Let’s Talk Cloud: The December 2022 VMware Multi-Cloud Briefing

By vJoeG · December 06, 2022

Yesterday, VMware held the final briefing for 2022 and went out with a fantastic topic and new offering, VMware Aria. In the next couple of minutes, or less if you read really fast, I hope to unpack a number of the great details that came out of this brief, 25-minute presentation.

If you just want to jump over to the juicy details and see the briefing for yourself, I invite you to click below, and you’ll be whisked away to YouTube for the video.

How was the video? Did you watch it, did you learn a lot about VMware Aria? Well, if you didn’t let’s break down the segments and go into some detail

Introduction by Sumit Dharwan, President of VMware

Sumit kicks things off, welcoming us to the briefing, calling out that today customers are navigating the Multi-Cloud looking for ways to help themselves and their teams navigate its complexities. They need ways to manage costs and workloads and create effective governance across their Multi-Cloud journey. VMware has built the ‘Cloud Smart Architecture’ and to date are seeing 83% of customers using multiple clouds. And that is growing and becoming more complex. That is why the VMware Aria solution was created as part of that cross-cloud architecture.

Overview of the Challenges and Opportunities of Multi-Cloud Management

Purnima Padmanabhan, the SVP and GM of VMware’s Cloud Management group is up next to discuss the challenges customers have managing their environments and applications across the Multi-Cloud.

There are 4 main goals that she points out needing to be addressed. Controlling ‘Cost’, ensuring amazing ‘Performance’, Having the right ‘Configuration’ for security and high speed ‘Delivery’ of applications

The management of these goals can be a real challenge. As you focus on, and improve in any one area, the others could directly suffer as they are all interconnected. The ability to answer questions about one or many of these goals gets super challenging. Large number of apps and clouds create disparate systems and gathering information creates a high level of complexity. How can customers create a model of all of these goals and aggregate all of the date into a simple to use, single point. Imagine having a map and model of your multi-cloud environment. This is what VMware Aria does. A fundamentally new approach to managing your applications across multiple clouds

VMware Aria Hub and Graph have become the anchor for this new solution. The Graph model gives answers to multi-discipline and multi-cloud questions. The three main solutions in Aria are, VMware Aria Cost, VMware Aria Operations and VMware Aria Automation. But it goes deeper than that when you bring in VMware Aria Guardrails, VMware Aria Migration and VMware Aria Business Insights which function across all three of the main solutions providing rich deep learning, automation and management of your environment. See below for a list of links to blogs and TechZone articles around these exciting new offerings.

Technical Preview of VMware Aria

Chris McClanahan, a Director on the VMware Technical Product Management team goes through a technology preview, demo of VMware Aria.

In the Demo we start with the dashboard that is currently filtered on ‘Favorite Applications’ but contains a number of other filters to choose from. The home screen has a great number of valuable, and customizable, metrics from Cost to Security and Compliance, Infrastructure, Customer Experience and much, much more.

Then he dives deeper into some screens where VMware Aria has pointed out some violations that need to be addressed. The solution comes with a library of already created templates for many policies that are customizable for even more personal multi-cloud monitoring.

Next up the focus shifts to a view suited for Infrastructure Admins. There are resources available for things like Customer Experience, Cost, Availability and Performance. You can search and explore allowing you to see all of the environments that you’ve integrated into the system.

Workload migrations using the VMware Aria Migration service allows you to scope, assess, plan and execute an On-prem to AWS environment. You can get extremely granular with all activities to limit and adjust your scope, calculate the TCO of the migration, save the assessments for sharing with your executive sponsors and teams. Planning comes in with four easy steps including Approval, Preparation, Design and finally Migration Scheduling and you have full visibility before, during and after migrations with metrics so you can realize the full benefits.

The demo wraps up with the introduction of the VMware Aria Hub Free tier. This offering let you manage 2 native public cloud accounts with support for AWS and Azure. You can capture, filter and search your multi-cloud inventory and that includes 90-days of real-time, event-based inventory. You can manually curate applications to better understand dependencies and relationships. Give it a try using the link below.

Customer Perspective on Multi-Cloud Management

The voice of the customer is one of the most powerful methods to getting the word out, providing references and promoting success. We heard from Johan Marais the Senior Platform Services manager with Discovery Limited, a South African based financial services group. They started their journey to the cloud many years ago in 2012 and since then have faced many of the same problems other organizations have. Struggles with CapEx and OPEX, focusing too heavily at times on cost savings at the expense of performance. He shared how VMware Aria has helped ease their challenges from management and reporting to Automation, allowing customers to self-service and streamline operations. The VMware Aria hub brings it all together and having VMware Aria Graph at the core of the solution is super powerful and integrates well with the company as they have become very heavily DevOps focuses and they can easily customize all aspects to fit their organizational model.

VMware Aria and Cross-Cloud Services

In the final segment Purnima sits down with Vittorio Viarengo the VMware VP of Cross-Cloud services. He points out that today over 75% f VMware customers already use two or more clouds including private and public clouds which creates a fast and agile environment but at the same time adds many new layers of complexity and costs.

Many years ago, VMware saw it coming and the Cross-Cloud services group was founded to help customers build, manage, run, secure and access any application across any cloud. VMware abstracted the functionalities so that in a single place you could harness and use all of the capabilities of every cloud in the same way while not taking away the power and resources away or reducing any capabilities.

The discussion turned to VMware Aria and how does it still pull all of the capabilities together without losing the power, agility and speed of the multi cloud? Purnima explains the power of Aria Graph and Hub is that they do not take away any of the capabilities, rather they collect them into one interface to allow you to bring in all of the services you are using and have a holistic view of them from a cost, performance and management point of view.

New and exciting in VMware Aria is that it’s anchored by Aria Graph and Hub which is a net new offering tying VMware and third-party solutions to create a rich and robust single point of access. And VMware Aria isn’t an island. Graph is highly scalable, near real-time. Other solutions can be directed and imported into Aria and federated for analysis and management.

A main differentiator for VMware Aria is that it brings everything together in one place. Traditionally there would be deep yet siloed players, like the hyperscalers, and point players that focus on one solution across all clouds like cost or security.

Vittorio calls out that VMware is the only company that has the vision, the DNA and engineering resources bringing a platform approach from dev, management, infrastructure, security to end user access that works consistently across all clouds.

Overall, the briefing was full of great information about how the new VMware Aria is poised to make your journey to, and experience in the Multi-Cloud highly successful for years to come.

Useful Links

Here are a number of useful links to help you learn, use and get started with VMware Aria