VMware news in 2018: Acquisitions, partnerships and more
VMware acquisitions and partnerships led a year of VMware news, including the addition of CloudHealth and Heptio, as well as a relationship with Amazon that remains fruitful.
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edge projects that have enabled it to keep up with a rapidly evolving industry.
VMware capped a year of growth with VMworld 2018 in August and VMworld 2018 Europe in November. Its established virtualization products remain mainstays for IT administrators, but VMware news in 2018 energized admins looking to extend their VMware experience to the edge, cloud and back.
Review the top VMware news of 2018 and see where the company stands.
CloudHealth's SaaS offering provides cloud management visibility via cost tracking and optimization, performance and resource monitoring, and tools for implementing governance and compliance policies.
VMware hasn't yet revealed how it will integrate CloudHealth's services, but cloud cost management is an appealing tool to many organizations. Despite the proclamations of savings that cloud vendors have long pitched, many organizations struggle to track and control cloud costs.
In late 2018, VMware also announced the acquisition of Heptio and the eventual integration of its Kubernetes services into Pivotal Container Service (PKS). Similar to IBM's acquisition of Red Hat, this purchase will help VMware offer multi-cloud services that are cloud-agnostic. Unlike Red Hat, which will purportedly remain independent, VMware will fold Heptio into PKS.
VMware faces a wide spectrum of competition in the Kubernetes management market -- from open source Cloud Foundry to Mesosphere to Rancher Labs. Admins and analysts expect more consolidation, so the future of VMware's endeavor, among others, remains unclear.
Project Dimension takes VMware to the edge
VMware news in 2018 also featured some mystery as VMware touted a pseudonymous project that promised a novel approach to edge technologies.
Project Dimension promises tighter integration between cloud and on-premises environments via a lightweight, hyper-converged infrastructure product that applies the VMware Cloud on AWS model to on-premises infrastructures.
VMware wants Project Dimension to bring the edge into the cloud by using a hybrid cloud management pane to control data centers from on premises to the edge. One of the primary benefits of the cloud is easy management, but edge locations often suffer due to inaccessibility, especially in regard to difficulties with patches and updates.
Project Dimension's primary use case is the hybrid cloud, and its potential functionality is as a managed service that multiple locations can access. VMware is hoping to follow the burgeoning trend away from the public cloud and toward the edge, which organizations are increasingly using and where admins need more compute power.
VMware-Amazon partnership continues to grow
VMware Cloud on AWS captured headlines in 2016, and the growing partnership remained an attention-grabber in VMware news from 2018.
This brings the partnership full circle, allowing admins to migrate legacy applications to the cloud and operate cloud tools on premises.
Admins can use Amazon RDS on VMware to deploy and scale RDS as a service to automate rote database management tasks, including capacity management and backups. VMware admins will also be able to use Amazon RDS on VMware to recover databases after disasters and replicate read-only clones of on-premises data.
Admins can run Amazon RDS on VMware on premises or migrate it to VMware Cloud on AWS. This brings the partnership full circle, allowing admins to migrate legacy applications to the cloud and operate cloud tools on premises. Amazon RDS on VMware points to a hybrid cloud model that can enable organizations to take advantage of major cloud benefits on premises.
VMware announced vSphere 6.7 Update 1, which features a complete HTML5 client, a vCenter Server Converge Tool and improvements to vMotion and snapshots. Though many admins have waited a long time for a feature-complete HTML interface, this update didn't include anything particularly surprising. Despite some potential benefits for admins implementing machine learning and artificial intelligence, this update will likely only serve to keep VMware customers engaged rather than to entice further adoption. VMware also announced vSphere Platinum Edition, a product bundle that includes vSphere 6.7 Update 1, AppDefense and an AppDefense plugin for vCenter.
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