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Accelerate Sustainability Targets with VMware

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This post will look at how VMware prioritises Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), and how it supports and accelerates its global customer base with their own sustainability initiatives. The focus will be on environmental sustainability in healthcare, specifically the UK National Health Service (NHS).

In October 2020, the NHS was the first health system globally to commit to delivering net zero, acknowledging that climate change and human health are inextricably linked. Sustainability ambitions for the NHS were previously laid out in the NHS Long Term Plan, and net zero was legislated through the Health and Care Act 2022 and the subsequent forming of Integrated Care Boards (ICBs).

The Delivering a Net Zero National Health Service Report is issued at statutory guidance for NHS trusts and ICBs. The report outlines 2 targets for the NHS carbon footprint. Firstly, for emissions the NHS controls directly, these will be reduced to net zero by 2040, with an 80% reduction achieved by 2028-2032. Secondly, for emissions the NHS can influence, these will be reduced to net zero by 2045, with an 80% reduction by 2036-2039. These targets are crucial to the Climate Change Act 2008, since the NHS makes up around 4% of the country’s carbon emissions. According to NHS England, an overwhelming 87% of NHS staff support the NHS Net Zero ambition, while 92% of the general public believe it is important for the NHS to work in a more sustainable way.

What does VMware do for sustainability?

VMware’s 2030 Agenda is a decade-long Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) commitment to build a more sustainable and equitable future. VMware has been innovating for 25-years and, through the introduction of data centre virtualisation and consolidation, has already had an immeasurable impact on the efficiencies of global infrastructure and emissions.

The VMware Environmental Social and Governance Report 2023 sets out VMware’s sustainability strategy, focused on visibility (data), efficiency (resources), and renewables (energy). VMware have been certified as a carbon neutral company continuously since 2018, and achieved 100% renewably sourced power for global facilities and co-located data centres continuously since 2019. Some of the key goals outlined in the VMware 2030 Agenda are listed below.

  • Achieve net zero carbon emissions for operations and supply chain, and reduce emissions 50% from FY19 baseline, by 2030.
  • Collaborate with enterprise public cloud partners to catalyse the transition to zero carbon clouds through the adoption of 100% renewable energy. At the time of writing 74 cloud providers have partnered with VMware for a sustainable future, including the likes of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle, Equinix, and others.
  • Collaborate with global governments as a sustainable cloud advocate, to drive policy making IT infrastructure more reliable, scalable, flexible, secure, cost-effective and sustainable.
  • Empower customers by enabling transparency into the carbon reduction impact of VMware solutions (more on this below).

VMware’s approach to sustainability goes far beyond decarbonising operations, it is also inherent to their technologies and innovation. VMware’s virtualisation solutions help reduce customers hardware and power consumption, improving efficiencies in data centre operations and management across compute, storage, network and security.

Furthermore, VMware holds itself, partners, and suppliers accountable for sustainability targets. At VMware Explore Europe 2023, mitigating the carbon footprint of an event with a 9000+ strong attendance was a top priority; using responsible materials, a green venue, and innovative climate partnerships. VMware has a strong history in foundation and community support, it comes as no surprise that when mitigating residual emissions, projects are selected that have the potential for systemic impact in communities. These carbon avoidance and removal projects include things like solar water heating, clean water and cooking, mangrove and forest restorations, wind power, and more.

VMware reports its climate strategy, targets, emissions, risks and opportunities in detail through an annual disclosure with the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). The reporting aligns to the recommendations provided by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). In FY23 VMware was recognised on the CDP Climate A list for their environmental transparency and performance on climate change preparedness. You can see VMware’s full TCFD disclosure, in the VMware Environmental Social and Governance Report 2023.

How does VMware help customers achieve their sustainability targets?

There are multiple ways in which VMware solutions help customers with their sustainability initiatives. This is not an exhaustive list, but rather the most common conversations I have with customers. The solutions are aligned to healthcare messaging but are applicable cross-industry at a high level, so you can apply your own use cases. If you’re interested in knowing more about this topic you can catch up on the Sustainability for Techies – Why You Should Care session recording from VMware Explore.

  • A digital, low-carbon transformation:
    • Ensure data centres and companies providing these services minimise their environmental impact and support the drive to reach net zero
    • Front-line digitisation of clinical records, clinical and operational workflow and communications, aided by digital messaging and electronic health and care record systems
    • Digitising the estate and smart hospitals; ensuring large-scale migration of trust data centres into the hyper-scale cloud; and reducing the need for the storage of large volumes of data
VMware customers can use Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations) to directly gather and track information on the environmental sustainability of on-premises infrastructure.

The VMware Aria Operations Green Score feature provides recommendations for customers to optimise energy usage and carbon footprint. The score factors in workload and hardware efficiency, resource utilisation, virtualisation rate, and power source. You can read more about this topic in the VMware Green Score in Aria Operations blog and Configuring Green Score to Track Sustainability documentation.

The built-in Aria Operations Sustainability Dashboards provide visibility into sustainability optimisation and emissions reduced by using VMware technologies. The available dashboards at the time of writing include: carbon transparency, carbon efficiency with virtualisation, environmental impact of idle VMs, and green supply. This is complimentary to existing features that already help customers manage their energy consumption such as workload right-sizing, resource reclamation and capacity management.

The sustainability features in Aria Operations are discussed in detail in the Improve Cloud Optimisation and Sustainability Stance with VMware Aria Operations session at VMware Explore. In this session, the internal VMware IT team (VMware on VMware) talk about how they operationalise the green score and recommendations within VMware’s own IT infrastructure.

With Aria Cloud Suite, available as Software as a Service (SaaS), customers can benefit from Aria Automation as well as Aria Operations. Additional efficiencies from automation and on-demand infrastructure can be gained with Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Automation). Automating the deployment of infrastructure services allows for standardisation and desired state configuration, as well as just-in-time provisioning. Environments such as test and development can be spun up and torn down easily, providing infrastructure efficiencies especially when paired with cloud services.

Public cloud users can optimise resources and spend with VMware Tanzu Cloud Health. Sustainability reporting for multi-cloud is now in private beta.

Cloud Health provides actionable insights and recommendations to optimise cost and governance in public cloud. It is aligned with FinOps practices, but has more recently integrated GreenOps too. GreenOps starts with visibility, taking a baseline of the current multi-cloud operational emissions, in order to identify optimisation and remediation opportunities. Next, and much like FinOps, the right teams need to be onboard to take action along with the right reporting and governance structure.

The GreenOps feature in Cloud Health is currently in private beta. It includes a multi-cloud dashboard and reports with carbon emissions, power consumption and equivalencies, for all compute instances and regions for the 3 major cloud providers. You can learn more about Cloud Health for FinOps and GreenOps practices in the VMware Explore session recording for From FinOps to GreenOps – Public Cloud Sustainability and Compliance.

Extend compute virtualisation benefits to the Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

The benefits of compute virtualisation with vSphere are well documented, but they also extend out to storage virtualisation with vSAN and network virtualisation with NSX. These components bundled together are known as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). VCF provides a consistent operational building block for a Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) in the data centre, private cloud or public cloud, and at the edge. The consolidation of hardware into Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) has an immediate impact on carbon footprint, reducing data centre racks, power consumption, cooling, and removing the need for external storage arrays. Beyond switching and routing, networking capabilities like load balancing, firewalls, and Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS) that previously required dedicated hardware and data centre space can now be run in software.

Hosting providers are becoming more competitive in their electricity consumption. This is measured by the amount of data centre power consumption versus how much of the total Kwh is being used by the actual computing power of the data centre, known as the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness). At a recent customer supplier day I learnt that currently IT accounts for around 2% of emissions globally, but this will rise to 10% by 2030. Every organisation is being tasked with digitalisation, at the same time as reducing their carbon emissions. It is absolutely vital to choose the right hosting partners, so with VCF customers have the flexibility to either self manage their infrastructure whilst selecting a data centre premises with a lower PUE, or consume their infrastructure as a managed service. At the time of writing there are 74 cloud providers approved as VMware Zero Carbon Committed Cloud Providers.

Migrating to public cloud unlocks world class optimised data centres with lower energy usage, increasing migration speed and reducing risk and cost with VMware.

All the benefits of VCF on-premises can also be delivered off-premises, in renewable energy powered cloud data centres. The hosts used by solutions like VMware Cloud on AWS typically allow for reduced hardware, with better consolidation ratios, and scale on-demand capabilities. Data centres run by hyperscalers are optimised and utilised to a higher scale than could ever be achieved by an individual organisation; the 3 major cloud providers have PUE ratios of between 1:1 and 1:3, by contrast the local data centre average in Europe is 1:6.

Many organisations will still retain an on-premises or hybrid footprint, whilst migrating to a combination of SaaS and public cloud services. Public cloud can help replace unnecessary energy consumption, such as always on dedicated storage arrays for archive data, with cold or on-demand infrastructure. In conjunction with cloud computing, further opportunities are presented for consolidating and optimising network infrastructure with SDWAN.

With VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, customers can deploy copies of production environments on-demand for a true Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) model.

Traditionally, organisations have had to double up on IT infrastructure to provide Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities essential for business continuity. This model presents obvious drawbacks in the doubling of cost, hardware, power consumption, operational support, maintenance, and a big impact on sustainability initiatives. VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) enables a DRaaS model that can potentially remove or reduce the need for a complete secondary infrastructure stack. VCDR replicates immutable copies of workloads to a cloud based scale-out file system. In the event of an outage or ransomware attack, VCDR mounts the file system to on-demand infrastructure using VMware Cloud on AWS. This approach significantly reduces the overhead of DR cost and carbon footprint.

  • Reduce travel and transport:
    • Digitally enabled care models and channels for citizens that will significantly reduce travel and journeys to physical healthcare locations, with care closer to home being delivered through remote consultations and monitoring.
    • Approximately 3.5% (9.5 billion miles) of all road travel in England relates to patients, visitors, staff and suppliers to the NHS, contributing around 14% of the system’s total emissions.

The solutions mentioned above provide the underlying resilient and secure foundation for digitally enabled services. Promoting self-service through modern, Internet facing applications, along with Integrated Care Board and Partnership collaborations, can also help improve accessibility and further reduce overall carbon footprint.

Take advantage of a distributed workforce and offer users both flexibility and consistency with VMware’s End User Computing (EUC) solutions.

Remote work has a number of immediate benefits on carbon emissions across all industries. The obvious ones include less commuter travel and optimising the way organisations use their buildings. Where there are customer, or in this example patient, facing activities the commute of the patients and visitors is also removed. In healthcare published desktops and applications with VMware Horizon and Workspace ONE enable use cases such as telemedicine and teleradiology, to reduce waiting times and access a wider talent pool of remote clinicians.

It’s not just about remote and distributed workforces either. Carbon footprint for those with fixed locations can still benefit from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) delivery by utilising low power consuming thin client devices over thick clients. Features like multi-session desktops enable consolidation of compute power for multiple people accessing the same applications. In many cases, a full desktop instance isn’t needed and applications can be published directly to the relevant role.

The transition of applications and services to edge locations can be enhanced with SDWAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). In healthcare these technologies support examples like virtual wards and community or popup services, reducing the carbon impact of delivering acute care.

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VMware Explore 2023 Review

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Last week 9000+ tech enthusiasts descended on Fira Gran Via, Barcelona, for VMware Explore 2023. VMware’s flagship annual event started out in 2004, running under the hugely popular VMworld banner until 2021. In 2022 VMworld transitioned to VMware Explore, demonstrating the companies journey to a mutli-cloud and application focus.

This year, VMware Explore 2023 ran through 6-9 November, with over 750 sessions, and over 60 sponsors and exhibitors. Amongst the breakout sessions and the parties customer appreciation events, I’ve pulled together all the key announcements, along with insights into the healthcare showcases.

Be sure to visit the VMware Explore 2023 Video Library where you’ll find over 700 sessions from Barcelona, available on-demand. You can also use the GitHub page, compiled by William Lam, of VMware Explore 2023 Breakout Session URLs. Expect to hear how VMware is leading the way in cloud-smart, bringing the power of private AI to mainstream enterprises, and continuing to deliver breakthrough innovation.

Day 0

The Monday at VMware Explore is typically for industry and partner sessions. There’s a great buzz as people are arriving, checking in, and building anticipation for the general session the following day.

First up was healthcare industry session INDT1725BCN, Teleradiology Workshop: Ensuring Dependable Workflows for Radiologists, opened by Jens Koegler, VMware Healthcare Industry Director, with an opening keynote from Martin Curley. Martin is Professor of Innovation at Maynooth University and Director of the Digital Health Ecosystem at the Innovation Value Institute. Most recently Martin was CIO and Director of Digital Transformation at Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE). We heard about the Stay Left, Shift Left 10X strategy, which aims to keep people out of emergency and elective care. By keeping people well and managing chronic conditions from home, the movement of patients is shifted left to a community or home setting. Furthermore, increasing preventative and pro-active healthcare improves the quality of life and care, at the lowest cost. As we look at the continuum of care the cost increases as we shift from preventative, to home care, to community or primary care, to acute care settings.

We then delved into the life of a remote radiologist and their complex IT setup and challenges. We heard how VMware SDWAN improves and prioritises radiologists applications, along with VMware’s ecosystem of integrating technologies for secure remote access. Siemens Healthineers took to the stage to tell us about the increasing demand for imaging services and the shortage of radiologists, along with their virtual cockpit software for remote scanning, enabling radiologists to collaborate anytime from anywhere. The Siemens Healthineers representatives took part in a Q&A panel session on teleradiology, with Yusuf Mangera, Technical Architect at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. The discussion centred around the need for remote radiologists to increase productivity, provide efficient diagnosis, increase retention, and ultimately deliver better patient outcomes. Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust are tackling the significant shortage of skills by using technology to widen the pool of available radiologists remotely across the UK.

Day 1 General Session

Tuesday and the biggest day of the week, the general session was underway from 9am local time. Here is my take away from the key announcements and my favourite breakout sessions of day 1. With so much to see and do across the hub, the expo, and even a castellers’ human tower, I missed the donut wall! You can find out what else was going on throughout the day in the official VMware Explore 2023 Barcelona Day 1 Recap.

AI, AI, AI, Artificial Intelligence, if you hadn’t heard. Distributed computing and multi-cloud are at the foundation of AI, and we’re about to hear how we can make it easy to adopt AI securely in the enterprise. VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram opened the general session GEN2154BCN, Taking a Cloud-Smart Approach to Harness the Power of Generative AI, in VMware’s 25th year of milestones and accomplishments. Raghu introduced Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, who committed to continued innovation by investing in R&D and the VMware ecosystem, whilst simplifying how customers consume and configure VMware products.

Working in the healthcare industry, it was great to see Siemens Healthineers as the first major customer showcase. Siemens Healthineers are a market leader in CT/MRI scanners and software for analysing the human body, offering AI-driven solutions to support radiologists with the increasing demand for imaging. They use VMware technologies to develop applications on multi-cloud platforms, using Private AI to take learnings from local data back into central algorithms, as opposed to moving data around. The end to end process provides life changing outcomes for patients and speeds up workflows for radiologists.

Next, we were joined by Purnima Padmanabhan, VMware SVP of Cloud Management, to talk about product innovations. Purnima covered the VMware Cloud capabilities, anchored by VMware Cloud Foundation and delivered as software through partners and hyperscalers, along with security add-ons and overlay services to build applications. Some of the major new innovations include:

  • VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1 – provides innovation on your platform foundation, with support for generative AI and compute intensive workloads. VCF 5.1 includes 2x GPU capacity to accelerate AI, 4x storage performance boost with vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA), and a bill of materials featuring vSphere/vSAN 8.0 U2, NSX 4.1.2.1, and SDDC Manager 5.1.0.0.
  • VMware vSAN Max – delivers petabyte scale disaggregated storage, allowing storage to scale independent of compute, but still be managed from the same control plane. There’s also a broader choice of certified VMware vSAN Ready Nodes now available.
  • New Developer, Data, and Security Services for Sovereign Clouds – last year, I wrote about VMware Sovereign Cloud; a framework of guiding principles and best practices to deliver cloud services that adhere to the data sovereignty requirements of a specific jurisdiction. A sovereign cloud seeks to augment existing platforms and regulations, with a specific focus on putting the customer in complete control of their data. Today VMware Sovereign Cloud is a powerful, interconnected, and global ecosystem of 57 cloud providers in 33 different countries. This is a super relevant topic for the NHS, as we know the overwhelming majority of UK citizens believe it is important their data does not leave UK shores. VMware Sovereign Cloud is about more than just data locality, but also regulatory and jurisdictional control. As well as security enhancements, such as Bring Your Own Keys (BYOK) and Bring Your Own Key Management Systems (BYO-KMS), a range of further data and developer services have been added to VMware Sovereign Cloud for more agility, better resiliency and faster innovation. You can see the full list here.
  • VMware Live Recovery – VMware announced a new solution that will provide protection for ransomware and disaster recovery across VMware Cloud in one unified console, allowing customers to take advantage of unified protection, secure cyber recovery, and simplified consumption. The functionality in VMware Site Recovery Manager and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery with Ransomware Recovery, is now available in a flexible adoption model from a single console.

Moving on and Chris Wolf, VP VMware AI Labs, took to the stage to discuss all things generative AI. At VMware Explore Las Vegas, VMware announced Private AI; an architectural approach that balances the business gains from AI with the privacy and compliance needs of the organisation. The key partnership was VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia and a VMware Private AI Open Ecosystem. A Reference Architecture for VMware Private AI was accompanied at VMware Explore Barcelona by Starter Packs for VMware Private AI.

Private AI Gains Momentum at VMware Explore Barcelona contains all the Private AI keynote announcements, also summarised below. The AI use case with Siemens Healthineers earlier in the general session is outlined fully in the article AI’s Healthcare Revolution Draws Closer with Multi-Cloud.

  • Accelerating Data-Driven Innovation with Next Generation VMware Data Services Manager – the new VMware Data Services Manager will ensure best-in-class management for a wide range of data services, not just databases, as a natively integrated experience for VMware Cloud Foundation customers. MinIO Object Store will be the first third-party object storage natively integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation through Data Services Manager. MinIO is a highly performant and resilient object store and ideal solution for data lake and large-scale AI/ML use cases.
    • VMware and Google Cloud Announce Database Solution for Traditional and Generative AI Applications on VMware Cloud Foundation – VMware and Google announced a partnership to deliver Google Cloud’s AlloyDB Omni database to VMware Cloud Foundation, starting with on-premises private clouds. AlloyDB Omni is a PostgreSQL-compatible database that runs anywhere and offers built-in support for generative AI. It will integrate into VMware Cloud Foundation using VMware Data Services Manager for simplified management and developer-friendly consumption, whilst providing superior performance and scalability with VMware vSAN.
  • VMware Collaborates with Intel to Unlock Private AI Everywhere – VMware and Intel extended over 2 decades of joint innovation with a validated AI stack, based on VMware Cloud Foundation, Intel’s AI software suite, Intel processors with built-in AI accelerators, and Intel Max Series GPU’s. Customers can use their existing general-purpose VMware and Intel infrastructure with open source software to simplify building and deploying AI models.
  • IBM and VMware Help Enterprises Adopt Generative AI with watsonx On-Premises – born out of the IBM and VMware Joint Innovation Lab, IBM and VMware are bringing together VMware Cloud Foundation, Red Hat OpenShift and the IBM watsonx AI and Data Platform. This partnership will allow enterprises access to IBM watsonx in on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, unlocking generative AI use cases at close proximity to mission-critical operations.
  • New Innovations to Accelerate Software-Defined Edge Adoption – there were multiple announcements in this area, including new VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator telemetry capabilities for better visibility of edge workloads. Edge operations have been simplified with the introduction of Intelligent Assist, and edge security enhanced with Microsoft Security Copilot and Symantec integrations.

Finally, here are some of the additional announcements and innovations from modern applications to anywhere workspace:

And breathe! If you’re still reading, and you still want more, all of the technical announcements are pulled together nicely in the What’s New at VMware Explore 2023 page, or for higher level there’s the VMware Explore 2023 Media Kit page.

Day 1 Customer Breakout Sessions

Next, it was on to the breakout sessions starting with MAPB1443BCN, UK Health Security Agency Streamlines Cloud to Accelerate Digital Healthcare. In a really informative session from Jonny Da Silva, Head of DevOps, we listened to UKHSA’s challenges around deploying high-demand services to multi-cloud, with a need for consistent security, operational, and cost policies. UKHSA are responsible for protecting the country against health threats and share best practice and data globally. They work as an Arm’s Length Body for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) alongside NHS England.

UKHSA developed new capabilities to unify governance, automate account provisioning, and build in guardrails and policies, using VMware Tanzu Cloud Health. Cloud Health was a game changer for driving down costs and optimising cloud resources, it enables UKHSA to run a multi-cloud platform where service owners and partners have the flexibility of selecting the right cloud for each application. Cloud Health provided instant visibility and substantial return on investment, through monetary savings repurposed more effectively elsewhere. Jonny spoke very well about the mantra of doing it right first time, which has delivered an award winning platform and applications. In the future, by adopting automation and AI, skills will not be replaced but instead repurposed. If you’re interested in hearing more about UKHSA’s cloud journey you can catch the session replay and separate case study.

Running at the same time as the UKHSA breakout session, was session CEIB1442BCN, Deliver Hybrid Cloud to Modernise Infrastructure and Accelerate Innovation. Fortunately I was able to catch up on the recording to hear Keith Tudge, Datacentre Manager at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust, deliver an excellent session on implementing a secure and resilient private cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). VMware representatives first covered VCF use cases and the latest features in 5.0 and the newly announced 5.1. The main innovations brought in by VCF 5.1 include vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA), networking integration enhancements, support for DPUs with vSphere DSE (Distributed Services Engine), and support for both Terraform and Okta.

Then, and most importantly, we moved onto the customer spotlight. In 2021 Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust were running separate VMware environments in data centres that were not fit for purpose, with no site resilience, and obsolete hardware and software. The trust migrated workloads seamlessly using HCX to a new VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell VXRail platform with dual site mirroring and resilience, software defined networking and lifecycle management. Virtual Machines were moved throughout the day with no down time and no impact to clinical services.

Fast forward to 2023 and the trust completed a rolling 24 hour upgrade to VCF 4.5, starting at 9am Monday morning as a central London organisation, again with no impact on IT systems. Infact, as a seamless background task clinicians were completely unaware the platform had been upgraded. With VCF 4.5, the team were then able to start utilising Aria Suite, particularly Operations and Lifecycle Manager. Keith gave a great example of a complete network failure at a co-located site in March 2023. The data centre network outage saw 680 VMs restarted at a second site within 7 minutes of the outage. There were no out of hours calls and barely any noticeable impact on clinical services, due to the VCF architecture.

Overall the trust has seen a huge drop in the number of P1 and P2 calls and outages, more stable clinical systems, increased confidence in IT, ease of patching to address cyber vulnerabilities, and enhanced health reporting and monitoring. A great story but not the end of the journey! Chelsea and Westminster are planning next to migrate to VCF 5, automate more with Aria Automation, centralise load balancing activities into NSX Advanced Load Balancers, further secure east-west data centre traffic with intrusion detection, and expand the platform for VDI.

Onto the next one, session CEIB1800BCN, Customer Panel: Cloud-Smart Insights from the Public Sector. Hosted by Chris Dunne, VMware Head of Regional Public Sector Technology, this panel Q&A gave us a unique insight into both operating and cloud challenges for public sector. We heard from representatives of government and higher education about evading red tape and bureaucracy, and breaking out of a traditional public sector mindset.

The panel was in agreement that software enables quicker and more efficient digital transformation, but to be successful organisations need the people, skills, and culture wrap around. Other topics included procurement, upskilling, cloud migrations, flexibility, availability, portability, and proximity of both applications and data. I was sat next to an attendee from the NHS who commented it was reassuring to hear others with the same issues he experiences day to day. This isn’t a technical session but the topics covered are absolutely crucial to the successful implementation of technical solutions, well worth a watch.

As well as the NHS speakers in today’s breakout sessions, another highlight was East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT) winning Hero for Good in the 2023 VMware Customer Achievement Awards. With VMware, ELFT built a future-proof platform where IT innovates, scales and maintains access to digital care services. The trust swiftly migrated to the cloud, virtualised its networks and implemented a robust disaster recovery solution. Clinical staff are now less encumbered by technology and able to engage more with patients. More people have access to ELFT’s digital care services through digital pods, and patients have easier access to view and manage their own records.

Day 2 & 3

Wednesday was another jam packed day of breakout sessions, covering not only technical content but also leadership and self-development. Some of my favourites included VCF technical deep dives, AI integration with Google Cloud VMware Engine, Azure VMware Solution migration lessons learned with Lloyds Bank, automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Natwest, VMware Cloud on AWS migration strategies for public sector customers, and an overview of AI/ML workloads running on Intel AMX CPUs. You can browse the VMware Explore 2023 Video Library for these sessions and others, using the filters for your favourite topics.

Off the back of session INDB1728BCN, When Healthcare Meets Modern AI and VMware: The Results Are Life-Changing, I had a great chat with a NHS trust about piloting the use of AI in partnership with NHS England. The NHS AI Lab is rolling out a pilot of an AI Deployment Platform (AIDP) that acts as a store for AI medical imaging technologies used in radiology workflows. Finally, the traditional Wednesday evening VMware party took place onsite with the Manic Street Preachers. Check out all the other day 2 activities in the official VMware Explore Barcelona 2023 Day 2 Recap.

Thursday, the final day of a fantastic week at VMware Explore, and still a great hustle and bustle at the Fira and across the expo hall. Apart from any left over swag, the main healthcare agenda item today is session CEIB2113BCN, Securing Medical Devices and Data with VMware NSX and VMware SD-WAN. For those with an interest in blue light services, there was also the story of an SDWAN-enabled edge compute stack for emergency vehicles in session CEIB1985BCN, Building the Police Car of the Future.

Healthcare is becoming the most common target for ransomware attacks and data breaches are rising exponentially. As the session opened we heard examples from Waldemar Potratz, VMware, including a phishing email generated ransomware attack at a hospital in Germany, and the NHS Wannacry attack, which exploited a Windows 7 vulnerability in 2017.

Although banking and financial personal data may be the obvious target for cyber criminals, we learnt that actually your medical information is worth between 10 and 40 times that of your credit card number on the black market. Furthermore, AI is now being used to manipulate medical images, and medical devices are being targeted as a back door entry to a hospitals network and systems. Often the communication path for medical devices is unsecured, using protocols such as HTTP, and configuration changes can result in voiding the devices warranty or support status.

We heard how technologies like NSX micro-segmentation, IDPS, and NDR, identify application boundaries and implement a zero trust model over the top of the existing underlay network. NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB) and Web Application Firewall (WAF) is used to protect web applications and API’s, while SDWAN provides secure connectivity across sites and cloud applications.

You can find more NHS specific guidance on this topic in the NHS Micro-Segmentation Solution Brief which covers architectures for datacentre and connected medical devices.

Check out the official VMware Explore 2023 Barcelona Day 3 Recap for the full scoop featuring more innovative sessions, Hands-on-Labs, and live podcasts. And that’s a wrap, but save the date! VMware Explore 2024 Barcelona has been confirmed for 4-7 November, at Fira Gran Via.

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All the Major Announcements from VMware Explore Europe and US!

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All the Major Announcements from VMware Explore Europe and US!

vSphere 8 and vSAN 8

The major announcement in San Francisco at VMware Explore US was vSphere 8 IA (Initial Availability) and some of the game-changing features to unlock the value of GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and DPU (Data Processing Unit) hardware.

First off, the eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed the vSphere 8 release tagged as IA . This new iteration replaces the previous GA (General Availability) in the sense that it has been through all the previous quality controls and is production ready.

With perpetual and on-premises software, VMware has found that many customers will wait for the first service pack or update, before installing software on their production infrastructure. As the industry shifts to subscription and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), operational processes change as rolling feature updates are received. To reflect this, VMware has introduced IA allowing for a period of wide scale adoption and feedback, before certifying a build to be GA. This period of adoption and feedback from the field is typically expected to be 4-6 weeks, but can be anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months, and is designed to give customers more confidence and stability.

At VMware Explore Europe in Barcelona, following 4 weeks and 18,000 deployments with no major issues or escalations, VMware announced vSphere 8 GA. Some of the great new functionality includes:

  • Introduction of vSphere Distributed Services Engine (Project Monterey)
  • DPU offload for network, storage, and management services to improve performance
  • Enhanced Kubernetes run-time with TKG (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid) 2.0 and 2.1
  • VMware Cloud Console integration of vSphere 8 Admin Services (Project Arctic)

The cloud capabilities delivered through the VMware Cloud integration include triage of alerts and events, global inventory view, anywhere VM provisioning, detection of configuration drift, and automated one-click updates of vCenter instances. You can read more in the VMware Project Arctic Graduates to vSphere+ overview.

Of course baked in to vSphere 8, comes vSAN 8. There are improvements to compression algorithms and native snapshot integration, but the big news is the new ESA (Express Storage Architecture).

With NVMe-based devices offering significantly greater performance than SAS/SATA, and prices steadily declining, the stage is set for NVMe to become the dominant storage technology in the coming years. The optional next-generation Express Storage Architecture provides a single tier pool of independent NVMe devices:

vSAN 8 Express Storage Architecture

Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Announcements

On stage during the general session key note, VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram announced the latest initiatives and partnerships to the VMware private cloud portfolio.

First was HPE Greenlake for VMware. HPE Greenlake provides a pay-as-you-go cloud consumption model for HPE hardware; now fully integrated with VMware Cloud to include the VMware enterprise software overlay. More flexibility around payment and commitment terms for customers.

VMware Explore Europe General Session with Raghu

Next was VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal; combining VMware-managed and supported cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service, with Equinix automated bare metal and connectivity. This service will help extend cloud environments into distributed and metropolitan locations with consistent infrastructure and operations, for business-critical performance at the edge. Equinix are a major connectivity hub for many regions, with private, low-latency connectivity to private and public clouds, and access to thousands of IT and network providers through the Equinix Fabric Interconnection.

Later, William Lam introduced a plethora of VMware Sovereign Cloud product innovations and ecosystem services. Earlier in the year VMware released a framework of guiding principles and best practices to help partners deliver cloud services that adhere to data sovereignty requirements of a specific jurisdiction. This framework and reference architecture is about complete control, beyond individual areas like data residency. You can find out more on VMware Sovereign Cloud in the VMware Sovereign Cloud Overview.

Several developer ready services were announced for the VMware Sovereign Cloud solution at Explore Europe; such as sovereign Kubernetes clusters with multi-tenant Tanzu Standard, and support for air-gapped Tanzu Application Platform and Tanzu Mission Control deployments. Meanwhile Tanzu Application Catalog can now provide a sovereign application pipeline.

The partner ecosystem also gained a significant upgrad. Key Management as-a-Service is now available with Fortanix, and data protection and Ransomware Defense as-a-Service through Veeam and Cloudian. Various data services, lakehouses, and compliance solutions were also added. You can see the full list here!

At VMware Explore US in particular, there were some pretty cool additions to the VMware Cloud on AWS feature-set:

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) was upgraded with purpose-built Ransomware Recovery-as-a-Service (now GA). On top of the existing functionality, Ransomware Recovery will:

  • Identify recovery point candidates with dedicated ransomware recovery workflow and guided deep snapshot history, such as change rate and risk of infection vs data loss
  • Validate recovery points with NGAV (Next-Gen Anti-Virus) and behavioural analysis
  • Prevent reinfection at recovery with on-demand IRE (Isolated Recovery Environment) and VM network isolation

There was good news for multi-cloud resilience fans, with technical preview of Site Recovery pairings between VMware Cloud on AWS and Azure VMware Solution. Let’s look at what else was revealed for Azure VMware Solution:

  • Azure VMware Solution is now part of VMware Cloud Universal providing more financial flexibility, savings, and buying options
  • Log Insight Cloud for Azure VMware Solution is now available for log analysis, audit, and monitoring integration
  • Support for Azure Arc now extends Azure governance and management into vSphere
  • New independently-scalable storage with Azure NetApp Files
  • Improved internet connectivity options with simple AVS managed SNAT gateway, and Azure Public IP to NSX Edge support

Next, at the enterprise edge VMware announced Edge Compute Stack 2.0. The Edge Compute Stack provides an integrated edge platform delivering real-time intelligence. Building on last years v1.0 release, v2.0 adds GPU passthrough support for AI & ML (Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning), vendor-agnostic AIOps, and a smaller cluster size to run efficiently on smaller off-the-shelf hardware. The Edge Compute Stack has vSphere, vSAN, TKG, and SDWAN/SASE all built-in.

At VMware Explore US Project Northstar made its debut in tech preview. This is a really exciting new project promising to deliver SaaS-based multi-cloud networking and security services to the masses. We’ve already seen how projects like Arctic and Monterey have become fully fledged features or products after their announcement. The immediate benefits that jump out from Project Northstar are scalable lateral security, flexible consumption, and faster time to value. Let’s drill down further:

  • Policy as-a-Service – manage networking and security policies centrally for all clouds, with a single touch point and consistent controls and policies across sites and regions
  • NSX Intelligence as-a-Service – enhance security planning and visibility with NSX Intelligence offering real-time visualisation, recommendations, and insights on threats and behavioral anomalies
  • NDR as-a-Service – scalable threat detection and response with Network Detection and Response (NDR); analyses IDPS (Intrusion Detection and Prevention System), malware, and anomalies for a single , simplified SOC monitoring process aligned to the MITRE ATT&CK framework
  • Advanced Load Balancing – (ALB) cloud hosted controllers that can be used standalone or in conjunction with other Project Northstar SaaS services
  • Workload Mobility – workload mobility as a service with fully managed workload migration and secure connectivity across multiple sites

To support these initiatives, at VMware Explore Europe HCX+ was announced to provide central management, automation, orchestration, and observability for workload migration, repatriation, and rebalancing initiatives across clouds. Deeper insights and a unified dashboard for licensing, threat telemetry, and proactive support were also added to VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer’s PULSE Cloud Service.

Finally, at Explore Europe VMware unveiled Carbon Black XDR to extend VMware’s visibility and detection to VMware Carbon Black Enterprise EDR. The new XDR solution enhances lateral security using telemetry from VMware Contexa, which records and processes over 1.5 trillion endpoint events and over 10 billion network flows each day, along with strategically captured data through technology partnerships.

Cloud Management Announcements

Throughout VMware Explore US and Explore Europe, VMware announced the next chapter in their multi-cloud management story; introducing VMware Aria, a unified management solution for cloud native applications and multi-cloud.

VMware had previously been developing cloud management products under the vRealize banner. Whilst these are great products they offer individual perspectives to different personas and teams. As IT moves away from traditional silos and more towards Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) models, a unified end-to-end service is required. With the addition of CloudHealth and Tanzu Observability also providing FinOps and DevOps capabilities for cloud management, VMware has taken the opportunity to launch not only a single portfolio, but a new centralised single platform.

VMware Aria is absolutely not just a rebranding of the vRealize Suite, and here’s why:

  • VMware Aria Graph provides a near-real time single source of truth for all operations and events, with unified GraphQL API for developers and operations
  • VMware Aria Hub provides centralised views, relationships, and controls for managing the entire multi-cloud environment from a single interface, powered by Aria Graph

The word ‘aria’ actually means a single voice above all others, and summarises perfectly the value of the new Aria Hub and Aria Graph. What’s more, at VMware Explore Europe a free tier of VMware Aria Hub powered by VMware Aria Graph was announced. The new free tier will allow you to understand the relationships of your resources and policies for up to 2 native public cloud accounts (currently from either AWS or Azure).

VMware Aria Graph

We now have end-to-end management across clouds, and as well as ongoing innovation within each of the product sets, VMware are also announcing new end-to-end overarching solutions for multi-cloud:

  • VMware Aria Guardrails – enforcement automation for networking, security, cost, performance, and configuration across clouds
  • VMware Aria Migration – assessment, planning, and execution automation for the multi-cloud migration journey
  • VMware Aria Business Insights – full-stack event correlation with AI & ML analytics to present relevant business insights across clouds

In terms of features, we heard about Tanzu Mission Control integration with Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Automation), and a new application dashboard for Aria Operations for Networks (formerly vRealize Network Insight).

Aria Operations Cloud (formerly vRealize Operations Cloud) now supports synthetic monitoring to track the performance and availability of public facing applications. At Explore Europe, Aria Operations 8.10 was announced. The latest release will include a no-code management pack builder, to expand operations anywhere that has a Rest API. Capabilities for public cloud monitoring, using Telegraf agent, and basic actions for AWS, Azure, and GCP virtual machines were also added, as well as support for Raw Device Mappings (RDM).

Log analysis hasn’t always been the most exciting of topics, but there were some big announcements for Aria Operations for Logs (formerly vRealize Log Insight) at Explore Europe. The first was Log Root Cause Analysis (RCA), which will save hours on log forensics. Log RCA will take a specified date and time, and use Machine Learning (ML) to sift through potentially millions of logs, before presenting back outliers relavant to a breakage or major issue. A confidence score is provided and the operator can dig deeper into the individual events. Log Compare will allow simultaneous queries to be run side-by-side. There were also content packs released for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS).

Modern Apps Announcements

VMware Tanzu Solution Recap

The latest updates to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) were announced at Explore US (v2.0) and Explore Europe (v2.1). TKG 2.x introduces a new unified API (ClusterClass) for declarative state deployment, scale, and lifecycle management. ClusterClass support for the supervisor cluster was brought in with TKG 2.0, followed by management cluster support in TKG 2.1.

Also announced was TKG 2.1 support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), complementing existing AWS, Azure, and vSphere integrations.

Tanzu Mission Control will support private and air-gapped deployments, allowing consistent control of all Kubernetes clusters for customers who must operate on-premises and in air-gapped environments. Furthermore, Tanzu Mission Control will also support Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster lifecycle management.

Tanzu Mission Control will also streamline the installation of trusted, upstream open source software packages with Bitnami Application Catalog integration. Speaking of Bitnami, the Bitnami engine was used to develop the VMware Image Builder. At VMware Explore Europe, it was announced that VMware Image Builder is now in beta!

Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) 1.3 has brought in Red Hat OpenShift support, and Jenkins CI/CD integration. TAP 1.3 air-gap support was added for disconnected and highly regulated environments, as well as secure software supply chain enhancements and supported vulnerability scanners. You can read the full list of announcements in Tanzu Application Platform Updates.

Finally, enhancements were made to Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced, allowing operators to automatically discover Kubernetes clusters across multiple clouds, and onboard them for secure connectivity.

Anywhere Workspace Announcements

The big news in the SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) space was the new SD-WAN client to provide consistent connectivity, performance, and security capabilities to remote and mobile workers. The SD-WAN client will enable zero trust security, integrated AIOps for end-user experience visibility, Dynamic Multipath Optimisation for fast and reliable connections, and access to a worldwide network of SASE Points of Presence (PoPs) for multi-cloud access. SDWAN and SASE continue to grow this global connectivity by also adding new PoPs and delivering VMware Private Mobile Network.

New VMware SD-WAN Client

At VMware Explore US and Europe, VMware presented a strategic north star vision of autonomous workspaces – self-configuring, self-healing, self-securing – as the future of hybrid work. To support this vision, product enhancements were made across virtual apps and desktops, anywhere workspace, security, and digital employee experience. Let’s take a look:

Horizon Cloud support for Windows 365 Cloud PCs
Workspace ONE Mobile Threat Defense with phishing and content protection

Many of the sessions from both Explore US and Explore Europe are available to replay online in the VMware Explore Video Library. With the ongoing energy crisis in Europe, don’t miss VMware CTO Kit Colbert discussing how we co-innovate to accelerate energy transformation.

Phew.. that’s it for another year! A huge congratulations to all the Customer Achievement Award Winners, including in the UK The Royal Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and to Lloyds Banking Group for taking to the main stage during the general session!