VMware’s latest cloud push includes more VMware Cloud on AWS regions, expanded multicloud management tools, and a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) device jointly engineered with Dell EMC.

“The world is going to be hybrid,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s Cloud Provider Software business unit. And VMware’s strategy in this hybrid cloud world is to provide consistent infrastructure and operations across customers’ data centers and private clouds as well as public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This requires workload portability and unified management tools across VMware-based and cloud-native services “that have no VMware in them,” Patel said.

“As the world moves to multicloud, cloud is the new hardware, and that unique management solution that allows [customers] to operate is VMware,” he said. “Customers want a consistent infrastructure for running [virtual machine] and container workloads across the edge, data center, and the cloud.”

VMware Cloud on AWS plays a major role in this hybrid strategy — this is the hybrid cloud service VMware and AWS launched in 2017 that allows customers to run their workloads in the AWS public cloud using the same VMware software stack. The companies haven’t yet said how many customers use this service, but Patel did note that they passed the goal of more than 1,000 customers by the end of 2018.

Today the companies added three more AWS regions to the service: AWS Canada (Central), AWS EU (Paris), and AWS APJ (Singapore). This means the service is now available in 13 AWS regions globally.

More than 60 partners are building or delivering managed service offerings for VMware Cloud on AWS, and more than 280 partners have achieved the VMware Cloud on AWS solution competency, less than one year from the launch of VMware Cloud on the AWS partner program.

VMware also announced new cloud management capabilities in CloudHealth, the startup VMware acquired last summer.

CloudHealth developed a software-as-a-service (SaaS) multicloud management platform that works across AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and VMware vSphere-based clouds. The platform manages more than $8 billion in annual cloud spend, and helps customers save an average of 25 percent each month on their cloud costs, said Joe Kinsella, VP and CTO of CloudHealth. Kinsella founded CloudHealth in 2012.

Today it added a multicloud reporting feature that provides visibility across the aforementioned clouds, plus Kubernetes cluster visibility, from a single report. This allows customers to pull resource usage, capacity planning, and governance-level information in to a single report.

The CloudHealth platform now integrates with Wavefront, VMware's cloud analytics and monitoring platform, so customers can access cloud performance metrics via their CloudHealth platform. “Customers can pull those metrics back into CloudHealth, trend them, and then use them to provide recommendations around right sizing” to optimize performance and cut costs, Kinsella said.

VMware also today announced the newest version of its hybrid cloud software stack, VMware Cloud Foundation 3.7, will be available on an HCI appliance jointly engineered with Dell EMC in VMware’s first quarter fiscal 2020.

VxRail is Dell EMC’s HCI appliance that ships with integrated VMware software. The sister companies will now, for the first time, offer VMware’s hybrid cloud stack running on top of the HCI device. This provides “a completely integrated hardware-software solution, fully automated hardware and software, and end-to-end life cycle management,” Patel said, adding that customers that have deployed these integrated HCI appliances have seen more than 60 percent improvements in efficiency. “The fastest, most seamless way to deploy hybrid cloud is to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation with VxRail.”