VMware stakes out its position across clouds, containers, edge
How does a platform vendor that started by creating virtual machines for on-prem devices become a multi-cloud player for containers and Kubernetes? VMware set out to answer that question at VMworld 2021. VMware’s focus on the virtual conference was a series of projects that reflect a new strategy. That strategy involves making its VM architecture operate across a variety of external services and platforms, including Kubernetes, to appeal to its traditional user base as well as developers.
VMworld keynotes concentrated mostly on projects in technical preview:
Project Arctic is vSphere-as-a-service. Arctic is planned as a simple way to use VMware across clouds. This will enable IT admins to expand capacity on-demand anywhere through one interface. Arctic is a major part of VMware’s strategy to move towards a subscription and SaaS model. It is also a key piece of what VMware calls its Cross-Cloud Services.
Project Capitola is virtual persistent memory management. The goal is to provide the best price-performance for current and emerging memory tiers such as DRAM, PMEM and NVMe. Project Capitola will be released in phases with the initial release focusing on tiering at the host level and subsequent releases extending capabilities to the cluster level.
Project Cascade is a unified Kubernetes interface for delivering infrastructure-as-a-service and containers-as-a-service through VMware Cloud. This allows developers to consume VMs and containers on-demand through a self-service Kubernetes interface. At the same time, IT ops can use resources from VMware Cloud while enforcing policies and governance.
Project Ensemble is a SaaS cloud management platform. This will be a dashboard to consolidate elements such as metrics and logs, tracking change events, and determining the impact of outages. The goal is to provide one view across VMware’s vRealize cloud management services. The tech preview will be available for VMware Cloud on AWS.
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