In 2020, mankind will usher in the once-in-a-hundred-year COVID-19 epidemic. What impact will this have on the digital transformation that is being actively promoted and the digital infrastructure suppliers? As one of the world's largest enterprise-level digital infrastructure and technology providers, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger recently stated that the world is now more dependent on digital infrastructure than ever before, and digital technologists have ushered in their own bright moments: in human life Plays the most critical role, from delivering food to every remote classroom, every minute of remote meetings, and every remote consultation...
Gelsinger said that he is quite confident that looking back at today's COVID-19 epidemic in the next ten or twenty years will be able to see fundamental and lasting changes in mankind. And this lasting change is digital transformation. Gelsinger emphasized that in just a few weeks during the epidemic, the popularization of digital technology that took years before was achieved, and not for business or business needs, but for the entire society and the entire human race. Although COVID-19 has brought a global epidemic to all mankind, it has also promoted the permanent progress of mankind towards a digital society and digital economy.
At the latest VMworld 2020, VMware released a series of new technologies, new products and new services. One of the major themes is to continue to promote the migration and application transformation of enterprise digital infrastructure to a hybrid multi-cloud environment. In particular, VMware's virtual cloud network technology has undergone major updates, including automated functions with public cloud experience, modern application connectivity and security services, and solutions for restructuring network security. These have consolidated the digital transformation for hybrid multicloud. Technology "base".
VMware is everywhere
After launching VMware on AWS in 2018 and announcing the cooperation with Alibaba Cloud to launch hybrid cloud, VMware has built its own technology on various public clouds, forming a ubiquitous layout of VMware technology. Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer of VMware products and cloud services, said during VMworld 2020: "We now provide VMware services through all major public cloud vendors and hundreds of VMware Cloud Verified partners around the world."
Currently, more than 15 million enterprise workloads are running in the VMware cloud environment, and more than 4,300 partners provide cloud services based on VMware technology, covering all mainstream public cloud vendors. With these new products and cloud services, VMware customers and partners can provide developers with more freedom of choice, achieve unified and efficient IT operations and ensure security, so as to fully tap the potential of multi-cloud and provide enterprises with better and better Efficient digital transformation path.
VMworld 2020 announced that VMware applications can be run on Microsoft Azure: the new generation of Azure VMware Solution allows customers to easily extend or migrate local VMware applications to Azure. Azure VMware Solution, as a service of Microsoft, supports enterprises to use existing VMware tools and management experience through integration with the Azure console. In particular, enterprises can use Azure Hybrid Benefits to save costs and optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) generated by running Windows Server and SQL Server workloads on Azure VMware Solution.
As early as April this year, the Alibaba Cloud VMware solution was officially released in mainland China and Hong Kong. It also allows enterprises to use familiar VMware Cloud technology to easily expand VMware-based enterprise local workloads without refactoring the existing environment. In the Alibaba Cloud VMware environment, and without affecting the network and security, manage enterprise workloads in the familiar VMware environment.
Of course, in terms of VMware on AWS, it continues to grow. As of August 2020, the total number of virtual machines on VMware Cloud on AWS has increased by 140% year-on-year, and the total number of hosts has increased by 130% year-on-year. More than 600 channel partners have VMware Cloud on AWS service capabilities, and more than 300 certified or verified Technical solutions are available to VMware Cloud on AWS customers.
It is worth mentioning that thousands of verified third-party, first-party and open source solutions can be found in the integrated new VMware Marketplace. These solutions can be deployed in vSphere, VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and VMware Tanzu environment. Through VMware Cloud Director service integration, partners can provide their tenants with a catalog of modern applications for developers.
Tanzu 1st Anniversary
Remember the Tanzu product line that was unveiled at the VMworld conference last year? This year marks the first anniversary of Tanzu. VMware Tanzu products include the technology portfolio obtained through the acquisition of Bitnami, Heptio, Pivotal, and Wavefront. VMware recently announced that the above products will be packaged into four simple Tanzu versions. VMware also embeds Kubernetes into the VMware vSphere control plane-vSphere with Tanzu, to provide a unified platform for all applications.
In October of this year, VMware has launched two versions of Tanzu Basic and Tanzu Standard, and two versions of Tanzu Advanced and Tanzu Enterprise will be launched soon. Among them, Tanzu Basic is an additional component of vSphere, which supports enterprises to run Kubernetes in the vSphere environment. vSphere can natively support the functions of Kubernetes and lower the barrier to use; and Tanzu Standard works with VMware Cloud Foundation to support enterprises to run and manage Kubernetes across multiple clouds. . In Advanced and Enterprise versions, more advanced features will also be introduced.
There are currently more than 75 independent software vendors (ISVs) in the VMware Tanzu community, and hundreds of customers now use Tanzu products and run on more than one million containers used in production environments. In addition, an average of 36 new projects are launched every minute on start.spring.io. VMware now supports millions of developers every month to start new projects using the Spring microservice framework and the Bitnami community container image catalog. VMware also announced the establishment of a cooperative relationship with GitLab, a development and operation platform application. The two parties will join hands with application developers and operations teams to achieve the common goal of a fast and secure release cycle. For this reason, GitLab with Tanzu can help companies simplify and speed up the development process.
As an important part of this VMworld 2020, VMware announced Tanzu's support for VMware Cloud on AWS and a preview of support for Oracle Cloud VMware solutions, and VMware and Microsoft are working closely to provide early users with preview versions as soon as possible. These will support enterprises to quickly and safely extend workloads to the cloud, and further make the VMware platform ubiquitous, allowing enterprises to run applications on the infrastructure of their choice.
Virtual Cloud Network: The "True Kung Fu" of Hybrid Cloud
When it comes to hybrid multi-cloud, virtual cloud network is the most critical technology. Simply understand that hybrid multi-cloud involves multiple public clouds, private clouds and local data center environments. Network resource scheduling across multiple environments is the key to ensuring the quality of hybrid multi-cloud services. This is the rise of SD-WAN software-defined wide area networks in recent years. important reason. As early as 2017, VMware announced the acquisition of VeloCloud and officially entered the SD-WAN field. In the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, VMware once again ranked one of the global leaders.
Seven years ago, VMware pioneered software-defined networking to decouple the network functions of physical devices, helping to reduce application deployment time from months to minutes, making micro-segmentation possible in terms of cost and operation and maintenance. Two years ago, VMware launched a virtual cloud network, for full-scale workloads running in virtual machines, containers or bare metal, extending virtual network connectivity and security functions from the edge to the core and then to the cloud. Today, the VMware virtual cloud network solution is the only comprehensive virtual network stack covering the second to seventh layers in the industry. With a fully software-defined approach, it provides switching, routing, firewall and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) for enterprises and telecommunications or 5G environments. WAN) and other functions.
A number of virtual cloud network innovations were announced at VMworld 2020. In terms of network automation functions that provide public cloud experience, VMware will add more functions to virtual cloud networks, including cloud automation and expansion, more uptime and flexibility, predictive analysis based on machine learning, and intelligent functions. VMware NSX-T 3.1 can provide better support for larger-scale global deployment and disaster recovery application scenarios, and realize automated deployment workflows. VMware will also double the scale of NSX Federation, equipped with new API-driven advanced routing and multiple Broadcast function and provide support for Terraform Provider. VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.0 will introduce new assurance and verification features and expanded VMware SD-WAN visibility.
In terms of connecting and protecting modern applications, VMware is expanding its virtual cloud network through VMware Tanzu Service Mesh, supported by NSX, to support Project Antrea, an open source project that implements Kubernetes networking and security. The new VMware Container Networking with Antrea is a commercial product that consists of signed images and binary files and fully supports Project Antrea. It will be introduced into VMware NSX-T and vSphere 7 with Tanzu. Tanzu Service Mesh can discover, connect and better protect applications running in a Kubernetes cluster that uses Antrea as a container network interface (CNI).
In addition, VMware is expanding VMware Cloud Foundation to support SmartNIC smart network card technology. By supporting SmartNIC, VMware Cloud Foundation is able to maintain computing virtualization on the server CPU while offloading network and storage I/O functions to the SmartNIC CPU. In this way, applications can maximize the use of available network bandwidth while reducing server CPU cycles. As part of the Project Monterey plan, VMware and NVIDIA have cooperated to launch a hybrid cloud architecture based on SmartNIC technology to maximize the use of the resource synergy between CPU, SmartNIC and NVIDIA DPU, which will help accelerate enterprise AI deployment and support enterprise expansion. Some AI infrastructure.
Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer of VMware, emphasized that VMware invented the virtual machine for X86 when it was first established 22 years ago. Now with the further advancement of technology, it has expanded its infrastructure to GPU and ARM-based architectures, especially network, storage, etc. The /O function is unloaded from the CPU and delivered to the SmartNIC for completion, thus extending VMware's virtualization and security capabilities to the SmartNIC. And if computing can be performed on SmartNIC, edge computing can be made more popular and more powerful, including turning data centers into supercomputers and extending more computing to the edge.
In summary: Judging from the series of new products, new technologies, and new services announced at VMworld 2020, VMware's innovation momentum remains unabated during the global epidemic, and it is still fully advancing the timetable for digital transformation of enterprises and institutions. As Gelsinger judged, the epidemic has pressed the accelerator key for global digital transformation. Digital technology and digital technology practitioners are ushering in their high-profile moments in human history. At this time, they must accelerate innovation and fully embed digital technology into human society. In order to create a more healthy and beautiful human future! (Text/Ningchuan)