Introducing VMware Cloud: Multi-Cloud Services for Any App in Any Cloud – VMware Cloud Community

Infrastructure and App Modernization Challenges

Today we see incredible demand for digital–first services, from telemedicine to distance learning to touchless systems in retail and financial services. But the reality is the pace of business-wide transformation is stalled as customers contend with applications in different environments and different stages of modernization.

Most organizations are already using multiple clouds depending upon application type, cloud capabilities and organizational preferences. Factors such as M&A, compliance, data sovereignty, and licensing practicality make this even more common.

“A multi-cloud environment, underpinned by VMware, allows our IT team to support the nimble development of valuable new products and services for our insurance agents and customers.” –Jeff Shaw, Executive Vice President and CIO, EMPLOYERS

Regardless, the message is clear, the apps and services powering businesses today simply must evolve to meet the needs of the business in the future.

We see a model for cloud that is both increasingly distributed and diverse – with apps deployed across a range of public clouds, within the data center and at the edge – but unified with centralized management and operations, centralized governance, and security.

“We aim to have a distributed IT environment across multiple private and public clouds—which ultimately keeps our operations more secure and available” – BJ Gardner, Lead Systems Architect, Pennsylvania Lumbermens Mutual Insurance Company

This distributed multi-cloud model delivers the flexibility to build and run any application in the best environment, and access to the vast array of innovation from cloud providers, along with a unified model for security and operations at the level that enterprises demand.

“We were able get to the public cloud quickly without having to upskill our engineering teams to learn another cloud environment. To date we’ve migrated more than 3,000 VMs and hundreds of applications. Now we have more elastic scale, with the ability to roll out services quickly and consistently across the VMware Cloud platform.” – Sarah Lucas, Head of Infrastructure and Platforms, William Hill

This is the vision for VMware Cloud and our very own Raghu Raghuram, COO of VMware Products and Cloud Services has shared his thoughts on this vision in recent blog post The Distributed, Multi-Cloud Era Has Arrived.

What is VMware Cloud?

VMware Cloud is the result of over two decades of innovation with our VMware Cloud Foundation stack that is supporting over 300,000 organizations, powering over 85+ million workloads, and providing a platform to over 5+ million developers to build the next generation of modern applications and services.

Our goal for VMware Cloud has been to deliver on consistent infrastructure and consistent operations, enabled through a unified service for customers to manage their deployments and applications, spanning all locations and clouds.  The VMware Cloud journey started back in 2017 when we first launched VMware Cloud on AWS, the industry leading, jointly engineered cloud service with AWS.  Since that time, we have launched hundreds of new features and expanded to 17 global regions.  VMware Cloud on AWS was the start of our hybrid and multi-cloud journey. In 2019, we shared our vision of the VMware Hybrid Cloud Platform that would empower our customers and partners to deliver the future of Hybrid IT. Continuing the momentum, we launched VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, enabling a true hybrid cloud experience for the modern IT team. In 2020, we delivered on the initial part of the VMware Cloud vision, with the introduction of the VMware Cloud Launchpad, a consolidated landing page and starting point designed to help customers get started quickly on the latest VMware Cloud solutions and infrastructure services.

Figure 1 – VMware Cloud Timeline

Today, we are excited to launch the next evolution of VMware Cloud^™, as the true multi-cloud service for all apps across data center, edge, and public cloud environments. VMware Cloud enables modular, multi-cloud infrastructure, app, and management services that accelerate app modernization and cloud transformation to deliver innovation for customers faster than ever. VMware Cloud is the modern infrastructure that delivers the flexibility to build, deliver, and operate any application running in VMware’s SDDC-powered clouds, providing IT organizations with the choice of where to run and modernize their applications depending on their specific business needs and requirements.

VMware Cloud has evolved to become the top-level service for infrastructure and solutions.  VMware Cloud enables a true “Any Cloud” experience through a unified control plane, the VMware Cloud Console, accessible through https://vmc.vmware.com.  The VMC Console is the primary management interface for VMware Cloud, providing common functionality across all the service offerings.  The VMC Console provides central visibility and control of infrastructure and management services and includes core functionality across all services including inventory and subscription management, notifications, and other common features. The VMC Console also includes a rich set of APIs, SDK, and CLI automation tools, exposed through common endpoints for infrastructure management.  Learn more at the VMware Cloud Service Description, Docs, and Release Notes.

As part of our latest release, the VMware Cloud service includes three different SDDC-based infrastructure offerings that can be created, ordered, or registered within the VMware Cloud console:

VMware Cloud on AWS – VMware Cloud on AWS – VMware’s enterprise class VMware Cloud infrastructure software running on the AWS Cloud. Extend on-premises vSphere environments and access the global footprint and native services of AWS, currently operating across 17 AWS regions today and more coming in future.  Learn more at the VMware Cloud on AWS Service Description, Docs, and Release Notes.

VMware Cloud on Dell EMC – Fully VMware-managed VMware Cloud service providing a simple, secure, and scalable VMware Cloud infrastructure for on-premises data center and edge locations. Learn more at the VMware Cloud on Dell EMC Service Description, Docs, and Release Notes.

VMware Cloud Foundation Subscription – Our newest SDDC choice, this is a customer-managed hybrid cloud platform delivering integrated compute, storage, and networking infrastructure for modernizing data centers and deploying modern applications.  Through VMware Cloud, customers now have access to VMware Cloud Foundation through a subscription purchase, with the ability to register VCF deployments to VMware Cloud inventory.  Learn more at the VMware Cloud Foundation landing page.

These three different infrastructure services provide customers with the choice and flexibility to run their applications in the public cloud or on-premises, and to choose fully VMware-managed or customer-managed cloud.  Customers can spend flexibly across any of these three infrastructure services, and each can be purchased and managed consistently through the VMC Console and through common SDDC management APIs.  VMware Cloud presents a unified view of SDDC inventory, with deployments spanning multiple infrastructure services:

As part of VMware Cloud Foundation Subscription purchases, customers gain access to vRealize Cloud Universal and Tanzu Standard Edition:

vRealize Cloud Universal – SaaS management suite designed to accelerate cloud evolution, combining SaaS and on-premises capabilities for automation, operations, and log analytics.  vRealize Cloud Universal can be deployed on-premises or as SaaS, and allows customers to move between the two without additional purchase, for a consistent multi-cloud management experience.

VMware Tanzu Standard Edition – Simplifies the operation of Kubernetes for multi-cloud deployments, centralizing management and governance for many clusters and teams across on-premises, public clouds, and edge.

In addition to the infrastructure and management services above, customers can also leverage additional VMware service offerings as part of VMware Cloud, including migration services available through VMware Cloud Sizer, VMware HCX, and VMware vRealize Network Insight, as well as Disaster Recovery services available through VMware Site Recovery and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery.

Accelerating your Infrastructure and App Modernization

Are you ready to get started on your Infrastructure and Application Modernization Journey? If so, here are some useful resources to help you quickly get started:

Learning More

Explore and learn about all the different VMware infrastructure services and solutions by visiting the VMware Cloud Launchpad. To help customers quickly achieve their business outcomes for modernizing their infrastructure and applications, VMware has recently launched the VMware Cloud Ready Framework (VMCRF) which provide comprehensive guidance and best practices in partnership with the various public cloud providers to support our customers throughout their multi-cloud journey. For more details, please refer to this blog post for all the new educational and technical collateral that is now available.

Figure 2 – VMware Cloud Ready Framework (VMCRF)

How to Buy

The current evolution of VMware Cloud can be purchased through the newly announced VMware Cloud Universal program. VMware Cloud Universal is a flexible program that simplifies the purchase of VMware Cloud infrastructure services and management services across multi-cloud environments, providing customers with choice and flexibility in how they adopt VMware Cloud modular offerings over time and at their own pace. A key component of VMware Cloud Universal is the Cloud Acceleration Benefit (CAB), a new program designed to offer customers an incentive to move from their existing perpetual licenses to a VMware Cloud subscription offering. VMware Cloud Universal also includes VMware Success 360, a comprehensive success offering that allows customers to realize value from their investment in VMware Cloud and achieve outcomes faster.  VMware Success 360 provides VMware Cloud Universal customers with dedicated success planning for their multi-cloud journey. To learn more about VMware Cloud Universal, visit http://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-universal.html.

Additional Resources