Eight of the best from VMworld 2021

VMware’s flagship event saw a whole host of new products and announcements, many forming important components of VMware’s new Cross-Cloud services strategy as well as featuring in their own right.

In no particular order, here are brief details of eight of the most significant announcements:

• VMware Cross-Cloud services: Overarching many of the individual announcements at the event was VMware’s new strategy to help customers navigate the multi-cloud era. Essentially it consists of a group of integrated services to build, run and secure applications across any cloud. These are centred around five core building blocks:
  • A platform for building and deploying cloud-native apps
  • Cloud infrastructure for operating and running enterprise apps
  • Cloud management for monitoring and managing cloud performance
  • Security and networking that addresses multi-cloud operation
  • A digital workspace that can be utilised by the distributed workforce
• Zero Trust security: New innovations were revealed that help deliver consistent security for endpoints, virtual machines and containers via an end-to-end Zero Trust architecture. These include secure workload access for Zero Trust inside clouds and data centres, together with VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and VMware Carbon Black Cloud for ransomware protection and recovery
• Project Arctic: A technology preview of a new architecture for the vSphere virtualisation software, Project Arctic effectively makes hybrid cloud the default operating model. Importantly, customers will be able to take advantage of unlimited cloud capacity on-demand and instantly access Cross-Cloud services through vCenter
• VMware Tanzu Community Edition: This freely available platform is intended to make it easier for organisations to evaluate and learn how to use  software is the same as that used in the Tanzu Commercial Edition and can be installed and configured on a local workstation or the cloud. Additionally, a free tier of Tanzu MiKubernetes. The open-sourcession Control, known as Tanzu Mission Control Starter, is also available
• VMware Cloud on AWS: A range of enhancements here include the general availability (at no extra cost) of Tanzu Services with VMware Cloud on AWS. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) provides a Kubernetes runtime directly inside the hypervisor, compliant with upstream Kubernetes. VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts is also generally available, whilst other additions include enhancements to Cloud Disaster Recovery and an advanced security add-on
• VMware Edge: A portfolio of products from across VMware make up the newly introduced VMware Edge. These are VMware Edge Computer Stack, SASE and Telco Cloud Platform. The aim is to enable organisations to run, manage and better secure edge-native apps across multiple clouds at both near edge and far edge locations
• vRealize Cloud Management: A range of enhancements were unveiled that deliver cloud-agnostic provisioning, proactive monitoring, capacity and cost optimisation, app-aware troubleshooting and end-to-end network visibility across all cloud environments. In addition, there was a tech preview of Project Ensemble which will allow users to track an entity consistently across all VMware solutions from a unified control plane
• Sovereign Cloud: And finally, a brand-new initiative to help customers engage with trusted national cloud service providers to meet geo-specific requirements around data sovereignty and jurisdictional control; data access and integrity; data security and compliance; data independence and mobility; and data analytics and innovation. This is achieved through a range of designated partners that have met the requirements of the Sovereign Cloud Framework