VMware on Dell EMC, Dell Technologies Cloud on VMware, and Azure VMware Solutions — The first truly Hybrid Cloud?

Since the announcement of VMware Cloud on AWS we have all been speculating about how VMware is planning to convince customers to permanently run its Cloud Foundation SDDC platform on top of Amazon infrastructure, instead of ultimately migrating away from VMware entirely. Today, at Dell Technologies World 2019 Michael Dell, Patt Gelsinger, and Satya Nadella jointly revealed the answer.

One Operating Model for Cloud Foundation on VxRail, Azure, and AWS

Today, most enterprises leverage all three public clouds, often through numerous separate accounts per cloud, and are typically patching together private cloud capabilities through a combination of VMware, Red Hat, IBM, and Cisco technologies. The key problem here is that each of these clouds, public and private, requires different skills in terms of servers, storage, network, security, and application management. This leads to the requirement for multiple sets of operations tools and staff, often resulting in operational complexity and cost inefficiencies. Neither Google Cloud, nor AWS or Azure have found a remedy for this tremendous challenge, despite last year’s launch of Azure Stackand the announcement of AWS Outposts at Re:Invent 2018.

Enter VMware Cloud on Dell EMC: Data Center-as-a-Service

Michael Dell described VMware Cloud on Dell EMC as a “fully-managed Data Center-as-a-Service solution” where customers can order a “cloud availability zone” for their own data center. Dell will then deliver the entire SDDC, consisting of VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure and VMware Cloud Foundation software defined compute, networking, and storage. Customers consume this infrastructure via subscription-based pricing and will provision application workloads in the same way and through the same tools they are already using for their existing VMware environments on premises and on AWS. VMware Cloud on Dell EMClays the foundation for truly policy-driven application deployment in a hybrid cloud.

Dell Technologies Cloud Powered by VMware

The new Dell Technologies Cloud (DTC) Powered by VMware offering targets customers that require a private cloud that offers additional customization and flexibility, while still running on top of VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation. This is interesting as DTC aims to deliver a home for existing enterprise applications that often require specific infrastructure configurations, while at the same time providing DevOps APIs (e.g. PKS) for modern distributed applications. Dell promises automated lifecycle management for this offering. Interestingly, customers can now chose whether to reallocate existing VMware Cloud on AWS entitlements toward DTC.

And then there was “One More Thing”

At the end of the joint announcement of VMware on Azure with Satya Nadella, Pat dropped a quick and seemingly innocent comment: “we are also working on bringing Azure capabilities on premise.” This reminds me of last year’s announcement at VMworld 2018, where Pat and Andy Jassy presented their plans for AWS RDS running on VMware VCF on premises. While there still are no details in terms of how this will work and when it will be available, at least in beta, Pat’s comment shows that VMware is working into the direction of bringing public cloud services, so far from Azure and AWS, into the corporate data center and running on top of VCF. This is the right goal to pursue and could well be the ticket to VMware’s successful future.

But what about AWS Outposts?

Amazon’s vision of making most or all AWS APIs available on premises through its own Outposts appliance is a direct threat to all data center infrastructure vendors near and far. However, we currently know little about Outposts initial capabilities, pricing, and release date. We also believe that Outposts will need to be connected to the AWS mothership at all times, ruling out use cases where an airgap is needed. While AWS will always remain a threat, Dell now needs to throw its massive resources toward making both, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and Dell Technologies Cloud Powered by VMware a reality and a platform that is a pleasure, with native Kubernetes integration.

Originally published on my personal blog.