VMware Explore: key announcements and highlights

VMware Explore is a yearly gathering of experts and clients. It kicked off its 2023 season with a raft of announcements and upgrades. Learn more.

VMware is on tour! Its series of VMware Explore regional conferences kicked off last month in Las Vegas, with future events planned in Barcelona, Singapore, Sao Paolo and Tokyo.

VMware Explore is an annual gathering of industry experts and VMware clients – and this year, the industry-leading virtualisation firm unveiled several exciting upgrades and service announcements.

The focus is on multi-cloud and edge computing, along with a sharpened spotlight on product lifecycle management.

The flagship announcement was a new suite of offerings that aim to optimise cloud-native app performance and management across multi-cloud environments.

These environments are now an essential part of digital transformation. VMware research shows that 70% of CIOs are now developing cloud-native apps. These have all but replaced traditional apps for many enterprises worldwide.

Similarly, "multi-cloud environment" isn't quite a tautology – but it's getting there.

Today's forward-thinking businesses are hell-bent on modernising their apps – and to this end are embracing artificial intelligence, machine learning, open-source solutions, multi-cloud environments and Kubernetes.

As VMware's Purnima Padmanabhan puts it:

"Applications are a driving force behind the most innovative businesses and best-in-class customer experiences. Delivering apps at scale can be an immense undertaking and it is becoming increasingly complex. Our goal is to increase our customers' business agility by accelerating application development, delivery and management."

Let's take a deeper dive into how VMware is realising this goal.

Tanzu Application Platform

VMware's Tanzu is a platform engineering environment that helps developers customise and streamline app delivery.

Its Application Platform takes its rolled-out Kubernetes capabilities and folds them into cutting-edge innovations in platform engineering and operations.

VMware's latest offering includes – among much else – VMware Tanzu Application Engine (beta), enhanced multi-cloud Kubernetes operations and a portal for developers.

VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia

This new service allows enterprises to use private data with the latest in generative AI. It's a single-stack solution that hooks up software and hardware with generative AI large language models.

This has the versatility that today's businesses take as read. It can be run on-premises, in the data centre, in the cloud or at the edge.

Networking

NSX is one of VMware's flagship products. We've written elsewhere about how it can help enterprises with both their cloud security posture and overall agility.

As the name suggests, NSX+ is not an entirely new offering, but rather a much-anticipated upgrade. It's now a cloud-managed solution for network and security operations, bringing security policy management closer to a central point of command.

It also deepens NSX's existing network and application visibility offering, spreading its network detection and response capabilities across today's multi-cloud environments.

NSX+ will be available to existing NSX customers as an upgrade. New members of the VMware family will be able to sign up for a free trial or full paid service.

What does this mean in practice? VMware believes that NSX+ will make IT technicians breathe a sigh of relief as its existing capabilities become manageable with a single click.

It also has positive security implications, bringing zero-trust principles into hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Zero-trust is the principle that every user and device is suspect. It's like a digital bouncer at the door of a nightclub called "The Cloud" who checks everyone's ID – no exceptions.

This means network managers can stay abreast of access permissions at all times. There's less and less wiggle room for bad actors to get in through the back door.

In another bid to simplify network and security operations, NSX+ is operable across AWS, Azure and other big-name public cloud platforms.

At Ascend Cloud Solutions, we're hot on NSX – so we'll keep you posted as we learn more.

Another network announcement relates to VPCs (virtual private clouds). These allow developers to automate the selection of cloud resources for applications on a case-by-case basis – a blessing for innovation, performance and the end-user experience.

Finally, VMware has announced its Private Mobile Network Service, bringing it squarely into the game with industry players like Cisco and Cradlepoint.

This network service will be a managed private mobile connectivity service for enterprises. As with the Private AI Foundation, it will be used in both on-premise and cloud environments.

VMware will provide the orchestration layer and, together with Federated Wireless, will build and run the necessary 4G and 5G network infrastructure.

Security

As well as the pivot towards zero-trust, VMware also announced improvements to its ransomware-recovery-as-a-service solution which launched last year.

When it comes to recovering from a ransomware attack, speed is of the essence. VMware is laser-focused on narrowing the gap between attack and recovery.

It does this by enabling workflow automation to isolate recovery environments. It's a form of digital hygiene – quarantining infected zones to keep them safe from reinfection.

VMware's Mark Chuang describes the journey that the company has been on to help customers deal with ransomware attacks, especially those that use so-called "file-less" techniques:

"[H]ere at Explore Vegas, we announced additional innovations on top of our existing ransomware-as-a-recovery service in order to continue to shorten the amount of downtime by accelerating the recovery rates."

One of the cloud's biggest advantages is its ability to minimise downtime – and VMware's ransomware recovery service forms an important part of this broader mission.

These "additional innovations" include support for concurrent multi-VM recovery operations – like having your leg and neck operated on at once. The result? Improved efficiency and a faster bounce-back from ransomware attacks.

Progress has also been made in VMware's XDR (extended detection and response) offering – the enigmatically titled "Carbon Black".

This solution is now applicable to cloud-native apps. Environments rich in containers and micro-services have a number of benefits – but they can be vulnerable to hackers.

This enhanced XDR service, then, will be a breath of fresh air for enterprises on the cutting edge of cloud-managed services.

What's next?

VMware Explore 2023 underlines the company's commitment to meeting the demands of digital transformation in the multi-cloud era. As these solutions are rolled out, we'll let you know all the juicy details.

Are you looking for a cloud migration partner? At Ascend, we're VMware cloud experts who have managed over 400 successful migrations and counting. Get in touch today for a no-obligation consultation.