VMware will be enhancing its existing wellbeing benefits program, to equip employees to live a more healthy and balanced life. Under this program, all employees across offices in India will be eligible for an additional wellbeing allowance of 29,565 INR as equitable reimbursement. Employees can also choose to apply the wellbeing amount to help pay to vaccinate themselves and their family members.

This initiative is the latest offering in VMware’s unique wellbeing program portfolio. As the industry moved to a remote work model last year, VMware revisited some of its policies to ensure that teams had help and resources to help cope with the rigors of the new normal.
As the world embraced the new normal, VMware initiated a pandemic leave policy for its employees, a unique initiative where employees are entitled to 5 days of paid leave, to help employees take some time off during this unusual time. VMware also introduced EPIC2 days, declaring four company-wide holidays throughout the year to help employees switch off and spend time with their families. In addition, VMware introduced a new coaching, therapy, and work Life Services (ICAS) program that caters to the mental and emotional wellbeing of not just the employees but also their dependents.

“At VMware, we believe that true innovation is tied in with an environment where employees can bring in their best selves to work. Balance is key to employee happiness and enabling our employees to live healthy and balanced lives has always been an integral part of our work culture. Given the disruption of last year, we understand that our employees might need some additional support and we have revamped our wellbeing benefits program to do just that. Our people are our biggest strength. And we believe it is our responsibility to establish a work culture that is supportive and prioritizes employee health, both physical and mental,” said Ramkumar Narayanan, VP Technology & MD, VMware India.

VMware believes that people are the key to sustainable success. The company continuously strives to make it easier for its employees to pursue well-being on their terms while delivering excellence at work. At VMware, the focus remains on creating a culture where people are empowered to bring their best selves to work focusing on relevance, impact, and choice.

VMware today rolled out a series of updates to its automation and monitoring portfolio as part of an ongoing effort to simplify management of highly distributed IT environments.

Updates to the VMware vRealize Cloud automation portfolio include VMware vRealize Automation 8.4’s tighter integration with the open source Salt automation framework the company gained by acquiring SaltStack last year, in addition to a range of tools for provisioning and governing instances of VMware software running on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

There is also a set of tools to enable organizations running NSX network virtualization software for vSphere to migrate to NSX-T, an instance of network virtualization software that can be deployed anywhere.

VMware vRealize Operations, meanwhile, is being updated to support a total of 57 AWS services along with the ability to predict the cost of deploying VMware Cloud on AWS. The latter capability includes tracking potential savings generated by powering off idle or unused virtual machines as well as snapshots, orphaned disks and oversized virtual machines. There are also now ten additional dashboards for tracking various costs, including return on investment, total cost of ownership and potential cost savings. IT teams can also more easily track capacity utilization trends on AWS.

VMware is adding support for the open source Telegraf Agent to enable IT teams to collect metrics from any platform, in addition to providing an update to VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.4 and vRealize Log Insight Cloud that enables these monitoring tools to store data collected from multiple cloud services more efficiently. IT teams will also be able to collect logs from both Microsoft Azure and AWS.

Finally, VMware is expanding its network monitoring tools to provide greater visibility across multiple clouds.

Fidelma Russo, senior vice president and general manager for cloud services at VMware, said the rate at which IT teams are consuming the software-as-a-service (SaaS) editions of VMware management and observability tools or full-blown managed services has increased sharply since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, as IT teams managed on-premises and cloud instances of VMware software from home.

It’s not clear what percentage of VMware’s installed base are now consuming the company’s automation and monitoring tools, but as the number of VMware instances deployed on public clouds increases alongside on-premises IT environments, so, too, do the management challenges. The choice IT teams generally have to make is deciding between automation and observability tools that are optimized for a specific platform versus adopting frameworks that work more broadly. With the acquisition of Salt and support for Telgraf, it is apparent VMware is moving to expand the reach of its management portfolio beyond its own software.

In the meantime, IT teams are not only being asked to manage more complex IT environments, but the expectation that, through automation, they will be able to more effectively implement cost controls. This is happening at a time when many organizations have not been quite so sensitive to the total cost of IT. The challenge, of course, is those organizations are being asked to spend money on automation today in the hopes of spending less because of it tomorrow.

VMware Introduces the Tanzu Portfolio

At VMworld 2019, VMware unveiled Tanzu, a portfolio of products and services aimed at transforming how enterprises build, run, and manage software on Kubernetes. The announcement represented a significant strategic pivot for VMware, positioning the company as a major player in the cloud-native ecosystem.

VMware Chief Operating Officer (Products and Cloud Services) Raghu Raghuram summarized the vision:

“We’re positioned to help customers succeed along each step of their journey—building their applications with the addition of Pivotal’s developer platform, tools and services; running their applications with the groundbreaking Project Pacific which will transform vSphere into a Kubernetes native platform; and managing their growing Kubernetes footprint across environments from a single control point with VMware Tanzu Mission Control.”

Raghu Raghuram, COO (Products and Cloud Services), VMware

Three Pillars: Build, Run, Manage

The Tanzu portfolio was structured around three core activities for enterprise Kubernetes adoption:

• Build: Helping development teams create modern applications using a modern software supply chain, supported by the pending Pivotal acquisition and its developer-centric platform.
• Run: Transforming VMware vSphere into a Kubernetes-native platform through Project Pacific, enabling enterprises to run containerized workloads alongside traditional VMs.
• Manage: Providing centralized control of Kubernetes clusters across environments using VMware Tanzu Mission Control.

Project Pacific: Kubernetes Embedded in vSphere

The centerpiece of the VMworld 2019 announcement was Project Pacific, a re-architecture of VMware vSphere to make it Kubernetes-native. Rather than treating Kubernetes as an add-on, Project Pacific aimed to embed Kubernetes capabilities directly into the vSphere hypervisor layer.

Key technical aspects of Project Pacific included:

• Container runtime in the hypervisor: A new ESXi-native pod concept was introduced, combining properties of both Kubernetes pods and virtual machines to deliver improved security and performance for mission-critical workloads.
• App-level policy controls: Operators could apply policies, resource quotas, and role-based access controls at the application level directly through vSphere tooling.
• Kubernetes API access to SDDC infrastructure: Developers could consume Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) resources via standard Kubernetes APIs, while IT operators continued to use familiar vSphere tools to provision and manage Kubernetes clusters.
• Consistent view for all stakeholders: Both developers and IT operators would interact with the same underlying infrastructure through Kubernetes constructs, reducing operational friction.

This approach was designed to protect existing investments in vSphere skills, tooling, and infrastructure while enabling a gradual and practical migration toward cloud-native application architectures.

Acquisitions Underpinning the Portfolio: Pivotal and Bitnami

Two acquisitions were central to the Tanzu build story:

• Pivotal: VMware announced its intention to acquire Pivotal, which brought a comprehensive developer platform, professional services expertise, and a strong connection to the enterprise developer community. Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry heritage and Spring ecosystem were particularly relevant to enterprises modernizing Java-based applications.
• Bitnami: Bitnami contributed what VMware described as the largest catalog of pre-built, scanned, tested, and continuously maintained application content for Kubernetes clusters, with a stated audience of 2.5 million developers at the time of announcement.

Project Galleon: Curated Application Stacks for Developers

Also announced at VMworld 2019 was Project Galleon, introduced as a beta offering. Project Galleon was designed to allow enterprise IT teams to deliver customized, up-to-date application stacks and package formats to their internal developers, with multi-cloud readiness as a design goal. This addressed a common enterprise pain point: ensuring that developer-facing tooling is both current and compliant with organizational standards.

Tanzu Mission Control: Managing Kubernetes at Scale

VMware Tanzu Mission Control was positioned as the management layer for organizations running Kubernetes clusters across multiple environments. It leveraged several open-source projects to deliver key capabilities:

• Cluster API — for Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management
• Velero — for backup and recovery of cluster state and persistent volumes
• Sonobuoy — for conformance testing and configuration validation
• Contour — for ingress control using the Envoy proxy

VMware’s commitment to open-source was highlighted as a core principle of the Tanzu portfolio. The company cited its position as a top-three contributor to the Kubernetes project at the time of the announcement.

Industry Context

Jay Lyman, Principal Analyst at 451 Research, offered third-party perspective on the announcement:

“Kubernetes can help organizations achieve consistency and drive developer velocity across a variety of infrastructures, but enterprises also require effective control, policy and security capabilities. Building on its acquisitions, organic innovation and open source contributions, VMware has staked out its place as a leader in this rapidly evolving cloud-native industry.”

Jay Lyman, Principal Analyst, 451 Research

The Tanzu announcement signaled that VMware recognized Kubernetes as the de facto standard for enterprise container orchestration and was repositioning its core vSphere platform accordingly—rather than competing with Kubernetes or treating it as an optional feature.

Summary

VMware’s Tanzu portfolio, announced at VMworld 2019, represented a comprehensive response to the shift toward cloud-native application development in the enterprise. By embedding Kubernetes into vSphere through Project Pacific, acquiring developer-focused platforms via Pivotal and Bitnami, and providing multi-cluster management through Tanzu Mission Control, VMware aimed to position itself as the platform of choice for enterprises at every stage of their Kubernetes journey.