Managing multicloud just got a lot easier; this is the key message coming from VMware’s vFORUM, which was held in Sandton and served to echo the announcements from the recent VMware Explore event in the US.
“The biggest message out of Explore was that last year we launched projects. This year, it’s about how we’ve landed them as products,” says regional MD VMware Sub-Saharan Africa Lorna Hardie opening the local event.
Given the drive to digital and widening adoption of cloud, specific skills shortages faced, and organisational siloes, there’s a need to remove complexities and move to a smart cloud model, she says. “There’s skills specific to each of the different clouds, but VMware has created a common platform for cloud, that frees developers and allows them to operate in any environment and across any cloud.”
Multicloud provides significant benefits for organisations, such as being immensely scalable, providing global availability, and rich sets of developer services, says Ian Jansen van Rensburg, chief technologist and SE director, VMware Sub-Saharan Africa. But adopting multicloud brings new challenges, he says, such as which apps should be deployed on which cloud. Where apps are placed may be determined by the developer, leading to a lack of central oversight. How are policies consistently applied across clusters and clouds?
He says that as far back as 2001, VMware developed its ESX hypervisor as part of its early work in virtualisation, and in so doing the company shaped the way ‘we view IT today’. “VMware provided a virtualisation layer on top of hardware, so it could be managed as one.”
He continues: “The typical cloud journey today starts with a ‘cloud first’ approach, then we reach ‘cloud chaos’ with many clouds, but we want to get to a ‘cloud smart’ state. To get there we need an abstraction layer, like a hypervisor, to simplify and unify.”
This is where the Aria cloud management portfolio, which was introduced in 2021 as Project Ensemble and officially launched at last month’s VMware Explore, fits in. Jansen van Rensburg describes the solution as a ‘game-changer’, and in a bit of history repeating, he says it will ‘change the way we know IT today’.
Aria enables VMware mulitcloud infrastructure, meaning that applications can be moved across any cloud and managed centrally. And with Aria Graph, visibility can be improved, so even costs can be determined before the move of applications to different clouds.
“This technology will reinvent where we go next within IT and cloud environments. It will provide guardrails to match your configuration across clouds, and configures the whole environment.”
He says people may think that Aria is simply a rebrand of vRealize (a datacentre and hybrid cloud management solution), but it has been completely developed from the ground up and will provide a ‘constant look and feel’ across any cloud environment.
VMware on all the cloud providers
Discovery is a significant VMware customer and the company’s senior manager: platform services, Johan Marais explains the multicloud benefits experienced from VMware’s solutions. He says that, at Discovery, a software development function sits in each of the business units across the group and is often separate from the central IT function. There have also been siloes within the IT function, such as a storage team, Linux team, and so on. The new mulitcloud world challenges siloes, he says.
“We use four public cloud providers (Oracle, AWS, Azure and Google) with some stuff on-prem. For a specific region, the workload dictates where it goes, and depending on a use case determines what we do with it.
He cites an example of when the team moved a whole datacentre over a weekend, without official approval and nobody knew about it. “On the Sunday morning, it was successful, but we thought ‘as nobody had said yes, it was best to move the stuff back’, so we did that all over a weekend. Our choice wasn’t driven by using cloud-native services, the strategy was to alleviate datacentre pressures and enable further redundancy, so we chose to remain on VMware, and having VMware on all the cloud providers, gives us that choice.
“It was a natural decision as the team didn’t have to develop a new skill, and the development teams didn’t have to develop new solutions that were cloud-native,” says Marais.
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