At VMworld 2015 Europe, VMware has announced enhancements to its unified hybrid cloud platform. These enhancements would accelerate application development, delivery and deployment, while also providing deeper insights into customers’ hybrid cloud deployments.
VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform enables customers to create one consistent environment based on VMware vSphere across their private and public cloud deployments. VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform is built on a software-defined data center architecture. It offers customers openness and choice in how to build and manage applications and cloud environments based on their needs.
vCloud Air and vCloud Air Network
As part of VMware’s enhancements to its hybrid cloud platform, the company has introduced new updates to VMware vCloud Air and VMware vCloud Air Network. New or expanded offerings include:
Google Cloud DNS – VMware vCloud Air and Google Cloud Platform are delivered through a single hybrid cloud service. Google Cloud DNS can offer organizations access to a globally distributed, low-latency DNS service with high availability and scalability as well as ease of manageability. The service would provide reliable, resilient, low-latency DNS serving from Google’s global network of Anycast DNS servers.
Google Cloud DNS would make it simpler for customers to host web-facing applications on VMware vCloud Air. It would also solve an important challenge for organizations looking to move their email servers to the cloud. Additionally, the service can be customized 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 hosting services that are hybrid-aware and ideal for enterprise-class organizations. 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 organization Virtual Data Center (vDC) templates, VMware vSphere vApp enhancements and OAuth Support for Identity Sources. These new additions would help Service Providers drive operational efficiency and provide new capabilities for customers.
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 hosting service operations through interactive metrics, event logs and user-defined alarms for flexibility and cost optimization. The service will give information on the infrastructure, application health and platform performance, enable granularity, retention and services monitoring, and helps optimize cloud spend by enabling high utilization of cloud infrastructure.
Enhanced Identity Access Management will enable customers of VMware vCloud Air with a single identity, single sign-on, unified authorization, 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.
Project Michigan
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 containerized 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 at VMworld 2015 Europe 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, optimized virtual machine migration and network and policy extension, and advanced peering and transit.
“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 organizations 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.”
