Virtuwise

VMworld 2016: VMware Cloud Foundation

VMworld in Las Vegas, I had the chance to come in early and connect with several folks from the community. I truly enjoy the morning breakfast events that the community put on and the variety of places we get to see. I tend to do a lot of ‘breakfast hopping’ as I like to see as many people as possible. I just hope all the walking that I do burns off all the extra calories I put on.

I’m going to touch on some of the more major announcements from VMworld. I tend to focus on the topics that have the community buzzing, and this year does not disappoint.

Last year we heard about the Unified Hybrid Cloud, and this year that has evolved into VMware Cloud Foundation. This has become the building block for your private cloud built on VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN with the network virtualization platform, VMware NSX. VMware SDDC Manager, which helps customers and service providers automate the deployment and management of VMware cloud software.

VMware Cloud Foundation runs any traditional or cloud-native application and integrates with existing VMware solutions, including:

VMware Cloud Foundation is expected to be generally available in Q3 2016

VMware Integrated OpenStack

VMware Integrated OpenStack 3, the latest release of VMware’s OpenStack distribution, which is based on the OpenStack Mitaka. VMware is introducing new features to make deploying OpenStack clouds simpler and more cost-effective, as well as allow customers to use existing VMware vSphere workloads in an API-driven OpenStack cloud.

Existing VMware Integrated OpenStack customers will be able to take advantage of the software’s built-in upgrade capability to migrate to VMware Integrated OpenStack 3.

VMware Cloud Foundation will also support VMware Integrated OpenStack enabling customers to deploy and operate their OpenStack clouds on VMware’s virtual infrastructure on-premises or in the public cloud.

Cross-Cloud Services

Cross-Cloud Services are new Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings to enable visibility into cloud usage and costs, enhance consistent networking and security policies, and automate the deployment, management, and migration of applications and data across vSphere and non-vSphere private and public clouds.

Cross-Cloud Services will showcase how customers can manage, govern, and secure applications running in private and public clouds, including AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud.

Cross-Cloud Architecture

VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture that will give customers the ability to manage, govern and secure applications running across public clouds, including AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud.

Cross-Cloud Architecture enables consistent deployment models, security policies, visibility, and governance for all applications, running on-premises and off-premises, regardless of the underlying cloud, hardware platform or hypervisor. VMware’s Cross-Cloud Architecture builds on its leading private and hybrid cloud capabilities by offering customers the freedom to innovate in multiple clouds, and is delivered through VMware Cloud Foundation.

vSphere Integrated Containers

vSphere Integrated Containers is now comprised of three main components, all of which are available as open source on github.

The vSphere Integrated Containers Engine is a container runtime for vSphere, allowing developers familiar with Docker to develop in containers and deploy them alongside traditional VM-based workloads on vSphere clusters

Harbor, the enterprise container registry, is an enterprise-class registry server that stores and distributes container images.

Admiral, the container management portal, provides a UI for developers and app teams to provision and manage containers, including retrieving stats and info about container instances.

I hope this gives a sense of some topics folks were discussing at VMworld. What did you find interesting? Do you think you will be a user of these new offerings? Please let me know on Twitter, and thanks for reading!

Be sure to check out my VMworld 2015: Unified Hybrid Cloud post.