VMware today advanced its hybrid cloud strategy by making a series of updates to existing offerings, including the CloudHealth by VMware software-as-a-service (SaaS) application for managing and optimizing cloud applications, which VMware acquired last summer.
In addition, VMware Cloud on AWS is now available in data centers operated by Amazon Web Services in Canada, Paris and Singapore, the company noted. VMware also announced that the latest version of VMware Cloud Foundation—which provides and automatically updates all the VMware compute, storage and networking software required to build a cloud—has been optimized to deploy VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software, and will available on Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure in April.
New capabilities being added to CloudHealth by VMware include enhanced multi-cloud reporting, multidimensional reporting and workspaces reporting.
The CloudHealth platform also is now integrated with the Wavefront by VMware cloud analytics and monitoring platform, enabling users of CloudHealth to employ Wavefront metrics to rightsize and optimize applications running on multiple cloud applications as part of their DevOps practices.
A future update to the CloudHealth platform will add enhanced amortization as well as support for convertible Reserved Instance (RI) exchanger automation, container cluster visibility and cross-family rightsizing for Amazon EC2, according to the company.
Finally, VMware announced it is making available version 9.7 of VMware vCloud Director to cloud service providers. This offering provides a single pane of glass through which multiple VMware environments can be managed regardless of whether they are deployed on-premises or in the cloud. The latest version of VMware vCloud Director adds support for version 3.0 of VMware Cloud Availability, which unifies onboarding, migration and disaster recovery services between multi-tenant clouds. VMware vCloud Director is only available to cloud service providers, but Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager for the cloud provider software business unit for VMware, said VMware and its cloud service provider partners plan to make available a software-defined data center (SDDC)-as-a-service offering through which they will manage deployments of VMware from the edge to the cloud on behalf of IT organizations.
VMware also revealed there are now more than 60 partners building or delivering managed service offerings for VMware Cloud on AWS, and more than 280 partners have achieved the VMware Cloud on AWS Solution Competency. VMware also now has 35 VMware Cloud Provider Program partners that have achieved Cloud Verified status, which is required to be eligible to deliver the forthcoming SDDC-as-a-service offering. Patel also revealed the number of organizations running instances of VMware on public clouds now exceeds 1,000, in the wake of the launch of VMware Cloud on AWS last year.
Patel said the shift to hybrid clouds is more about transforming IT operational models than it is about deploying workloads at new physical locations. The challenge many IT organizations will need to come to terms with going forward is deciding what portions of that IT operational model they want to run themselves versus opting to rely on VMware and its partners.
