At its annual conference in San Francisco this week, VMware announced a set of networking and security innovations centered around the “multi-cloud universe,” including the release of vSphere 8 and vSAN 8, its flagship compute and storage solutions.
“Whether you’re a challenger born in the cloud or an established player, the ultimate destination for customers is a multi-cloud environment that empowers teams to accelerate their digital innovation,” said Raghu Raghuram, CEO, VMware.
Highlights:
vSphere 8 DPUs: The new release brings data processing units (DPUs) into the fold along with CPUs and GPUs to help supercharge workload performance. vSphere on DPUs, previously known as Project Monterey, was developed in partnership with AMD, Intel and NVIDIA as well as OEM system partners Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo. It enables the offloading and acceleration network and security infrastructure functions onto DPUs from CPUs. Customer applications that need high network bandwidth and fast cache access such as in-memory databases can expect better efficiency in CPU cores and higher transaction rates with lower latency. Running infrastructure services on DPUs and isolating them from the workload domain, will also benefit infrastructure security.
vSphere 8 GPUs: the new release doubles the virtual GPU devices per VM, delivering a 4x increase of passthrough devices, and supporting vendor device groups which enable binding of high-speed networking devices and the GPU. For DevOps teams, vSphere 8 will include VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0(3)—expanding Kubernetes capabilities to include multi-availability zones for improved resilience as well as simplified cluster lifecycle and package management.
VMware vSAN 8: a new vSAN Express Storage Architecture is designed to enhance the performance, storage efficiency, data protection and management of vSAN running on the latest generation storage devices. vSAN 8 promises up to a 4x performance boost and increased availability due to a new storage pool construct that provides smaller fault domains, faster resync times, and native snapshots delivering up to 100x faster operations.
VMware Edge Compute Stack 2: new support for smaller cluster sizes to run containers efficiently on smaller COTS (commercial, off the shelf) hardware. Additionally, the release will also offer higher performance with GPU passthrough support to enable AI/ML use cases. In a future release, VMware, for the first time, will introduce initial support for non-x86 processor-based specialized small form factor edge platforms to simultaneously run IT/OT workloads and workflows on a single stack.
VMware Private Mobile Network (Beta): a new managed service from VMware that provides enterprises with private 4G/5G mobile connectivity in support of edge-native applications. VMware will empower partners with a single PMN orchestrator to operate multi-tenant private 4G/5G networks with an enterprise-grade solution. Building on VMware Edge Compute Stack, the service is seamlessly integrated with existing IT management platforms and incorporates VMware’s compute, network, security and edge intelligence solutions.
Project Northstar for multi-cloud networking, security and end-to-end visibility: Representing an advancement of its NSX platform, Project Northstar aims to transform how enterprises consume networking and security in a multi-cloud world. Project Northstar offers a centralized cloud-console for consistent and simplified software-as-a-service (SaaS) consumption. This family of services includes network & security policy management, network detection and response (NDR), network visibility and analytics (NSX Intelligence), advanced load balancing (ALB), and workload mobility (HCX) for private cloud environments and VMware Cloud deployments.
Expanded Carbon Black Cloud endpoint protection. VMware is strengthening its lateral security capabilities by embedding network detection and visibility into Carbon Black Cloud’s endpoint protection platform, which is now available to select customers in early access. This extended detection and response (XDR) telemetry adds network detection and visibility to endpoints with no changes to infrastructure or endpoints, providing customers with extended visibility into their environment across endpoints and networks leaving attackers nowhere to hide.
Project Trinidad: extends and advances VMware’s API security and analytics by deploying sensors on Kubernetes clusters. Project Trinidad uses machine learning with business logic inference to detect anomalous behavior in east-west traffic between microservices.
Project Watch: a new approach to multi-cloud networking and security that provides advanced app to app policy controls. In technology preview, Project Watch will help network security and compliance teams to continuously observe, assess, and dynamically mitigate risk and compliance problems in composite multi-cloud applications.
VMware NSX Gateway Firewall: adds a stateful active-active edge scale-out capability that significantly increases network throughput for stateful services. VMware now offers advanced threat prevention capabilities with IDPS, malware analysis, sandboxing, URL filtering, TLS proxy, stateful firewall, and stateful Network Address Translation (NAT) that extend centralized security controls to physical and virtual workloads at the data center and cloud edge.
VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer: brings new bot management capabilities, while enhancing the security capabilities of its web application firewall, malware detection, security analytics, and DDoS protection. VMware NSX ALB’s ability to enforce API security policies in line with application delivery traffic helps customers in protecting their north-south APIs.
https://news.vmware.com/vmware-explore-2022-media-kit#inside
