It has been a very busy year and, sadly, I didn’t had lot of time to write here. But with VMworld 2021 recently finished, lot of new things have appeared and I will talk about the key announcements.

Project Arctic

Project Artic, currently on a Tech Preview, has the main goal to bring hybrid cloud to customers existing vSphere deployment model. It integrates cloud connectivity right into vSphere and establishes hybrid cloud as the default operating model for all customers infrastructures. They will be able to leverage unlimited cloud capacity on demand and access VMware cloud services through vCenter.

Project Cascade

Projects Cascade aims to provide a unified interface for on-demand infrastructure and containers across VMware Cloud platforms from a single API or GUI. It will address the needs of developers and DevOps in a multi-cloud world and will enable a true open multi-cloud with an industry standard programmatic interface that is powered by Kubernetes.

Project Capitola

Project Capitola is an exciting step in the evolution of vSphere to meet the growing memory needs of the next generation of applications. It is a software-defined memory implementation that will aggregate tiers of different memory types such as DRAM, PMEM, NVMe and other future technologies in a cost-effective manner, to deliver a uniform consumption model that is transparent to applications. With the growing need to process and consume massive amounts of data, the memory subsystem of the data center continues to be a bottleneck, impacting performance.

Project Ensemble

Another new project, another Tech Preview. Project Ensemble will simplify and accelerate your journey to multi-cloud by uniting the different personas in an application-centric collaborative user interface. Project Ensemble will unify and strengthen our best-in-class multi-cloud management capabilities and support a cloud operating model for customers at any stage of their cloud transformation.

A cloud operating model combines people, process and technology and provides an operational framework for key decisions on where your applications need to live, how to help them perform and be more secure, and how to optimize the efficiency of these environments and your overall cloud budget. This model allows for more easily adopting new clouds and managing existing clouds with the same staff, tools, and governance policies. vRealize Cloud Management supports the cloud operating model and support private, public, multi-, hybrid and edge clouds in any combination.

Project Ensemble takes an app-centric view of your clouds, but also focuses on how different personas, such as cloud providers and cloud consumers, in your organization interact with those applications. This will be driven by a user experience customized by learning users’ needs made possible with machine learning.

VMware Sovereign Cloud Iniciative

As organizations become increasingly global and interconnected, issues surrounding data privacy have become more complex. 

A company may be based in France, but it may leverage the tools of U.S.-based companies like Google or Amazon to store and transmit sensitive data. If that France-based company stores customer information on a server that happens to be based in the U.S., where does that data really reside, who owns it, and what regulations should it be subject to? 

Many countries and regions are taking a firm stance to create guidelines around those questions in order to protect private data. With regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) setting the bar for data privacy protection, it’s more important than ever for companies to proactively safeguard their sensitive customer and employee data, everywhere it’s stored and shared.

VMware’s Sovereign Cloud initiative is a global collection of cloud provider partners who are addressing the ESG values in many ways, but particularly the “G” for Governance with their approach to sovereignty.  

Sovereign cloud providers are committed to ensuring data privacy and compliance, helping customers get the benefits of cloud whilst also meeting the rapidly growing and changing data privacy laws. These national or regional regulations and laws govern everything from where data resides geographically to cross-border data flow. Moreover, organizations need to protect data in the cloud against evolving cyberattacks. Sovereign cloud providers ensure that data sovereignty, data residency, data access, jurisdiction, control, and much more are met with the assurance that customer’s most sensitive data is managed securely. VMware Sovereign Cloud partners deliver Cloud Verified services and utilize architecture built on VMware Validated Designs (VVD) for Cloud Providers, this means they can design, architect and secure compliant clouds faster and efficiently.