VMworld 2021: 8 Biggest VMware Product Launches

From new Tanzu innovation to security and edge computing, here are eight of the most important new product launches VMware unveiled today at VMworld 2021.

VMware’s Biggest News From VMworld 2021

VMware unveiled a slew of new products at VMworld 2021 today including new Tanzu, ransomware protection, multi-cloud services and joint Dell Technologies offerings.

For the second year in a row, VMware’s flagship annual conference VMworld was virtual due to the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic. However, that didn’t stop thousands of customers, channel partners and IT experts from attending virtually today to hear from CEO Raghu Raghuram and other VMware’s top executives about the new products being launched.

“The way I and Raghu think about the future of VMware is mirroring what we have done in the past, but in the future world of multi-cloud,” said VMware’s President Sumit Dhawan in an interview with CRN. “VMware has become this trusted foundation for our customers, for their private cloud and their mobility. … Now, customers are looking at VMware to extend that foundation to the world of public cloud and modern apps. That’s what our focus is.”

CRN breaks down the eight most important VMware product launches from VMworld 2021 today as well as a glimpse into some future VMware projects.

New Cross-Cloud Services

One of the biggest launches at VMworld 2021 is VMware’s new Cross-Cloud services, which is a group of integrated services providing customers the ability to build, run and secure applications across any cloud with flexibility and security.

“We have created a suite of services for customers in a modular fashion so that they can solve the problem of embracing multi-cloud for cloud native apps, enterprise apps and edge apps through a connected set of services. So that’s what cross cloud services are: giving the path for customers to multi cloud,” said VMware’s Sumit Dhawan (pictured).

VMware’s President said the average organization runs roughly 500 applications to drive their business which are distributed across clouds. This multi-cloud environment is more complex than anything before which is why VMware is giving customers a powerful combination of freedom and control of their multi-cloud environment with its new Cross-Cloud services. The services allows customers to pick and choose the services needed on the cloud to meet evolving business demands.

“Channel partners have this amazing opportunity to take all of these workloads and customers using our technology for private data center and mobile, to now take them and extend them to all of the multi cloud as well as modern apps,” said Dhawan. “It puts partners in a perfect position to capitalize on this significant growth that’s going to happen in the world of cloud as well as modernization using VMware through these Cross-Cloud services.”

There are five core building blocks to VMware’s new Cross-Cloud services: building and deploying cloud native applications; cloud infrastructure for operating and running enterprise apps; cloud management across clouds; security and networking; and digital workspace to empower the distributed workforce along with edge solutions.

“These are the five set of services that help our customers with one mission: multi cloud,” said Dhawan.

Dell Technologies Apex Cloud Service With VMware Cloud

With VMware and Dell Technologies continuing their tight innovation and go-to-market strategy, the two companies unveiled the new Dell Technologies Apex Cloud Services with VMware Cloud. The Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering allows customers to deploy pre-configured cloud instances in their data center or at an edge location or co-location facility.

The new Dell-managed solution combines its hyperconverged infrastructure, VxRail, with VMware’s compute, storage, and network virtualization capabilities. Dell’s Apex Cloud Services with VMware Cloud provides secure operations across multi-cloud environments and gives customers the ability to move workloads across clouds and scale resources quickly with predictable costs.

Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of product marketing at Dell Technologies, told CRN that the solution is built to deliver an outcome-based approach that customers enjoy in the public cloud.

“Customers want to have the flexibility to be able to move workloads between different clouds without having a lot of overhead and friction. They also want to be able to run both traditional applications as well as cloud native applications on the same platform,” said Dell’s Chhabra. “Apex Cloud Services with VMC (VMware Cloud) gives customers a consistent framework to work across different clouds and manage both their traditional and cloud native applications in the same solution.”

Businesses can deploy the solution in their data center, at an edge location or a colocation facility. Dell has preconfigured cloud instances on Apex to make it easier for customers to get started. Dell’s Apex Cloud Services with VMC also helps organizations safeguard their data, meet regulatory requirements and avoid cyber threats with built-in cyber resiliency.

Dell Technologies APEX Cloud Services with VMware Cloud will become generally available within the next few months. The infrastructure-as-a-Service offering allows.

Free Tanzu Community Edition

VMware lunched its free, new VMware Tanzu Community Edition that allows customers to run and manage Kubernetes-based containerized applications at no cost in multi-cloud environments.

“We want to make sure that customers can get the power of Tanzu easy. Because in the world of DevOps, customers like trying things out before they engage with the partners for rolling them out in the most complete fashion,” said VMware’s President.

VMware’s new Tanzu Community Edition is a free, easy to manage Kubernetes platform for learners and users. The open-source software distribution can be installed and configured in minutes on a local workstation or cloud of choice, and automates end-to-end application delivery with a complete platform for application developers, IT operators, and DevOps engineers.

Customers can quickly build a complete Kubernetes based platform customized to their needs, and run it in on a local workstation, in VMware vSphere, or in a public cloud with single node and multi-cluster configurations.

“Our services are already built on open source. So it’s open source distribution, but now is available for certain set of capabilities that customers can try out, and then start using and utilizing it,” said Dhawan.

Introducing VMware Edge

VMware has launched VMware Edge, a product portfolio that will enable organizations to run, manage, and better secure edge-native apps across multiple clouds, anywhere. VMware Edge brings together products to enable organizations to run, manage and better secure edge-native apps across multiple clouds.

The new VMware Edge Compute Stack is a purpose-built, integrated VM and container-based stack that will enable organizations to modernize and secure edge-native apps. VMware Edge Compute Stack will be available in Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise editions. VMware also has plans to develop a lightweight version of VMware Edge Compute Stack to provide an extremely thin edge for lightweight apps.

For example, VMware Edge Compute Stack is now integrated with Dell EMC’s hyperconverged VxRail D-Series that is optimized for edge deployments. Additionally, VMware Edge Compute Stack can run on top of Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SE350 Edge Servers.

Another new offering unveiled at VMworld is new capabilities to VMware SASE. The offer now combines SD-WAN capabilities with cloud-delivered security functions, including cloud web security, zero trust network access, and firewalling—all delivered as-a-service. VMware SASE is adding a new inline cloud access service broker (CASB) service to help IT gain more visibility and control over app access.

“A new type of workload is emerging – edge-native apps – that must run at the edge to perform as intended,” said Sanjay Uppal, VMware’s senior vice president and general manager of Service Provider and Edge in a statement. “AR/VR, connected vehicles, and immersive gaming are becoming mainstream. 5G has made the use of collaborative robots, drone fleets and digital twins a reality. VMware delivers a trusted foundation – a multi-cloud edge – to help organizations move forward in the new edge reality.”

Tanzu New Support for Nvidia AI Enterprise Software

This year, VMware and Nvidia announced and end-to-end artificial-intelligence (AI)-ready enterprise platform that includes the Nvidia AI Enterprise software suite which has been certified, optimized, and supported for VMware vSphere.

At VMworld, VMware unveiled that Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service, included in VMware vSphere with Tanzu, is now integrated with Nvidia AI Enterprise to help customers automate the delivery of containerized workloads and proactively manage apps in production. Customers can now trial their AI projects on Nvidia AI Enterprise with vSphere with Tanzu which lets IT operations teams to use their existing vSphere environment to deliver Kubernetes clusters to AI developer teams at a rapid pace.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Now Supports Nvidia GPUs In AWS and Azure

VMware says its delivering one of the most requested VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid features of all time—Nvidia GPU support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, supported in VMware vSphere, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Azure environments.

With the launch of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid version 1.4, developers can now create and manage the lifecycle of GPU-enabled clusters in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for AWS and Azure.

VMware Ups Fight Against Ransomware

With ransomware proving to be effective, pervasive and profitable for hackers, VMware announced new rapid recovery capabilities in the event ransomware gets through defenses.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery is an cost-effective DR-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution that enables more rapid recovery at scale so organizations are better positioned to avoid paying the ransom. Customers can utilize a deep history of immutable snapshots stored in an isolated cloud file system, instant VM power-on for iterative security evaluations, and powerful orchestration for highly automated testing, failover, and failback to recover end-to-end IT apps and data sets after a ransomware attack, VMware said.

Additionally, VMware Carbon Black Cloud can now be enabled with a simple switch in VMware vCenter, making protection from ransomware attacks simpler and faster to deploy. VMware said it now provides both advanced protection and rapid recovery from ransomware attacks.

New Capabilities To Tanzu Application Platform Beta

VMware is making available new capabilities to the Tanzu Application Platform Beta to deliver intrinsic security, supply chain choreography, service bindings and develop tooling including IDE plugins.

VMware said its Tanzu Application Platform delivers a “superior” development experience for enterprises building and deploying apps and APIs on any Kubernetes. It gets software teams to production faster and sustains them over time by automating source to production pipelines and coordinating the efforts of development and operations teams, according to Dhawan.

“Up until now, we have only offered Kubernetes operation services. We are extending our portfolio to now also offer something that goes all the way to the developers for a great experience,” said Dhawan.

Some of the top new capabilities include supply chain choreographs which allows app operators to create pre-approved paths to production for developers that integrate Kubernetes resources and existing toolchains.

VMware is also adding intrinsic cybersecurity features for signing, scanning and storing images along with a path to production. Additionally, operators can now specify how endpoints and credentials from data services are exposed to workloads in a portable and Kubernetes-native way.

A new source controller in the Tanzu Application Platform enables application developers to create or update workloads from local source code.

Dhawan said VMware is actively signing up customers for the Tanzu Application Platform Beta. “As soon as we’re comfortable that it’s ready, based on the feedback from customers, we plan to make it generally available,” he said.

A Look Into The Future Of VMware Cloud

At VMworld 2021 today, VMware also showcased additional R&D investments and innovations currently underway for VMware Cloud.

VMware said it’s working with Intel to deliver a solution that will uniquely help secure edge environments starting from the silicon and extending to devices and apps. The solution will create a direct link between the Intel vPro platform and VMware Workspace ONE to enable automated out-of-band maintenance that keeps PCs up to date on the latest security patches and infosec policies no matter where they are located or the state of the operating system.

VMware executives also spoke about Project Capitola, a software-defined memory implementation that will provide the best price-performance ratio for current and new applications by aggregating memory tiers across DRAM, PMEM, NVMe and other future technologies.

Another big initiative currently underway at VMware is Project Ensemble. Designed as a unified control plane for VMware Cloud, Project Ensemble will further improve operations by delivering a unified view across vRealize Cloud Management services.