VMware Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Innovations Enable Breakthrough Efficiency, Flexibility and Performance Gains

VMware Explore 2022, VMware, unveiled cloud and edge infrastructure solutions featuring breakthrough innovations to help organizations better run, scale and secure the broadest range of enterprise workloads across private and public clouds and at the edge.

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“With our multi-cloud and edge portfolio, VMware serves as the trusted foundation for customers seeking flexibility and choice to run their workloads where they’re best suited to run.”

VMware research shows 580 million modern workloads are expected to run on diverse, distributed environments spanning public cloud, on-premises, edge, telco clouds and hosted clouds by 2024.⁽¹⁾ Businesses are aiming to match their diverse enterprise application portfolios to the most optimal environments based on technical, business or strategic needs and low total cost of ownership (TCO). This is driving businesses to embrace multiple public clouds while continuing to invest in their on-premises environments and deploy services at the edge.

“In highly distributed environments, customers need cloud and edge infrastructure that enables them to scale their operations with consistency, availability, and security—wherever their workloads are running—and at the lowest possible TCO,” said Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Infrastructure Business Group, VMware. “With our multi-cloud and edge portfolio, VMware serves as the trusted foundation for customers seeking flexibility and choice to run their workloads where they’re best suited to run.”

Significant Advancements Across Core Platform for Private and Public Clouds

VMware today introduced VMware vSphere 8 and VMware vSAN 8—major new releases of VMware’s compute and storage solutions—helping customers run the broadest set of workloads in the environments of their choice. The innovations across these common building blocks for the private and public clouds and edge will help customers dramatically improve how they run, manage and secure their enterprise applications. The continued advancement of VMware Cloud further provides customers with consistent infrastructure with value-added capabilities.

• VMware vSphere 8: Ushers in a new era of heterogeneous computing by bringing DPUs (Data Processing Units) into the fold along with CPUs and GPUs—making the future of modern infrastructure accessible to all enterprises. vSphere 8 will deliver key innovations to help customers supercharge workload performance while lowering TCO, accelerate innovation for DevOps teams, improve operational efficiency and IT productivity, and bring the benefits of the cloud to their on-premises infrastructure.

  vSphere 8 will introduce 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. Customer applications that need high network bandwidth and fast cache access such as in-memory databases can expect:

  • Up to 20% CPU cores saved while achieving similar or better performance—resulting in higher workload consolidation and lower TCO by using saved cores;⁽²⁾
  • Up to 36% higher transaction rate⁽²⁾ at 27% lower latency⁽²⁾ by leveraging freed CPU cores and better cache locality to drive more workload traffic, while benefitting from vSphere DRS and vMotion.

By running infrastructure services on DPUs and isolating them from the workload domain, vSphere on DPUs will boost infrastructure security. Additionally, now in beta, NSX Distributed Firewall will offload to DPUs to scale customers’ security operations by securing East-West traffic at line rate without the need for software agents.

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. For DevOps teams, vSphere 8 will include VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0⁽³⁾—expanding Kubernetes capabilities to include multi-availability zones for improved resilience as well as simplified cluster lifecycle and package management. The new Cloud Consumption Interface service⁽³⁾ in vSphere 8 will provide developers and DevOps engineers a Kubernetes-based common API endpoint and UI that offers fast, easy access to IaaS services across VMware Cloud. Learn more in the vSphere 8 announcement blog.

Ecosystem Support: Read what partners are saying about vSphere with DPUs

• VMware vSAN 8: Through a next-generation storage platform optimized for modern hardware with hyperconverged infrastructure, vSAN 8 introduces breakthrough performance and hyper-efficiency. Built from the ground up, the new vSAN Express Storage Architecture™ 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.⁽⁴⁾ Additionally, customers will experience up to 40% lower TCO ⁽⁴⁾ through highly performant and efficient data protection and enhanced data compression with up to 4x greater efficiency.⁽⁴⁾ Customers will also see increased availability due to a new storage pool construct that provides smaller fault domains, faster resync times, and native snapshots delivering up to 100x faster operations.⁽⁴⁾

• VMware Cloud Foundation+: 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 enable customers to gain greater operational efficiencies through easy management of VM and container-based enterprise workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. Customers will be able to streamline maintenance windows and gain immediate access to new features and cloud services. VMware Cloud Foundation+ follows the recent introductions of vSphere+ and vSAN+.

• VMware Cloud for Hyperscalers: VMware and its public cloud partners continue to innovate in support of customers migrating and running enterprise workloads in the public cloud of their choice. VMware and AWS are showcasing the continued innovation and customer value the companies are delivering together. New capabilities in the jointly engineered VMware Cloud on AWS help customers accelerate enterprise cloud transformation. [read the press release] VMware also announced that customers will now be able to purchase Azure VMware Solution as part of VMware Cloud Universal program. [read the press release] Google Cloud VMware Engine will offer the option for running both VMs and containers on the same infrastructure with VMware Tanzu Standard Edition, provide new enterprise capabilities, continue to expand regionally, and more. [read the post] Oracle Cloud VMware Solution features new capabilities will include the newly validated and supported VMware Tanzu Standard Edition and introduce single host SDDCs. [read the post]

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Deploying and Operating Edge-Native Apps Across Multiple Clouds

Edge computing is the next evolution of the distributed digital enterprise with the fastest growing segment of workloads, with worldwide spending expected to be $176 billion in 2022 according to IDC.⁽⁵⁾ VMware enables organizations to run, manage and better secure edge-native apps across multiple clouds at both near edge and far edge locations. At VMware Explore 2022, VMware is introducing new and enhanced edge solutions purpose-built for edge-native apps and their unique performance, autonomy and latency requirements, including:

• VMware Edge Compute Stack 2: A fully integrated edge platform to operate modern, existing, and future edge-native applications, VMware Edge Compute Stack 2 will help customers address the needs of simplicity and scale at the edge. New capabilities will include support for smaller cluster sizes—1 control node and 1 worker node—to run containers efficiently on smaller COTS (commercial, off the shelf) hardware. Additionally, the release will also offer higher performance with GPU passthrough support to enable AI/ML use cases. Both of these features will be enabled by new functionality in VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0—helping bring simplicity and scale to the enterprise edge. Today, VMware Edge Compute Stack supports x86 hardware only. In a future release, 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. Read the VMware Edge Compute Stack 2 blog post.

  Customer quote: “Audi is revolutionizing factory automation with its rollout of Edge Cloud 4 Production,” said Henning Löser, head of Audi’s Production Lab. “Based on hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), Edge Cloud 4 Production servers in combination with virtual clients will replace countless expensive industrial PCs helping us save time and effort, particularly where software rollouts, operating system changes, and IT-related expenses are concerned. VMware Edge Compute Stack is helping us transform our shop floor environment with a scalable edge infrastructure that provides the foundation for Audi to continue transforming and consolidating shop floor applications.”

• Managed Edge Solution with NTT: VMware and NTT are announcing an expanded partnership that will define, create, and bring to market a fully-managed edge compute solution with private 5G connectivity, delivered by NTT across its global footprint and powered by VMware Edge Compute Stack. The joint offering will give enterprises the ability to deploy, manage and monitor applications closer to the edge than ever before. Read the NTT press release.

• 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. Building on VMware Edge Compute Stack, the service is seamlessly integrated with existing IT management platforms and incorporates VMware’s industry leading compute, network, security and edge intelligence solutions.

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