Virtualization News
VMworld 2020’s 15 Biggest Product Announcements
Mark Haranas
VMware unleashed a slew of new products, services and partnerships at VMworld 2020 Tuesday. CRN breaks down the 15 most important announcements.
New VMware Products And Services Launched At VMworld
Thousands of people from across the globe are expected to attend VMware’s first-ever virtual VMworld 2020 this week, providing channel partners, customers and attendees a general pass free of charge to VMware’s flagship annual conference.
At VMworld Tuesday, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based virtualization and software superstar unleashed dozens of new products, services, offerings and technology integrations—from the new VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload and Tanzu support for VMware Cloud on AWS, to a slew of new work-from-home - and cybersecurity offerings.
“Amid global disruption, the key to survival for many companies has meant an accelerated shift to the cloud and, ultimately, bolting on security products in their data centers,” said Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer, customer operations, for VMware in a statement. “But legacy security systems are no longer sufficient for organizations that are using the cloud as part of their computing infrastructure. It’s time to rethink security for the cloud. Organizations need protection at the workload level, not just at the endpoint.”
CRN breaks down the 15 most important announcements at VMworld 2020 Tuesday.
VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload
In one the biggest announcements at VMworld 2020, VMware launched the VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload, which provides advanced protection for securing modern workloads to reduce the attack surface and strengthen security posture.
The new offering combines prioritized vulnerability reporting and foundational workload hardening with prevention, detection and response capabilities to protect workloads running in virtualized, private and hybrid cloud environments, said VMware.
Tightly integrated with vSphere, VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload provides agentless security that cuts installation and management overhead and consolidates the collection of telemetry for multiple workload security use cases. The unified offering enables security and infrastructure teams to automatically secure new and existing workloads at every point in the security life cycle, while simplifying operations and consolidating the IT and security stack.
VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload will become generally available in November.
Six-Month Free Trial
VMware said customers can experience the new offering with a six-month unlimited free trial of VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload Essentials, available for all current vSphere 6.5 and VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 customers.
Tanzu Support For VMware Cloud On AWS
As momentum surges for VMware Cloud on AWS, the hybrid cloud offering is getting taken to the next level with the unveiling Tuesday of Tanzu support for VMware Cloud on AWS. Tanzu is VMware’s portfolio of Kubernetes products and services for modernizing applications and infrastructure.
Support for VMware Tanzu will centralize operations and management of Kubernetes clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS.
As of August, total VMs are up 140 percent and the total number of hosts up 130 percent year over year on VMware Cloud on AWS. Over 600 channel partners across the globe have achieved a VMware Cloud on AWS service competency.
There are currently more than 300 certified or validated technology offerings available to VMware Cloud on AWS customers.
“Amazon is now scaling their dedicated sales force [around VMware Cloud on AWS],” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger during Citi’s recent 2020 Global Technology Virtual Conference. “So we have a dedicated sales force, Amazon has a dedicated sales force, and they’re now partnering at scale. I would say this is really starting to generate shared momentum in the marketplace.”
VMware Edge Network Intelligence
In a move to boost its edge networking automation capabilities, VMware has leveraged new technology acquired this year from network analytics specialist Nyansa.
The new VMware Edge Network Intelligence is an AIOps offering based Nyansa technology that provides automation and actionable intelligence, which helps ensure that users and IoT devices on campus, in branches, or in the home get the network performance needed to support applications.
VMware Edge Network Intelligence is part of VMware’s broader Virtual Cloud Network aimed at helping customers create a modern network that supports current and future business initiatives. VMware said its Virtual Cloud Network is “the only complete Layer 2-7 virtual networking solution” in the world. It delivers and distributes all networking services in software over a diverse set of underlay transport including broadband, 4G/LTE, MPLS, dedicated internet access and 5G.
VMware Edge Network Intelligence will be generally available in VMware’s third quarter fiscal year 2021, which ends Oct. 30, 2020.
VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention
VMware took the wraps off VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention, which combines NSX Distributed IDS/IPS with advanced malware detection and AI-powered network traffic analysis (NTA) acquired from Lastline. In June, VMware acquired anti-malware research pioneer Lastline for an undisclosed amount. Lastline was purchased to help VMware better detect and contain sophisticated network threats before they disrupt business.
Lastline’s AI-powered NTA capabilities use unsupervised and supervised machine-learning models to accurately identify threats and minimize false positives compared with other network traffic analysis tools. VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention delivers an “industry-first” ability to apply virtual patches at every workload—something traditionally only implemented at the perimeter—enabling more effective response to sophisticated threats before they disrupt business, said VMware.
VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention will be generally available in VMware’s third quarter fiscal year 2021, which ends Oct. 30, 2020.
VMware vRealize AI Cloud
Formerly known as Project Magna, VMware unveiled vRealize AI Cloud, which will become generally available within the next few weeks.
VMware vRealize AI Cloud is an intelligent, self-tuning cloud service specialized for application performance optimization. VMware said it combines “near-real-time and historical observability with reinforcement learning” to continuously adapt VMware cloud infrastructure to the changing needs of application workloads. VMware vRealize AI Cloud helps ensure service-level agreements are met while enabling business agility as customers scale and migrate workloads across different IT environments.
At launch, vRealize AI Cloud will support VMware vSAN and will be extended to other VMware offerings and application optimization use cases in the future. The offering with VMware vSAN support will become generally available in VMware’s third quarter fiscal year 2021, which ends Oct. 30, 2020.
VMware Container Networking With Antrea
Last year, VMware launched Project Antrea, an open-source networking and security project for Kubernetes clusters, aiming to provide an open and flexible network and security offering for Kubernetes. Project Antrea enables Kubernetes networking and security wherever Kubernetes runs including on-premises vSphere, public clouds and at the edge.
At VMworld Tuesday, VMware launched its new VMware Container Networking with Antrea, a commercial offering consisting of signed images and binaries and full support for Project Antrea. VMware Container Networking with Antrea will be included in VMware NSX-T, vSphere 7 with Tanzu, and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Applications running on Kubernetes clusters using Antrea as the Container Networking Interface (CNI) can be discovered, connected and protected by Tanzu Service Mesh.
Cloud Web Security Service
With its objective to provide best-in-class web security offerings, VMware unveiled the VMware Cloud Web Security service.
The service integrates Mountain View, Calif.-based Menlo Security’s secure web gateway, cloud access service broker, and remote browser isolation capabilities natively into the VMware Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution. VMware’s SASE Platform converges cloud networking, cloud security and zero-trust network access with best-in-class web security.
The new VMware Cloud Web Security will be sold and supported by VMware, with a single management interface and integrated back-end operations, offering customers of all sizes an easy-to-deploy offering.
VMware Cloud Web Security is expected to be available in VMware’s fiscal first quarter of fiscal year 2022.
NSX Firewall as a Service
Although not expected to be available until next year, VMware said it will be launching a next-generation Firewall-as-a-Service offering targeting the new remote workforce.
The VMware NSX Firewall is a stateful Layer 7 firewall that will be integrated into the VMware SASE platform for cloud-delivered Firewall as a Service in both single-tenant and multitenant deployment options. This complements the firewall capabilities of the existing VMware SD-WAN offering today. The VMware SASE Platform is a cloud-first offering that delivers application quality assurance, intrinsic security, and operational simplicity that VMware said is ideal for organizations that are supporting a work-from-anywhere workforce.
NSX Firewall as-a-Service for the VMware SASE Platform is expected to be available in fiscal year 2022.
Workspace Security Remote
One the security front, VMware has now made generally available its VMware Workspace Security Remote offering aimed at the new work-from-home workforce that has emerged from the coronavirus pandemic.
The VMware Workspace Security Remote cybersecurity offering combines unified endpoint management (UEM), endpoint security, and remote IT support into an integrated offering to better manage and protect Mac and Windows 10 devices. While InfoSec teams focus on preventing, detecting and responding to threats, IT teams ensure broader compliance and help to operationalize security updates. VMware said Workspace Security Remote brings the two teams, technologies and consoles closer together to enhance overall device health, provide zero-trust access and efficiently automate threat response.
Workspace Security VDI
In another move to help organizations safely adapt to the new remote workforce stemming from COVID-19, VMware has integrated VMware Horizon and VMware Carbon Black Cloud into a single unified offering to help security and IT teams deliver highly secure virtual desktops and applications.
With virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) on the rise as more employees work from home, VMware’s Workspace Security VDI goes beyond legacy offerings as it uniquely integrates Carbon Black technology directly into the VMware vSphere Hypervisor and VMtools. VMware said Workspace Security VDI delivers an agentless approach with improved anti-tamper capabilities, audit and remediation, and uses behavioral detection to protect against ransomware and file less malware.
Workspace Security VDI is now generally available.
One-Click Integration With Zscaler
VMware and Zscaler, a San Jose, Calif.-based cloud security specialist, are introducing new integration around end-to-end visibility and protection for distributed workforces.
VMware said new one-click integrations will enable joint customers to stop zero-day threats from impacting endpoints and enable true zero-trust conditional access to internal applications.
The flexible prevention policies and endpoint response actions of VMware Carbon Black combined with Zscaler’s advanced threat protection, sandboxing, secure private application access, and visibility into assets provide an endpoint-to-cloud solution that identifies risk across any environment. In addition, the joint offering prevents those risks from impacting endpoints, enables zero-trust conditional access to internal applications, and automatically responds in real time to any activity found to be malicious.
Zscaler has been on an acquisition spree this year, acquiring cloud security posture management startup Cloudneeti as well as Edgewise Networks.
Tanzu Partnership With GitLab
At VMworld Tuesday, VMware unveiled a partnership with GitLab, a DevOps platform built as a single application for all stages of the DevOps life cycle.
GitLab said it enables product, development, quality assurance, security and operations teams to work concurrently on the same project, providing a single data store, one user interface, and one permission model across the DevOps life cycle. This allows teams to significantly reduce cycle times through more efficient collaboration and enhanced focus.
VMware said both companies are both committed to uniting application developers and operations teams around the shared goal of fast and secure release cycles. In addition, GitLab with VMware Tanzu helps customers streamline the development pipeline as well as consistently get to production faster.
Carbon Black Workload For Kubernetes
VMware said Kubernetes technology will be injected into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload before the end of the year.
Carbon Black Cloud Workload will introduce expanded offerings later this year including a new Carbon Black Cloud module for hardening and securing Kubernetes workloads. The new capabilities will give security teams governance policy and control of Kubernetes environments.
VMware acquired Carbon Black last year for approximately $2.1 billion.
The Carbon Black Cloud module for hardening and securing Kubernetes workloads is expected to be available in December 2020. The VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload will be available in November.
New Versions Of NSX-T, vRealize Network Insight
VMware launched new versions of its networking data center product NSX-T as well as software-defined networking and security offering vRealize Network Insight.
VMware’s new NSX-T version 3.1 supports larger-scale global deployments and disaster recovery use cases and automated deployment workflows. VMware will double the scale of NSX Federation, add new API-driven advanced routing and multicast capabilities, and offer Terraform Provider support.
The VMware vRealize Network Insight version 6.0 brings new assurance and verification capabilities as well as expanded VMware SD-WAN visibility. The updates to Network Insight version 6.0 enable better planning for virtual and physical networks, improved network uptime and resiliency, faster troubleshooting and proactive identification of potential network problems based on intent. In addition, it will be more effective in achieving service-level agreements.
VMware NSX-T 3.1 and vRealize Network Insight 6.0 are expected to be available in VMware’s third quarter fiscal year 2021, which ends Oct. 30, 2020.
VMware vRealize Cloud Universal
At VMworld 2020, VMware launched several new cloud management innovations including its hybrid subscription solution vRealize Cloud Universal.
VMware vRealize Cloud Universal combines SaaS and on-premises management software into a single subscription license, enabling customers to use either consumption model interchangeably without the need to repurchase different licenses to support each option.
The offering includes VMware’s new vRealize AI Cloud and other cloud-first capabilities across operations and automation. These include federation capabilities for a consistent multi-cloud management experience across deployments and VMware Skyline integration, which enables proactive issue avoidance, troubleshooting and automated workflows in a unified management and support experience.
VMware vRealize Cloud Universal is now generally available.
