRealize Code Stream will integrate with build, continuous integration and source control tools such as Jenkins, Bamboo, Git, Subversion and others. Customers will be able to deploy application environments using VMware vRealize Automation starting, for example, with a public cloud development environment and later deploying in a secure, highly available production pod in a private cloud.
VMware vRealize Suite combines the capabilities of VMware’s cloud automation, cloud operations and cloud business management solutions into a single offering. It delivers a comprehensive and integrated management stack for automating the release and operational management of traditional and new cloud applications deployed on private and public clouds, multiple hypervisors, and physical infrastructure – all with a unified management experience. A shared service model simplifies common tasks, reduces the need to switch between management tools, and gives admins a powerful user experience.
VMware is advancing its cloud management platform with significant new and improved product capabilities including:
* VMware vRealize Operations 6.0 – Intelligent Operations from Applications to Storage – VMware vRealize Operations 6.0 will provide intelligent operations management across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures using predictive analytics and policy-based automation. VMware vRealize Operations 6.0 is a major product release featuring a new scale-out, resilient architecture that will be eight times more scalable than the previous release, and adapt to the needs of all customers from SMBs to global and distributed organizations. With an open and extensible platform, it will provide comprehensive visibility in a single console across applications, network and storage devices. The new release will introduce advanced analytics, smart alerts and problem detection capabilities to identify complex issues from multiple systems ahead of time, and suggest a resolution to the problem. Suggested resolutions include an embedded link to initiate policy-guided remediation enabling IT teams to address issues from a single console. VMware vRealize Operations 6.0 will also include new capacity planning and project management capabilities that extend beyond VMware vSphere to include physical and application-level metrics to better manage demand, available resources and service level agreements (SLAs).
* VMware vRealize Business 6.0 – Empowering IT with Cost and Quality Insights – VMware vRealize Business (formerly VMware IT Business Management Suite) provides transparency and control over the costs and quality of IT services enabling CIOs to align IT with the business. Building on recent enhanced cloud comparison capabilities, including VMware vCloud Air costing and the ability to manually add any service provider, VMware vRealize Business 6.0 will further empower infrastructure and operations teams with business management capabilities essential for managing a hybrid cloud. The new functionality includes pricing analysis, showback/chargeback and budgeting for infrastructure services out-of-the-box, delivering users an intuitive decision-making experience. Additionally, new releases of VMware vRealize Business 8.2 Advanced and Enterprises are being announced.
* VMware vRealize Automation™ 6.2 – Enhanced Platform Integration with vRealize Operations – VMware vRealize Automation (formerly VMware vCloud Automation Center) provides the agility businesses need by automating the delivery of IT services and applications. This latest product release will offer increased product integration and shared services with VMware vRealize Operations. The enhanced integration adds operational intelligence and analytics to optimize cloud lifecycle management. VMware vRealize Operations 6.2 will add visibility of service health badges and identification of idle machines in multi-vendor infrastructures. This will allow VMware vRealize Automation’s policy-driven workflows to verify if resources are still needed before reclaiming and reusing underutilized and idle capacity to improve resource usage and facilitate capital savings. Additionally, VMware vRealize Automation’s integration with VMware NSX will address a major problem — which is the ongoing management and provisioning of virtual networks and services such as load balancers and security policies. Blueprints will incorporate network and security policies tying them to applications whether for deployment, reinstantiation or migration. When an application is decommissioned, VMware vRealize Automation will reclaim network services and does away with security policies and firewall rules. Thus, admins will not be left wondering about the hundreds of firewall rules and security policies, many of which are detritus from long-dead applications.
* VMware vRealize Log Insight™ 2.5 – New Role-based Access Control Capabilities – Vmare vRealize Log Insight (formerly VMware vCenter Log Insight) delivers real-time log management featuring machine learning, high performance search and troubleshooting across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Enhanced integration between VMware vRealize Log Insight 2.5 and VMware vRealize Operations will enable organizations to combine and analyze both structured and unstructured data for end-to-end operations management to help them improve overall IT performance and avert disruptions. This latest release will introduce role-based access control capabilities that will enable customers to control access to log data based on organizational function.
VMware has also announced the beta of VMware vRealize Air Compliance, the industry’s first SaaS compliance service built for the software-defined data center. With VMware vRealize Air Compliance, customers can be up and running within minutes assessing their VMware vSphere® environment against a variety of security and regulatory requirements including the vSphere Hardening Guide and HIPPA/HITECH guidelines for the Healthcare industry. With continuous compliance scans, customers can quickly address their configuration compliance challenges with automated compliance scorecards that provide real-time information and alerts on non-compliant changes all the way up to the user level. This new offering will provide all the flexibility customers need to enable the security of their on-premises and public cloud environments based on vSphere infrastructure.
