VMware announced enhancements to the company’s unified hybrid cloud platform that will accelerate application development, delivery and deployment, while also providing deeper insights into customers’ hybrid cloud deployments.

“Enterprises are looking to move their applications to the cloud, and increasingly see a hybrid strategy to cloud adoption as the right answer,” said Bill Fathers, executive vice president and general manager, Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware. “VMware’s approach is about empowering organisations to securely build, run and deliver any application across any environment. Our public cloud, vCloud Air, and global service provider ecosystem, vCloud Air Network, form the core components of our Unified Hybrid Cloud and remove that compromise from consideration.”

VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform enables customers to create one consistent environment based on VMware vSphere across the private and public cloud to securely build, run and deliver any traditional or cloud-native application. VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform is built on a software-defined data centre architecture, and offers customers openness and choice in how to build and manage applications and cloud environments based on their needs.

New updates for VMware vCloud Air and VMware vCloud Air Network

As part of the announcements, VMware introduced new updates to VMware vCloud Air and VMware vCloud Air Network. New or expanded offerings include:

• Google Cloud DNS: With the upcoming general availability of Google Cloud DNS, organisations will continue to benefit from the combination of VMware vCloud Air and Google Cloud Platform in a single hybrid cloud service. Google Cloud DNS will offer organisations access to a globally distributed, low-latency DNS service with high availability and scalability as well as ease of manageability. The service will provide reliable, resilient, low-latency DNS serving from Google’s global network of Anycast DNS servers.  Google Cloud DNS will make it simpler for customers to host web-facing applications on VMware vCloud Air and will solve an important challenge for organisations looking to move their email servers to the cloud. Additionally, the service can be customised using a scriptable command-line interface, Developer's Console UI, or REST API.
• VMware vCloud Director 8: The new release of VMware vCloud Director enables Service Providers in the VMware vCloud Air Network to build differentiated cloud services that are hybrid-aware and ideal for enterprise-class organisations. VMware vCloud Director enables service providers with tools to deliver robust and secure self-service cloud orchestration capabilities to their end customers. Among the enhancements of this release include support for vSphere 6 and VMware NSX 6.1.4, the addition of organisation Virtual Data Centre (vDC) templates, VMware vSphere vApp enhancements and OAuth Support for Identity Sources. These new additions help Service Providers drive operational efficiency and provide new capabilities for customers. Learn more about VMware vCloud Director here.
• VMware vCloud Air Monitoring Insight and Enhanced Identity Access Management: VMware is providing new resources to have greater transparency and deeper integration with VMware vCloud Air. VMware vCloud Air Monitoring Insight will provide analytics into cloud service operations through interactive metrics, event logs and user-defined alarms for flexibility and cost optimisation. The service will give information on the infrastructure, application health and platform performance, enable granularity, retention and services monitoring, and helps optimise cloud spend by enabling high utilisation of cloud infrastructure. Enhanced Identity Access Management will enable customers of VMware vCloud Air with a single identity, single sign-on, unified authorisation, governance and role management. Now users can extend management capabilities from on-premises identity services to VMware vCloud Air and simplify how IT controls user management using token authentication. 
• VMware vSphere Integrated Containers: VMware is announcing plans to build upon the existing support for VMware Photon OS on the VMware vCloud Air platform by adding support for VMware vSphere Integrated Containers on VMware vCloud Air. With this support, VMware will enable IT teams to support any application, including containerised applications, on a common infrastructure running on VMware vCloud Air. This support can accelerate container initiatives by enabling IT teams to take advantage of their existing investments in VMware infrastructure, people, processes and management tools, while enabling developers to leverage a variety of container orchestration solutions from ecosystem partners.
• Unveiled today as a technology preview, Project Michigan extends the capabilities of Advanced Networking Services and Hybrid Cloud Manager to all VMware vCloud Air services. Project Michigan enables access to elastic Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand, with the ability to spin up thousands of virtual machines on a pay-as-you-go basis, integrated with secure connectivity, optimised virtual machine migration and network and policy extension, and advanced peering and transit.

The advantages to VMware’s approach to the public cloud

Organisations are moving to a hybrid IT environment using VMware’s public cloud, vCloud Air, as well as VMware vCloud Air Network, an ecosystem of over 4,000 service providers located in more than 100 countries offering VMware-based cloud services. VMware vCloud Air is a public cloud that enables organisations to quickly and safely take advantage of the public cloud benefits, with a consistent experience for IT and developers. Application processes and time-to-value are streamlined with VMware vCloud Air while security and performance are maintained.

VMware vCloud Air Network, a global network of validated cloud services based on VMware technologies, enables data sovereignty while providing a wide range of cloud services and vertical market expertise. The network provides specialised compliance and certifications from small-to-medium businesses to Fortune 500s. Both VMware vCloud Air and VMware vCloud Air Network help organisations address the risks and uncertainties of commodity public clouds and incompatible hybrid clouds with robust and secure, infrastructure services.

Analyst, Customer and Partner Perspectives

VMware vCloud Air

“Hybrid clouds enable enterprise IT and developers to leverage public cloud’s speed and agility with existing on-premises tools, systems and policies. With the move to the cloud, CIOs and IT executives are looking to simplify operations, make infrastructure decisions that can scale to demand and deliver a solid return on investment. VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform helps businesses remain competitive through this transformative IT period.” – Melanie Posey, Research Vice President, Hosting & Managed Network Services, IDC

“The number of websites we run is vast. When our websites are down, we’re losing money every single minute. Choosing VMware vCloud Air, it was a fairly straightforward choice after looking at the numbers. It was the automation, replication that we knew was happening in a specified time period that made it a simple choice for us.” – Schalk Van der Merwe, CIO, The Hut Group

“New College Durham offers a broad range of courses to a mixed student base, comprised of part-time and full-time students, so this requires a flexible IT function to support our heterogeneous learning environment. Our complex structure put sustained pressure on our IT team to multitask across the full spectrum of tasks. We wanted a solution which could be operated using the same tools and skills that our IT team was used to. VMware vCloud Air offered this, and it also provided the added benefit of being underpinned by comprehensive and fair service level agreements - meaning the college felt safe that the solution would be able to deliver exactly what it had promised.” – George Wraith, Head of ICT, New College Durham

VMware vCloud Air Network

"A hybrid cloud approach offers a real and long term solution to the challenges faced by many IT teams who have a varied estate and a wide range of applications on which their business depends to support. Claranet offers our customers the flexibility to select the appropriate cloud infrastructure solution and the ability to secure and control high-performance delivery of workloads. As a partner in the VMware vCloud Air Network, Claranet helps enterprises leverage their existing VMware implementations in combination with Claranet's hosting capabilities to support their cloud computing objectives. Working closely with VMware, we enable our customer's IT teams to focus on the applications and data their organisations need to grow." –Neil Thomas, Product and Marketing Director, Claranet Limited

"The VMware vCloud Air Network helps OVH deliver enhanced hybrid cloud solutions to our global customers. The network gives us access to expert resources that enable businesses to take the optimal steps in their managed cloud journey. Our customers can rely on us to provide robust, highly available and secure services so they can focus on their business." – Laurent Allard, CEO, OVH

“European enterprises of all sizes are transforming their existing traditional IT into a state-of-the-art, highly flexible IT infrastructure. T-Systems as part of Deutsche Telekom Group, has developed a hybrid cloud portfolio of products based upon VMware technology. This hybrid infrastructure as a service offering helps address the European market needs and helps customers maintain control of an internally managed cloud while relying on an external private or public cloud as needed. This approach enables organisations to seamlessly extend their existing on-premises VMware infrastructure into the cloud. With use cases from 10 to 10,000 systems, T-Systems captures new routes to markets combined with new levels of operational efficiency and quality.” – Ralf Poggemann, Digital Division, Cloud Partner Products and Ecosystems, T-Systems

Pricing and Availability

• VMware vCloud Director 8 is generally available.
• VMware vCloud Air Monitoring Insight and Enhanced Identity Access Management are expected to be generally available for VMware vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud in Q4 2015.
• Google Cloud DNS on VMware vCloud Air is expected to be generally available in H1 2016.
• Expanded support for vSphere Integrated Containers on VMware vCloud Air is expected to be available in 2016.

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