VMware Explore US 2022 – VMware Projects and Day 2 Announcements

VMware Explore US 2022 – VMware Projects and Day 2 Announcements

Last year at VMworld 2021, VMware mentioned and announced a lot of (new) projects they are working on. What happened to them and which new VMware projects have been mentioned this year at VMware Explore so far?

Project Ensemble – VMware Aria Hub

VMware unveiled their unified multi-cloud management portfolio called VMware Aria, which provides a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud native applications.

VMware Aria is anchored by VMware Aria Hub (formerly known as Project Ensemble), which provides centralized views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment, and leverages VMware Aria Graph to provide a common definition of applications, resources, roles, and accounts.

VMware Aria Graph provides a single source of truth that is updated in near-real time. Other solutions on the market were designed in a slower moving era, primarily for change management processes and asset tracking. By contrast, VMware Aria Graph is designed expressly for cloud-native operations.

VMware Explore US 2022 Session: A Unified Cloud Management Control Plane – Update on Project Ensemble [CMB2210US]

Project Monterey – DPU-based Acceleration for NSX

Last year introduced as Project Monterey and in technology preview, VMware announced the GA version of Monterey called DPU-based Acceleration for NSX yesterday.

Project Arctic – vSphere+ and vSAN+

Project Arctic has been introduced last year as a Technology Preview and was described as “the next step in the evolution of vSphere in a multi-cloud world”. What has started with the idea of bringing VMware Cloud services closer to vSphere, has evolved to a even more interesting and enterprise-ready version called vSphere+ and vSAN+. It includes developer services that consist of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid runtime, Tanzu Mission Control Essentials and NSX Advanced Load Balancer Essentials. VMware is going to add more and more VMware Cloud add-on services in the future. Additionally, VMware even introduced VMware Cloud Foundation+.

Project Iris – Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu

VMware mentioned Project Iris very briefly last year at VMworld. In February 2022, Project Iris became generally available and is since then known as Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu.

Project Northstar

At VMware Explore on day 1, VMware introduced Project Northstar, which will provide customers a centralized cloud console that gives them instant access to networking and security services, such as network and security policy controls, Network Detection and Response (NDR), NSX Intelligence, Advanced Load Balancing (ALB), Web Application Firewall (WAF), and HCX. Project Northstar will be able to apply consistent networking and security policies across private cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments.

Graphical user interface Description automatically generated

VMware Explore US 2022 Session: Multi-Cloud Networking and Security with NSX [NETB2154US]

Project Watch

At VMware Explore on day 1,VMware unveiled Project Watch, a new approach to multi-cloud networking and security that will provide advanced app-to-app policy controls to help with continuous risk and compliance assessment. In technology preview, Project Watch will help network security and compliance teams to continuously observe, assess, and dynamically mitigate risk and compliance problems in composite multi-cloud applications.

Project Trinidad

Also announced at VMware Explore day 1 and further explained at day 2, Project Trinidad extends VMware’s API security and analytics by deploying sensors on Kubernetes clusters and uses machine learning with business logic inference to detect anomalous behavior in east-west traffic between microservices.

Project Narrows

Project Narrows introduces a unique addition to Harbor, allowing end users to assess the security posture of Kubernetes clusters at runtime. Images previously undetected, will be scanned at the time of introduction to a cluster, so vulnerabilities can now be caught, images may be flagged, and workloads quarantined.

Project Narrows adding dynamic scanning to your software supply chain with Harbor is critical. It allows greater awareness and control of your running workloads than the traditional method of simply updating and storing workloads.

VMware is open sourcing the initial capabilities of Project Narrows on GitHub as the Cloud Native Security Inspector (CNSI) Project.

VMware Explore US 2022 Session: Running App Workloads in a Trusted, Secure Kubernetes Platform [VIB1443USD]

Project Keswick

Also introduced on day 2, Project Keswick is about simplifying edge deployments at scale. It comes as an xLabs project coming out of the Advanced Technology Group in VMware’s Office of the CTO.

Bild

A Keswick deployment is entirely automated and uses Git as a single source of truth for a declarative way to manage your infrastructure and applications through desired state configuration enabled by GitOps. This ensures the infrastructure and applications running at the edge are always exactly what they need to be.

VMware Explore US 2022 Session: Edge Computing: What’s Next? [VIB1457USD]

Project Newcastle

At VMworld 2021, VMware talked the first time (I think) about cryptographic agility and even showed a short demo of a Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) enabled Unified Access Gateway (using a proxy-based approach): 

Diagram of an HAProxy with TLS Termination and Quantum-Safe Cipher Support as a reverse proxy to communicate with a quantum-safe web browser.

At VMware Explore 2022 day 2, VMware demonstrated what they believe to be the world’s first quantum-safe multi-cloud application!

VMware developed and presented Project Newcastle, a policy-based framework enabling and orchestrating cryptographic transition in modern applications.

Integrated with Tanzu Service Mesh, Project Newcastle gives users greater insight into the cryptography in their applications. But that’s not all — as a platform for cryptographic agility, Project Newcastle automates the process of reconfiguring an application’s cryptography to comply with user-defined policies and industry standards.

Closing Comment

Which VMware projects excite you the most? I’m definitely going with Project Ensemble (Aria Hub) and Project Newcastle!

VMware Explore US 2022 – Summary of Day 1 Announcements

VMware Explore US 2022 – Summary of Day 1 Announcements

VMworld is now VMware Explore and is currently happening in San Francisco! This is a consolidated of the announcements from day 1 (August 30th, 2022).

VMware Introduces vSphere 8, vSAN 8 and VMware Cloud Foundation+

VMware today introduced VMware vSphere 8 and VMware vSAN 8—major new releases of VMware’s compute and storage solutions.

vSphere 8 – vSphere 8 introduces vSphere on DPUs, previously known as Project Monterey. In close collaboration with technology partners AMD, Intel and NVIDIA as well as OEM system partners Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo, vSphere on DPUs will unlock hardware innovation helping customers meet the throughput and latency needs of modern distributed workloads. vSphere will enable this by offloading and accelerating network and security infrastructure functions onto DPUs from CPUs.

ESXi on DPU

vSphere 8 will dramatically accelerate AI and machine learning applications by doubling the virtual GPU devices per VM, delivering a 4x increase of passthrough devices, and supporting vendor device groups which enable binding of high-speed networking devices and the GPU.

vSAN 8: vSAN 8 introduces breakthrough performance and hyper-efficiency. Built from the ground up, the new vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) will enhance the performance, storage efficiency, data protection and management of vSAN running on the latest generation storage devices. vSAN 8 will provide customers with a future ready infrastructure that supports modern TLC storage devices and delivers up to a 4x performance boost.

VMware Cloud Foundation+ – VMware introduces a new cloud-connected architecture for managing and operating full stack HCI in data centers. Built on vSphere+ and vSAN+, VMware Cloud Foundation+ will add a new cloud-connected architecture for managing and operating full-stack HCI in our data center or co-location facility.

VMware Cloud Foundation+ will deliver new admin, developer and hybrid cloud services through a simplified subscription model and keyless entitlement. VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 will enable VMware Cloud Foundation+ by adding vSphere+ and vSAN+, plus a cloud gateway that provides access to the VMware Cloud Console as part of the full stack architecture.

VMware Cloud for Hyperscalers

VMC on AWS – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) I4i instances for I/O-intensive Workloads: Powered by 3rd generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Ice Lake), Amazon EC2 instances help deliver better workload support and delivery, lower TCO, and increased scalability and application performance. Compared to I3, the I4i instances provide nearly twice the number of physical cores, twice the memory, three times the storage capacity, and three times the network bandwidth.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Integration Availability – as a native AWS cloud storage service that is certified as a supplemental datastore for VMware Cloud on AWS, FSx for ONTAP offers fully managed shared storage built on the familiar NetApp ONTAP file system trusted by VMware customers running on premises today. Customers can now use FSx for ONTAP as a simple and elastic datastore for VMware Cloud on AWS, enabling them to scale storage up or down independently from compute while paying only for the resources they need.

VMware Cloud Flex Storage Availability – A new VMware-managed and natively integrated cloud storage and data management solution that offers supplemental datastore-level access for VMware Cloud on AWS. With just a few clicks in the VMware Cloud Console, customers can scale their storage environment without adding hosts, and elastically adjust storage capacity up or down as needed for every application. Customers also benefit from a simple, pay-as-you-consume pricing model. Together with VMware vSAN, VMware Cloud Flex Storage offers flexibility and customer value in terms of resilience, performance, scale, and cost in the cloud.

VMware Cloud Flex Compute – “Preview” of a new cloud compute model that will help customers get started faster with VMware Cloud on AWS. With this new model, VMware introduces a “resource-defined” cloud compute model in place of “hardware-defined” compute instance model which will provide customers higher flexibility, elasticity, and speed to better meet cost and performance requirements of enterprise applications. It will help customers get started faster with VMware Cloud on AWS by using smaller consumable units.

Azure VMware Solution – Customers will be able to purchase Azure VMware Solution as part of VMware Cloud Universal, a flexible purchasing and consumption program for executing multi-cloud and digital transformation strategies. VMware Cloud Director Service for Azure VMware Solution is also now available in Public Preview.

Google Cloud VMware Engine – VMware announced VMware Tanzu Standard edition on Google Cloud VMware Engine to help simplify Kubernetes adoption and management.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution – New features and capabilities with VMware Tanzu Standard Edition and introduced support for single host SDDCs for non-production workloads.

VMware Cloud Management – VMware Aria

VMware unveiled a multi-cloud management portfolio called VMware Aria, which provides a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud native applications.

VMware Aria is a new brand for the vRealize components, Tanzu Observability by Wavefront and CloudHealth unified under one umbrella, one name.

The VMware products and services within the VMware Aria portfolio are:

  • VMware Aria Automation (formerly, vRealize Automation)
  • VMware Aria Operations (formerly, vRealize Operations)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Networks (formerly, vRealize Network Insight)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Logs (formerly, vRealize Log Insight)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Secure Clouds (formerly, CloudHealth Secure State)
  • VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth (formerly, CloudHealth)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Applications (formerly VMware Tanzu Observability)
  • VMware Skyline

VMware Aria Products

VMware Aria is anchored by VMware Aria Hub (formerly known as Project Ensemble), which provides centralized views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment, and leverages VMware Aria Graph to provide a common definition of applications, resources, roles, and accounts.

VMware Aria Graph provides a single source of truth that is updated in near-real time. Other solutions on the market were designed in a slower moving era, primarily for change management processes and asset tracking. By contrast, VMware Aria Graph is designed expressly for cloud-native operations.

VMware Aria provides features and functions that span management disciplines and clouds to deliver unique value for multi-cloud governance, cross-cloud migration, and actionable business insights. In addition, there are three new end-to-end management services built on top of VMware Aria Hub and VMware Aria Graph:

  • VMware Aria Guardrails – Automate enforcement of cloud guardrails for networking, security, cost, performance, and configuration at scale for multi-cloud environments with an everything-as-code approach
  • VMware Aria Migration – Accelerate and simplify the multi-cloud migration journey by automating assessment, planning, and execution in conjunction with VMware HCX
  • VMware Aria Business Insights – Discern relevant business insights from full-stack event correlation leveraging AI/ML analytics

Networking and Security

Project Northstar – Project Northstar is a SaaS-based network and security offering that will empower NSX customers with a set of on-demand multi-cloud networking and security services, end-to-end visibility, and controls. Customers will be able to use a centralized cloud console to gain instant access to networking and security services, such as network and security policy controls, Network Detection and Response (NDR), NSX Intelligence, Advanced Load Balancing (ALB), Web Application Firewall (WAF), and HCX. It will support both private cloud and VMware Cloud deployments running on public clouds and enable enterprises to build flexible network infrastructure that they can spin up and down in minutes.

Graphical user interface Description automatically generated

DPU-based Acceleration for NSX – Formerly known as Project Monterey, VMware announced that starting with NSX 4.0 and vSphere 8.0, customers can leverage DPU-based acceleration using SmartNICs. Offloading NSX services to the DPU can accelerate networking and security functions without impacting the host CPUs, addressing the needs of modern applications and other network-intensive and latency-sensitive applications.

Image of a SmartNIC

Project Trinidad – Available as tech preview, Project Trinidad extends VMware’s API security and analytics by deploying sensors on Kubernetes clusters and uses machine learning with business logic inference to detect anomalous behavior in east-west traffic between microservices.

Project Watch – VMware unveiled Project Watch, a new approach to multi-cloud networking and security that will provide advanced app-to-app policy controls to help with continuous risk and compliance assessment. In technology preview, Project Watch will help network security and compliance teams to continuously observe, assess, and dynamically mitigate risk and compliance problems in composite multi-cloud applications.

Additionally, VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer adds new bot management capabilities to help enterprises address threats quickly and efficiently, providing enhanced multi-layer application protection with existing Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, and API security.

Edge

VMware Edge Compute Stack 2.0 – VMware announced the VMware Edge Compute Stack v1.0 last year and is now adding more features and functionalities optimized for different use cases at the enterprise edge – shipped with vSphere 8 and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0. VMware, for the first time, will introduce initial support for non-x86 processor-based specialized small form factor edge platforms to simultaneously run IT/OT workloads and workflows on a single stack.

 

VMware Private Mobile Network (Beta) – Delivered by service providers, this new managed service offering provides enterprises with private 4G/5G mobile connectivity in support of edge-native applications. VMware will empower partners with a single PMN orchestrator to operate multi-tenant private 4G/5G networks with an enterprise-grade solution. 

Modern Applications (VMware Tanzu)

Tanzu Application Platform – VMware pre-announced new Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) 1.3 capabilities like the availability on RedHat OpenShift or the support for air-gapped installations for regulated and disconnected environments.

Tanzu Mission Control – Finally, VMware announced the preview for lifecycle management of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters, which enables direct provisioning and management of EKS clusters, which is awesome! I suppose we can expect the support for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) also coming very soon.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid – With the release of TKG 2.0, VMware now includes a unified experience for applications running on any cloud. In the near future, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0 should support both Supervisor-based and VM-based management cluster models. On vSphere 8, both Supervisor-based and VM-based models will be supported, and VM-based management clusters will continue to be available on previous versions of vSphere and public clouds. This means in other words, that VMware continues with their “TKGS” and “TKGm” flavors.

Tanzu Service Mesh – Also pre-announced, VMware is adding several enterprise and application resiliency capabilities into Tanzu Service Mesh:

  • Support for customer-owned enterprise certificate authority through integration with Venafi
  • Improved security with enterprise-approved container image registries, data services support, external services support
  • and a global SLO dashboard that allows developers and site-reliability engineers to view all managed service SLOs, helping with capacity planning, troubleshooting, and understanding the health of their applications.

Read more about all the Tanzu announcements here.

Anywhere Workspace

VMware unveiled how it is advancing self-configuring, self-healing and self-securing outcomes across four key technology areas that are delivered by the Anywhere Workspace platform:

  • VDI and DaaS
  • Digital Employee Experience
  • Unified Endpoint Management
  • Security

VMware is introducing a next generation of VMware Horizon Cloud that will enable multi-cloud agility and flexibility. This new release represents a major update to Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure that can dramatically simplify the infrastructure that needs to be deployed inside customer environments, reducing infrastructure costs in some cases by over 70% while increasing scalability and reliability of VMware’s DaaS platform.

20K user infrastructure cost comparison

Workspace ONE UEM’s Freestyle Orchestrator will be expanding to include support for mobile devices.

Workspace ONE support for Windows OS multi-user mode is now available in Tech Preview for Azure Active Directory-based deployments; and it will soon be extended to Active Directory-based deployments.

VMware also announced the coming tech preview of Workspace ONE Cloud Marketplace, which will feature dashboards, widgets, reports, Freestyle Orchestrator workflows, and other resources that can be imported to help customers adopt additional solutions.

Horizon Managed Desktop –  I am very excited about this announcement, because it will provide a managed service offering that takes care of lifecycle services, support, and more, on top of a customer-provided infrastructure. This will help customers that don’t have in-house experts get to value with VDI faster.

Availability

VMware Cloud Foundation+, VMware vSphere 8, VMware vSAN 8 and VMware Edge Compute Stack 2.0 are all expected to be available by October 28, 2022 (the close of VMware’s Q3 FY23). VMware Private Mobile Network is expected to be available in beta in VMware’s Q3 FY23.

Closing Comment

Not bad for the first day, right? Stay tuned for more exciting VMware Explore announcements!

VMware vSphere+ and vSAN+ – The Multi-Cloud Workload Platform

VMware vSphere+ and vSAN+ – The Multi-Cloud Workload Platform

Everyone knows VMware made it possible with vSphere to virtualize the compute resources in your data centers. Then they moved to the software-defined data center (SDDC) approach that allows you to virtualize storage and network as well. And for a few years now, VMware is moving towards what I call a hybrid multi-cloud platform, which enables customers to unify multiple public clouds, private clouds and edge locations with the same underlying technology stack complemented by cross-cloud services. Industry analysts and vendors like VMware are even talking about the term “Supercloud“. But let us focus on the vSphere+ and vSAN+ announcement for now. 🙂

VMware is moving their customers to a subscription-based consumption model and has already various technologies and licenses that help customers with that on their (multi-cloud) journey:

However, a subscription model and managed service offering were missing for customers who cannot or do not want to go down the VMware Cloud Foundation or VMware Cloud path, which includes vSphere, vSAN and NSX.

So, here is the next evolution of vSphere and vSAN.

vSphere+ and vSAN+

vSphere+ and vSAN+ are hybrid cloud solutions, which include a subscription license for your greenfield or brownfield deployments of vSphere and vSAN combined with a connection to VMware Cloud services (centralized management) that allows an easier and keyless management of your vSphere and vSAN infrastructure. You do not need to buy vCenter separately anymore and can deploy as many vCenter instances as needed for no additional cost! Finally, no more tracking and splitting of licenses!

How does it work?

It is very easy. To make it short, customers can connect their existing environment to a cloud management portal and at the same time migrate their perpetual licenses to subscriptions. There is no need to purchase anything else or move workloads to the cloud. You just need to follow four steps:

  1. Procure Subscription
  2. Deploy a new Cloud Gateway Appliance
  3. Connect and register Cloud Gateway with VMware Cloud
  4. Register on-premises vCenter(s)

vSphere+ Migration

Requirements

Your vSphere deployment must meet different software and hardware criteria for vSphere+.

ESXi and vCenter

Even though vSphere 6.7 is reaching EoGS (End of General Support) on 15th October 2022, you can still use this version to start a free trial of vSphere+. The minimum required version for production environments is vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3g, which allows you to convert your vCenter to subscription and use the full vSphere+ feature set.

Note: vCenter Server HA (VCHA) mode configuration and Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) are not supported.

Important: Your vCenter Server can only be used with vSphere+. Non-vSphere+ licensed hosts must be managed with a different vCenter Server.

vCenter Cloud Gateway

You can connect up to four vCenter Server instances to a vCenter Cloud Gateway, that needs to be deployed on-premises.

The vCenter Cloud Gateway uses 8 vCPUs, 28GB memory and 190GB of storage.

vCenter Cloud Gateway Appliance

Required Subscription Licenses

You can either purchase new subscriptions or convert your existing licenses to subscriptions. vSphere+ is licensed per core and requires a minimum of 16 cores per CPU for a predefined period of one, three or five years. This means, that a customer with a 12-core CPU count will be required to purchase a 16-core commitment for that CPU.

Note: VMware provides a small script (KB89116) that helps you to identify the number of cores

vCenter Cloud Gateway Appliance

Customers with vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus are eligible for an upgrade to vSphere+

vSAN+ is configured as an add-on to vSphere+ (co-term) and is licensed in the same way based on the same metrics (minimum of 16 cores per CPU). vSAN Enterprise is the only edition available for a subscription upgrade to vSAN+.

Note: VMware announced vSAN+ Standard and Advanced in the meantime.

vSphere and vSphere+ Feature Comparison

What else is included with vSphere+ compared to a regular vSphere deployment? You will not see virtual machines without containers anymore. So, it is not a surprise that vSphere+ includes so-called developer services as well:

  • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service – Run your containerized applications on a certified Kubernetes distribution, integrated with vSphere, using your existing tooling and workflows to give developers on-demand access to conformant Kubernetes clusters on-premises.
  • Tanzu integrated services – Streamlines the deployment and management of local and in-cluster platform services, such as logging, registry, monitoring, and ingress, to easily configure and maintain a production-ready Kubernetes environment. This includes open-source packages like Harbor, Fluentbit, Prometheus, Grafana, Contour, Sonobuoy and Pinniped.
  • Tanzu Mission Control Essentials – This will enable developers and DevOps teams to centralize platform operations and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with observability, troubleshooting, and resiliency. The Tanzu Mission Control Essentials feature set can be found here.
  • NSX Advanced Load Balancer Essentials – Feature set can be found here.

Here the list of admin services:

  • Cloud Console – Consolidate management of all vSphere deployments through a centralized cloud console (VMware Cloud Console).
  • Global inventory service – Visualize your inventory of vSphere resources and capacity to quickly understand your resource utilization across your vSphere estate.
  • Event view service – Get a consolidated view of events and alerts to quickly triage areas that need attention across your vSphere estate.
  • Security health check service – Evaluate the security posture of your entire vSphere infrastructure to identify security weaknesses or exposures.
  • Provision VM service – Quickly provision VMs from the VMware Cloud Console within any managed cluster.
  • Lifecycle management service – Simplify the lifecycle management of your vCenter instances – make updates with a single click and reduce the maintenance window so it is easier to schedule updates sooner. This gives you more rapid access to new features and address security vulnerabilities quickly. If there is a problem, you can easily roll back the update.
  • Configuration management service – Standardize and cascade vCenter configurations across your vSphere estate to quickly detect and remediate vCenter configuration drift.

Optional Add-On Services

There are a lot of VMware Cloud services that could add value, but the first optional add-on available for customers is VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR).

With this add-on service, you will be able to reliably protect and recover mission-critical applications. Customers will benefit from integrated protection workflows directly within the vSphere+ cloud console that will streamline IT operations and reduce risk of downtime in the event of regional outages or ransomware attacks.

Walkthrough

William Lam wrote a nice blog about the onboarding and configuration of vSphere+: A first look at the new vSphere+ & vSAN+ Cloud Service

Start your free vSphere+ and vSAN+ Trial

VMware offers free vSphere+ and vSAN+ trials that allows you to explore these new capabilities except upgrading the vCenter Server from the VMware Cloud Console. Customers just need to deploy a vCenter Cloud Gateway and connect their vCenter Server instance(s) to VMware Cloud. No need to purchase any new licenses.

Please follow this link to try vSphere+ for free: https://vmc.vmware.com/infrastructure/vsphere/overview

vSphere+ Hands-on Lab

You do not have a lab environment? No problem! Check out this new hands-on lab (HOL): https://pathfinder.vmware.com/v3/path/vsphere_plus/section/step2/activity/vsphere_plus_hol

Where can I find more resources?

Please find below a list with additional information:

Stay tuned for more vSphere and vSAN announcements from VMware Explore next week!

VMworld 2021 – Summary of VMware Projects

VMworld 2021 – Summary of VMware Projects

On day 1 of VMworld 2021 we have heard and seen a lot of super exciting announcements. I believe everyone is excited about all the news and innovations VMware has presented so far.

I’m not going to summarize all the news from day 1 or day 2 but thought it might be helpful to have an overview of all the VMware projects that have been mentioned during the general session and solution keynotes.

Project Cascade

VMware Project Cascade

Project Cascade will provide a unified Kubernetes interface for both on-demand infrastructure (IaaS) and containers (CaaS) across VMware Cloud – available through an open command line interface (CLI), APIs, or a GUI dashboard.  Project Cascade will be built on an open foundation, with the open-sourced VM Operator as the first milestone delivery for Project Cascade that enables VM services on VMware Cloud.

VMworld 2021 session: Solution Keynote: The VMware Multi-Cloud Computing Infrastructure Strategy of 2021 [MCL3217]

Project Capitola

VMware Project Capitola

Project Capitola is a software-defined memory implementation that will aggregate tiers of different memory types such as DRAM, PMEM, NVMe and other future technologies in a cost-effective manner, to deliver a uniform consumption model that is transparent to applications.

VMworld 2021 session: Introducing VMware Project Capitola: Unbounding the ‘Memory Bound’ [MCL1453] and How vSphere Is Redefining Infrastructure For Running Apps In the Multi-Cloud Era [MCL2500]

Project Ensemble

VMware Project Ensemble

Project Ensemble integrates and automates multi-cloud management with vRealize. This means that all the different VMware cloud management capabilities—self-service, elasticity, metering, and more—are in one place. You can access all the data, analytics, and workflows to easily manage your cloud deployments at scale.

VMworld 2021 session: Introducing Project Ensemble Tech Preview [MCL1301]

Project Arctic

VMware Project Arctic

Project Arctic is “the next evolution of vSphere” and is about bringing your own hardware while taking advantage of VMware Cloud offerings to enable a hybrid cloud experience. Arctic natively integrates cloud connectivity into vSphere and establishes hybrid cloud as the default operating model.

VMworld 2021 session: What’s New in vSphere [APP1205] and How vSphere Is Redefining Infrastructure For Running Apps In the Multi-Cloud Era [MCL2500]

Project Monterey

VMware Project Monterey

Project Monterey was announced in the VMworld 2020 keynote. It is about SmartNICs that will redefine the data center with decoupled control and data planes for management, networking, storage and security for VMware ESXi hosts and bare-metal systems.

VMworld 2021 session: 10 Things You Need to Know About Project Monterey [MCL1833] and How vSphere Is Redefining Infrastructure For Running Apps In the Multi-Cloud Era [MCL2500]

Project Iris

I don’t remember anymore which session mentioned Project Iris but it is about the following:

Project Iris discovers and analyzes an organization’s full app portfolio; recommends which apps to rehost, replatform, or refactor; and enables customers to adapt their own transformation journey for each app, line of business, or data center.

Project Pacific

Project Pacific was announced at VMworld 2019. It is about re-architecting vSphere to integrate and embed Kubernetes and is known as “vSphere with Tanzu” (or TKGS) today. In other words, Project Pacific transformed vSphere into a Kubernetes-native platform with an Kubernetes control plane integrated directly into ESXi and vCenter. Pacific is part of the Tanzu portofolio.

VMworld 2019 session: Introducing Project Pacific: Transforming vSphere into the App Platform of the Future [HBI4937BE]

Project Santa Cruz

VMware Project Santa Cruz

Project Santa Cruz is a new integrated offering from VMware that adds edge compute and SD-WAN together to give you a secure, scalable, zero touch edge run time at all your edge locations. It connects your edge sites to centralized management planes for both your networking team and your cloud native infrastructure team. This solution is OCI compatible: if your app runs in a container, it can run on Santa Cruz.

VMworld 2021 session: Solution Keynote: What’s Next? A Look inside VMware’s Innovation Engine [VI3091]

Project Dawn Patrol

Project Dawn Patrol

So far, Project Dawn Patrol was only mentioned during the general session. “It will give you full visibility with a map of all your cloud assets and their dependencies”, Dormain Drewitz said.

VMworld 2021 session: General Session: Accelerating Innovation, Strategies for Winning Across Clouds and Apps [GEN3103]

Project Radium

VMware Project Radium

Last year VMware introduced vSphere Bitfusion which allow shared access to a pool of GPUs over a network. Project Radium expands the fetature set of Bitfusion to other architectures and will support AMD, Graphcore, Intel, Nvidia and other hardware vendors for AI/ML workloads.

VMworld 2021 session: Project Radium: Bringing Multi-Architecture compute to AI/ML workloads [VI1297]

Project IDEM

IDEM has been described as an “easy to use management automation technology”.

VMworld 2021 session: Solution Keynote: What’s Next? A Look inside VMware’s Innovation Engine [VI3091] and Next-Generation SaltStack: What Idem Brings to SaltStack [VI1865]

Please comment below or let me know via Twitter or LinkedIn if I missed a new or relevant VMware project. 😉

Must Watch VMworld Multi-Cloud Sessions

I recently wrote a short blog about some of the sessions I recommend to customers, partners and friends.

If you would like to know more about the VMware multi-cloud strategy and vision, have a look at some of the sessions below:

VMworld 2021 Must Watch Sessions

 

VMworld 2021 – My Content Catalog and Session Recommendation

VMworld 2021 – My Content Catalog and Session Recommendation

VMworld 2021 is going to happen from October 6-7, 2021 (EMEA). This year you can expect so many sessions and presentations about the options you have when combining different products together, that help you to reduce complexity, provide more automation and therefore create less overhead.

Let me share my 5 personal favorite picks and also 5 recommended sessions based on the conversations I had with multiple customers this year.

My 5 Personal Picks

10 Things You Need to Know About Project Monterey [MCL1833]

Project Monterey was announced in the VMworld 2020 keynote. There has been tremendous work done since then. Hear Niels Hagoort and Sudhansu Jain talking about SmartNICs and how they will redefine the data center with decoupled control and data planes – for ESXi hosts and bare-metal systems. They are going to cover and demo the overall architecture and use cases!

Upskill Your Workforce with Augmented and Virtual Reality and VMware [VI1596]

Learn from Matt Coppinger how augmented realited (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are transforming employee productivity, and how these solutions can be deployed and managed using VMware technologies. Matt is going to cover the top enterprise use cases for AR/VR as well as the challenges you might face deploying these emerging technologies. Are you interested how to architect and configure VMware technologies to deploy and manage the latest AR/VR technology, applications and content? If yes, then this session is also for you.

Addressing Malware and Advanced Threats in the Network [SEC2027] (Tech+ Pass Only)

I am very interested to learn more cybersecurity. With Chad Skipper VMware has an expert who can give insights on how the Network Detection and Response (NDR) capabilities if NSX Advanced Threat Prevention provide visibility, detection and prevention of advanced threats.

60 Minutes of Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) 3rd Edition [MCL1853]

Learn more about NUMA from Frank Denneman. You are going to learn more about the underlying configuration of a virtual machine and discover the connection between the Generapl-Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) and the NUMA node. You will also understand after how your knowledge of NUMA concepts in your cluster can help the developer by aligning the Kubernetes nodes to the physical infrastructure with the help of VM Service.

Mount a Robust Defense in Depth Strategy Against Ransomware [SEC1287]

Are you interested to learn more about how to protect, detect, respond to and recover from cybersecurity attacks across all technology stacks, regardless of their purpose or location? Learn more from Amanda Blevins about the VMware solutions for end users, private clouds, public clouds and modern applications.

5 Recommended Sessions based on Customer Conversations

Cryptographic Agility: Preparing for Quantum Safety and Future Transition [VI1505]

A lot of work is needed to better understand cryptographic agility and how we can address and manage the expected challenges that come with quantum computing. Hear VMware’s engineers from the Advanced Technology Group talking about the requirements of crypto agility and VMware’s recent research work on post-quantum cryptography in the VMware Unified Access Gateway (UAG) project.

Edge Computing in the VMware Office of the CTO: Innovations on the Horizon [VI2484]

Let Chris Wolf give you some insight into VMware’s strategic direction in support of edge computing. He is going to talk about solutions that will drive down costs while accelerating the velocity and agility in which new apps and services can be delivered to the edge.

Delivering a Continuous Stream of More Secure Containers on Kubernetes [APP2574]

In this session one can see how you can use two capabilities in VMware Tanzu Advanced, Tanzu Build Service and Tanzu Application Catalog, to feed a continuous stream of patched and compliant containers into your continuous delivery (CD) system. A must attend session delivered by David Zendzian, the VMware Tanzu Global Field CISO.

A Modern Firewall For any Cloud and any Workload [SEC2688]

VMware NSX firewall reimagines East-West security by using a distributed- and software-based approach to attach security policies to every workload in any cloud. Chris Kruegel gives you insights on how to stop lateral movement with advanced threat prevention (ATP) capabilities via IDS/IPS, sandboxing, NTA and NDR.

A Practical Approach for End-to-End Zero Trust [SEC2733]

Hear different the VMware CTOs Shawn Bass, Pere Monclus and Scott Lundgren talking about a zero trust approach. Shawn and the others will discuss specific capabilities that will enable customers to achieve a zero trust architecture that is aligned to the NIST guidance and covers secure access for users as well secure access to workloads.

Enjoy VMworld 2021! 🙂