Introducing VMware Cloud Universal – VMware Cloud Community

The VMware Flexible Subscription for Multi-Cloud

Embracing cloud technologies in the planning of future-state architectures is critical to help organizations deliver and capture the benefits of digital transformation. Cloud technology allows companies to accelerate innovation, rapidly scale, increase business agility, modernize operations, and reduce costs.

Today we are excited to share two announcements!

• VMware Cloud™ (the “Service Offering” or “VMC”)  is a distributed, multi-cloud platform that enables organizations to accelerate application modernization across the data center, edge, and any cloud. It provides distinctive advantages to both developers and IT operators who are often forced to make tradeoffs. VMware Cloud boosts developer productivity by enabling them to build and deploy to any cloud. The platform enables IT to modernize infrastructure and operations with better economics and less risk. With the launch of VMware Cloud, VMware is announcing new offerings that bring a more integrated experience to customers. Learn more.
• VMware Cloud Universal™ – a new flexible subscription offering that delivers enterprise-class multi-cloud infrastructure and operations by combining compute, storage, networking, management, and modern application services with customer entitlements to flexibly deploy VMware Cloud infrastructure across private cloud, local cloud, and public cloud.

This blog focuses on VMware Cloud Universal, and a future blog will dive deeper into the VMware Cloud service capabilities. In this blog, we will explore VMware Cloud Universal and how customers will benefit from this new offering- but first, let’s understand the customer backdrop.

Customer Challenges

Customers’ environments have become increasingly heterogeneous. Organizations evaluate whether to keep their workloads on-premises or migrate to the public cloud and, if they migrate, which public cloud best meets their needs. They also must consider whether they continue purchasing traditional IT, operated and managed by the customer’s IT team or transition to an integrated managed services infrastructure. Another decision variable is how their IT purchasing model may need to shift from a perpetual/capex model to a subscription/opex model over time. And lastly, IT needs to make investments that can meet today’s needs and give them the flexibility to evolve in the future as IT requirements change.

The plethora of choices in terms of vendors and deployment scenarios can be daunting for IT teams. Common roadblocks include uncertain timelines and long-running migrations, operational consistency and control, vendor lock-in, and tough choices between on-premises, public cloud, and application modernization projects.  Organizations need a solution that allows them to adopt one or more clouds on their terms, provide unified infrastructure and operations, and support any application on any cloud.

Introducing VMware Cloud Universal

VMware Cloud Universal allows customers to establish a flexible commercial agreement with VMware to commit once and consume VMware Cloud offerings dynamically, as their needs evolve. The commercial structure of the program offers three key benefits.

1. Choice and Flexibility is designed to allow customers to enter into a multi-year, dollar-based commitment contract based on an initial estimate of their deployment needs. Customers have the choice and flexibility to redeem those dollars towards any eligible program offer at any time during the contract duration.
2. The Convertibility benefit is a unique value for customers that are uncertain about their cloud migration plans. Convertibility provides customers with the ability to convert and apply unused on-premises VCF-Subscription deployments towards a new VMware Cloud on AWS or VMware Cloud on Dell EMC subscription.
3. Cloud Acceleration Benefit (CAB) is a new program designed to offer customers an incentive to migrate from their existing perpetual licenses to a VMware Cloud subscription offering.

What’s Under the Umbrella of VMware Cloud Universal?

VMware Cloud Universal offers the following modern infrastructure services:

• VMware Cloud Foundation Subscription (VCF-Subscription)
  • A new subscription offering, with a customer-managed hybrid cloud platform delivering integrated compute, storage, and networking infrastructure for modernizing data centers and deploying modern applications.
• VMware Cloud on AWS
  • Fully managed VMware Cloud service running on elastic AWS bare-metal hardware available in 17 global regions. Allows customers to extend on-premises vSphere environments and access the global footprint and native services of AWS.
• VMware Cloud on Dell EMC
  • Fully managed VMware Cloud service providing a simple, secure, and scalable VMware Cloud infrastructure for customer’s on-premises datacenter and edge locations.

In addition to the core infrastructure offerings above, customers can leverage VMware Cloud migration services with VMware Cloud Sizer, VMware HCX, VMware vRealize Network Insight, and Disaster Recovery services – VMware Site Recovery and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery.

Additional Technology Offerings within VMware Cloud Universal

• VMware Tanzu
  • VMware Tanzu Standard Edition, included with VCF-Subscription, 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.
• vRealize Cloud Universal
  • SaaS management suite designed to accelerate cloud evolution combining SaaS and on-premises capabilities for automation, operations, and log analytics into one license to accelerate the business transition to the cloud.
• VMware Success 360
  • A key component of VMware Cloud Universal, Success 360 is a comprehensive success offering that allows customers to realize value from their investment in VMware Cloud and achieve outcomes faster.

VMware Cloud – Central Visibility and Control

To manage infrastructure entitlements and multi-cloud assets, customers can take advantage of the VMware Cloud Console. The VMC Console provides central visibility and control of your infrastructure and operations.  You can streamline the deployment and configuration of VMware Cloud Services by accessing a rich set of APIs, SDK, and CLI automation tools, all exposed through common endpoints for infrastructure and application management. The console also features the VMware Cloud Launchpad, a consolidated started point designed to help customers explore and deploy the latest VMware Cloud Solutions.

In part two of this blog coming later this week, we’ll take a more in-depth look at the VMware Cloud Console and VMware Cloud Services.

Key VMware Cloud Universal Use Cases

• Create a Future-Proof Hybrid Cloud Architecture: Customize your journey to the cloud and balance your investments across on-premises and public cloud with consistent infrastructure and operations.
• Migrate to the Cloud on Your Timeline: Migrate to the cloud at your own pace. Embrace the public cloud as needs evolve and preserve the ability to migrate using a phased approach.
• Leverage Burst Capacity During Peak Demand Periods: Seamlessly expand and take advantage of global cloud infrastructure to access additional resources during periods of increased demand.

Next Steps

Additional Resources