At the start of VMworld, VMware introduced both their new Cross-Cloud Services, as well as some of the services and technical previews which will be available out of the gate.

On Tuesday, VMware launched its VMworld 2021 event with CEO Raghu Ragharan, speaking in the opening keynote, highlighting the launch of VMware Cross-Cloud services, a new family of services to help build and run and secure customers’ apps across any cloud.

“This is a family of services to build and run your applications across any cloud,” Ragharan said.

He emphasized that Cross-Cloud Services would satisfy three core customer objectives.

“First, you will go faster, and this will accelerate your cloud journey,” Ragharan told his audience.

“Second, you will spend less, so you will spend less, so you will get big gains in efficiency, and third, you will Be Free, to run your applications across any cloud.”

Cross-Cloud Services have five core building blocks.

“We are bringing together a state of the art platform for building and deploying cloud-native apps,” said Joan Stone, VMware’s Senior Vice President and Chief Communications Officer. “We also have a cloud infrastructure for operating and running enterprise apps, and cloud management for monitoring and managing that performance and controlling the environment. Next is security and networking that spans across that multi cloud operation. And finally, we have a digital workspace that helps to empower distributed workforces, which obviously are rampant and growing right now.”

Stone said VMware is defining multi cloud as the use of two or more clouds that are obviously propelling a digital business and increasingly the edge.

“We’re seeing that our typical customers are using roughly 500 Apps on multiple clouds and you know those apps are running on rich and diverse clouds, and the apps are rich and diverse, so the opportunity for multi-cloud is huge,” she said. “At the same time, we obviously also know that it’s a complex and diverse environment. Enterprise architectures are much more distributed. Workloads are more diverse We’ve got cloud native. We’ve got core enterprise SaaS, and now again, apps at the edge. There’s a lot to manage, a lot to connect and a lot to secure, so that’s where we see an opportunity, as we have done in the past to help our customers work through this complexity to optimize as much as possible with this multi-cloud world.”

“Multi-cloud is all about embracing a single platform and a single set of cross-cloud services that can add value across the heterogeneous infrastructure stack, and this is a phenomenal opportunity for VMware,” said Matt Morgan, vice president of global marketing for VMware Cloud Services. “VMware cloud is built on the enterprise compute storage and networking of vSphere, NSX and vSAN. It also delivers workload mobility or technology that enables a workload to be moved without modification from one point of infrastructure to another, whether it’s across public clouds within the same public cloud or between a private cloud a data cloud or an edge cloud. We also include management, a very important piece, the ability to have a single pane of glass to see end to end for observability, operations and automation. Tanzu plays a huge role in VMware cloud. It facilitates our application layer combining our world class support for traditional applications and VMs with containerized support. Through this, organizations have the capability to modernize all of their applications, using the same consistent infrastructure management across all of their cloud ecosystems.”

Morgan noted that VMware Cloud Universal, a flexible subscription which enables acquiring credits in a subscription basis and, redeeming them for either a customer managed deployment or  a VMware managed deployment, has been a popular way to consume VMware cloud.

“We are now expanding this offer so those same credits can now be leveraged to be deployed to deploy Tanzu Standard,” he said. “This enables an organization to have one strategic investment that they can leverage, not just for infrastructure, but also for modernization of Kubernetes as needed, as they continue forward on their application modernization plans. We’re also expanding the distribution of VMware Cloud Universal, leveraging our partner ecosystem.”

Another key part of the expanded services is Tanzu Services, a fully managed service delivery Tanzu specifically for customers embracing communities and leveraging container-based development.

“This allows us to deliver Kubernetes clusters to developers in minutes, shrinking the time to value,” Morgan said. “It provides enterprise grade upstream conforming and fully managed Kubernetes services and provides a single pane of glass for customers to manage both their containers and VMs, through the familiar VCenter interface.

“We’re also announcing enhancements to VMware’s vRealize cloud management, the control plane,” Morgan continued. “Enhancements include support for all VMware cloud environments, including Azure VMware solution, Google cloud VMware engine, Oracle cloud VMware solution, integrated Kubernetes and Tanzu provisioning, NSX federation support and the new Skyline Advisor Pro to help prevent issues before they occur, to avoid costly and unplanned it downtime.”

New cloud services include new capabilities for VMware cloud on AWS, VMware’s preferred public cloud partner for vSphere-based workloads.

“This co-engineered service delivers a full VMware cloud stack or compute storage and networking on AWS global infrastructure,” Morgan said. “We are now  announcing that Tanzu Services will be now available in VMware cloud on AWS. We’re super excited about what this means for our customers, as they modernize their applications.

“There’s another announcement we are making with AWS and that’s in the local cloud arena,” Morgan said. “VMware cloud on AWS outposts will be announced as available in Q3 in F22. “This delivers the agility and innovation of VMware cloud as a service for private clouds or on-prem locations.”

Another local cloud service being announced is coming in partnership with Dell Technologies, to deliver cloud infrastructure on premises as a service, but operated and delivered by Dell Technologies.

“Like our other local cloud services, it will include our compute, storage and network technology, provide simple and consistent operations and allow you to subscribe operate and optimize and grow with self-service,” Morgan said. “But what’s unique about this is we integrate with the APEX cloud services, those Dell hardened enterprise cloud services. And together we’re delivering a great solution for hardened workloads, especially that leverage existing Dell architectures and Dell related processes. We think this is going to be a very popular local cloud solution.”

Morgan also discussed four new architecture announcements related to Cross-Cloud Services.

“Project Arctic, a technology preview, is the next evolution of vSphere,” he said. “Through the magic of a cloud in a connected architecture, we’re bringing new capabilities to vSphere. With Project Arctic, instances that are running vSphere based workloads can easily be extended. You can leverage cloud services whether they are a specific cloud service or cross-cloud services for any workload that’s running on vSphere, even ones that are running on premises. We provide more elasticity to the capacity that you may need by integrating cloud resources directly, and we have a new cloud control plane for global visibility management. We’re excited about what this means for the future of vSphere.”

Project Cascade is a next generation multi cloud consumption service entirely powered by Kubernetes.

“This new capability provides a Kubernetes API, not just for containerized workloads but to expose all of the infrastructure,” Morgan said. “Think about it. Developers who love to work with tools that interact directly with the Kubernetes API or access that API through their own personal tool sets can now do so and leverage infrastructure across a connected architecture, public cloud, private cloud, local cloud or edge cloud. This is a really exciting enhancement.”

Project Capitola is about software-defined memory implementation enabling memory intensive applications bringing the magic of virtualization to memory, to bring all of that value of virtualization and efficiencies that Vmware has brought to compute.

Finally, Project Ensemble is a single control plane for VMware cloud with a unified view across vRealize cloud management services, taking what was stovepipe services and bringing them together, so you have an innovative single control plan across the full stack.