PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 7, the biggest evolution of vSphere in over a decade. VMware vSphere 7 has been rearchitected into an open platform using Kubernetes APIs to provide a cloud-like experience for developers and operators.

Today’s enterprise customers’ needs are constantly evolving and IT needs to provide infrastructure agility as well as security, efficiency and resiliency. To fully benefit from their application modernization efforts, enterprises also need to simultaneously modernize their infrastructure. A responsive infrastructure that is easily accessible by development teams further enables enterprises to successfully adapt to their customers’ changing needs. VMware vSphere 7 delivers essential services for the modern hybrid cloud, powering the compute environments for AI and machine learning, business critical and modern applications.

“Increasingly we see our customers encounter a number of roadblocks and silos when it comes to running their modern and traditional applications,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware. “VMware vSphere 7, our most significant vSphere release in a decade, will help enterprises run all their applications on a common platform using a combination of virtual machines, containers, and Kubernetes. This further helps enterprises increase developer and operator productivity, enabling faster time-to-innovation combined with the necessary enhanced security, stability, and governance.”

Watch the VMware vSphere 7 online launch event on Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:00am PDT.

VMware vSphere 7: Essential Services for Modern Hybrid Cloud

With VMware vSphere 7, IT operations teams can expect to benefit from simplified lifecycle management capabilities, new and enhanced security capabilities, new application-focused management, and a unified platform for consistent operations across clouds, data centers, and edge environments.VMware vSphere 7 was tested extensively with approximately 1,000 customers in the beta program.New capabilities and features include:

• Simplified Lifecycle Management: Using a desired state model, vSphere administrators can create configurations once, apply them, and continue to easily monitor them, protecting against configuration drift. This simplifies lifecycle management, vSphere software patching and firmware upgrades. Customers that prefer restful APIs can also use JSON to automate lifecycle management using VMware vSphere 7.
• Intrinsic Security: Enterprises can further intrinsically secure infrastructure, data, and access with a comprehensive, built-in architecture and a simple, policy-driven model delivered in VMware vSphere 7. This new release introduces remote attestation for sensitive workloads using vSphere Trust Authority. Additionally, it helps secure access and account management using identity federation with Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS).
• Application Acceleration: All applications benefit from a host of VMware vSphere 7 enhancements including major improvements to DRS, enhanced vMotion, and augmented support for persistent memory (PMEM) capabilities. Additionally, AI/ML and other applications can leverage GPU hardware, improving utilization using elastic pools of GPU resources. Further, customers can now support latency-sensitive applications using newly implemented precision time protocol capabilities.
• Support for All Applications: Newly rearchitected using Kubernetes, vSphere is now optimized to run both modern container-based and existing virtual machine-based workloads. Initially, vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, which powers VMware Cloud Foundation Services to increase developer productivity, will be available solely through VMware Cloud Foundation 4.
• Application-Focused Management: Available only in vSphere 7 with Kubernetes (through VMware Cloud Foundation 4), application-focused management enables VI admins to organize multiple objects into a logical group and then apply policies to the entire group. For example, an administrator applies security policies and storage limits to a group of Kubernetes clusters that represent an application versus to all clusters individually.

VMware vSphere 7 comes in two major configurations. VMware vSphere 7 is now available for VM-based applications in a number of editions including VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus Edition. VMware vSphere with Kubernetes will be available with VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu to power container- and VM-based applications. VMware Cloud Foundation 4 is expected to become available by May 1, 2020 (the end of VMware’s Q1 Fiscal Year 2021).

Supporting Quotes

“BYU Idaho has seen an amazing amount of growth in the past few years,” said Stephen Parker, Systems Engineer, Brigham Young University Idaho. “Embracing the online learning community has been one our biggest expansions. It requires more back-end support and greater performance. The continual improvements in VMware vSphere help us deliver the reliability and performance that we need from our platform.”

“VMware vSphere with Kubernetes can help our IT team to achieve consistent operations of our existing system and rapid scale-up for new applications,” said Yang Shen, CIO, Digital China. “And the new architecture offers flexibility between private cloud and multiple public clouds.”

“VMware vSphere 7 introduces several new enhancements across lifecycle management, security and application acceleration that will make a difference to customers,” said Bob Laliberte, Sr. Analyst & Practice Director, Enterprise Strategy Group. “By integrating vSphere 7 with Kubernetes into VMware Cloud Foundation 4, customers get full stack, hybrid cloud infrastructure tightly integrated with the new Tanzu runtime, Hybrid Infrastructure Services and APIs. This integration provides rapid deployment of infrastructure to support modern app development, while also delivering automation and orchestration to reduce the operational overhead of these complex systems.”

Additional Resources

• Watch the VMware vSphere 7 online launch event on Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 8:00am PDT
• View the VMware vSphere 7 video playlist
• Learn more about VMware vSphere 7
• Read the March 10, 2020 press release “VMware Announces Expanded Portfolio of Products and Services to Help Customers Modernize Applications and Infrastructure”
• Connect with VMware on Twitter and Facebook