The Future of VMware: Going Down the Rabbit Hole at VMware Explore 2023
VMware: A company with a storied history that dates back to the very definition of virtualization and a darling of enterprise IT for decades. But since its pre-pandemic heyday under the leadership of Pat Gelsinger, VMware’s future has come into question. Many consider the company’s multiple investments in unproven technologies, cloud service provider delivery of alternative hypervisors, and the departure of Pat for Intel placing the future of VMware at risk. With the acquisition of the company by Broadcom looming (and another hurdle to that acquisition passed in the past few days), what will VMware become in the coming years, and what specifically does Hock Tan and the Broadcom team see as the true value of VMware’s IP portfolio?
To learn more, I headed to Las Vegas and to the TechField Day Extra event at the Wynn hotel. There, the VMware team detailed the new NSX+ offering including NSX+ policy management, NSX+ intelligence, NSX+ network detection and response, and NSX+ ALB cloud services. NSX+ is obviously the latest iteration of VMWare’s successful NSX offering, a shining star that has grabbed a hold of solution leadership beyond the VMware core hypervisor business. NSX+ is also likely at the center of Broadcom’s interest in the company given it’s squarely in network. So what does NSX+ deliver that is new? According to the VMware team, multi-cloud security policy configuration and management with a single pane of glass view on management of distributed firewalls, gateways and IDS/IPS policies are at the center of innovation.
The VMware team demonstrated the NSX+ Policy Management capability at work allowing adherence to corporate security guidelines and enabling teams to operate seamlessly within those guidelines. The demo provided walked through a step by step of setting up subnets within the VPC, associating VNICs to those subnets, and showcasing that teams have no access beyond the VPC intended ensuring compliance to broader corporate security policies.
Another key feature that caught my attention was the NSX ALB controller cloud service enabling multi-cloud load balancing through a single controller cloud service. When asked what the difference was between this core capability and existing management schema, the VMware team clarified that this offers a SaaS management option as an alternative to traditional in house management which was termed “disconnected”. This will be available to on-prem instances today and then extending to VMware cloud and public cloud instances over time.
But VMware saved the most interesting feature, at least from my perspective, for last. They’ve integrated centralized multi-cloud analytics with NSX+ intelligence. What does this provide for administrators? It delivers a scalable and centralized data platform to not just view historical data but also amps security oversight and delivers behavioral threat analytics. VMware also talked up their use of ML to classify workloads and oversee other rudimentary data collection, and I expect they’ll expand this capability over time. Will this be used by administrators vs. unique network security tools? I could see integration with other security tools, but I’m dubious that NSX+ alone will provide the requirements that enterprises require.
So where does this leave VMware? I think the key takeaway is that core innovation is still being delivered from their engineers, and NSX+ certainly will be part of the VMware of 2024+. Given the heritage of VMware within enterprise, I expect core hypervisor use to bias to VMware moving forward within enterprise deployments. But future innovation in the broader industry squarely biases towards cloud native workload management, and the innovation conversation in my opinion has shifted from VMworld to the likes of Cloud Native Con and the CNCF community, for example. And with Broadcom’s acquisition likely to close imminently, it does make a VMware Explore 2024 a real question at least in its current definition. As always, thanks for engaging.