LAS VEGAS — VMware jumped into the edge and will acquire multicloud management startup CloudHealth Technologies, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said on stage today at VMworld. He also showed off his new ink — a VMware tattoo that runs the entire length of his forearm — that he got earlier this week on the Vegas Strip.

CloudHealth provides a cloud operations platform across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It has more than 3,000 customers including Yelp, Dow Jones, Zendesk, Skyscanner, and SHI.

VMware plans to roll its existing cloud automation, compliance, and governance tools into a new CloudHealth suite to make multicloud operations easier, Gelsinger said. “We will make CloudHealth the cloud operations health platform of choice,” he said, adding that with the acquisition, VMware has “the most complete set of multicloud management tools in the industry.”

The companies didn’t report a purchase price, but Reuters puts it at about $500 million.

As data is increasingly generated and processed at the network’s edge — and as infrastructure companies are pushing their edge strategies — Gelsinger also announced a tech preview of a new product called Project Dimension. It’s a hyperconverged infrastructure appliance for edge locations running the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) software stack with NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud. “VeloCloud is the hottest product in VMware’s portfolio today,” Gelsinger said during his keynote.

Project Dimension also supports Workspace One for managing human endpoints and appliances and VMware Pulse, which manages IoT devices. Dell EMC and Lenovo are the initial hardware partners. VMware doesn’t yet have a launch date for the edge product.

“Project Dimension allows us to extend VCF to the edge,” Gelsinger said. “The device edge, the compute edge, and rethinking the evolving networking layer is the VMware edge strategy.”

And in a likely attempt to put a nail in the how-will-VMware-survive-in-a-container-world coffin, Gelsinger noted that “Google and all major clouds run their containers in VMs. Simply put, it’s the best way to run containers.”

Kubernetes has become the standard for containers, and “VMware is the enterprise dial tone for Kubernetes,” Gelsinger said, touting the company’s VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS). This allows enterprises to run a managed Kubernetes service in the hybrid-cloud environments as well as on the major public clouds: AWS, Azure, GPC, and IBM Cloud.

“But underneath that, NSX is emerging as the standard for software-defined networking,” Gelsinger said. “It fully supports VMware PKS. NSX — the only platform on the planet that can address the complexity and scale of Kubernetes deployments.”

The company also rolled out a slew of updates to its NSX networking and security portfolio on the first full day of VMworld. The networking technology’s even got its own keynote — aptly titled The NSX Keynote — later this afternoon. So it’s likely that VMware will unveil some additional networking news at that.

Among the NSX announcements: VMware introduced vSphere Platinum Edition, which now comes with AppDefense built in.

The company first launched its security product at last year’s VMworld conference. It initially supported applications running on vSphere-based virtualized and cloud environments. Earlier this year VMware announced the product added container security for Kubernetes, Docker, RedHat OpenShift, and PKS workloads running across virtual machines, bare metal servers, and cloud platforms.

AppDefense protects applications by monitoring them against their intended state. It leverages the hypervisor to monitor runtime behavior and uses machine learning to detect attempts to manipulate applications. It then uses vSphere and NSX to automate and orchestrate response to attacks.

“vSphere Platinum will enable virtualization teams to give an enormous security contribution to your enterprise,” Gelsinger said. “I call it the burger and fries: nobody leaves a restaurant without the fries. Who could possibly run a VM without turning security on?”

This also ties into what VMware calls microsegmentation 2.0. This provide deep visibility into how an application behaves, and it automates alerts or actions when it deviates from this known good behavior. “We are fusing together AppDefense with vSphere and NSX,” Gelsinger said. “Taken together: adaptive segmentation.”