VMware made a number of announcements during last week’s VMworld 2020 around how the company is seeking to meet all DevOps teams’ needs with an ever-expanding range of tools and platforms. Encompassing data center and multicloud operations for legacy infrastructure and cloud native, VMware seeks to support organizational requirements under a single umbrella.

VMware’s security tools and platforms, for example, extend “intrinsically into the infrastructure as your apps and data move across clouds or get decomposed into containers,” Pat Gelsinger, VMware’s CEO, said during a VMworld keynote. The basic components of IT infrastructure that VMware serves includes app modernization, application development and management for multicloud cloud and legacy environments, as well as for what VMware describes as “digital workspace” needs.

In a nutshell, VMworld featured a large number of talks on these themes, with an emphasis on cloud native applications and operations and security, as well as next-generation topics, such as 5G and AI — including VMware’s partnership with Nvidia described below.

Photo: VMware

AI, 5G and a Project Monterey

VMware will use GPU giant Nvidia’s hardware framework to provide artificial intelligence (AI) for VMware’s platform. This is intended to help “democratize” AI Gelsinger said, noting AI adoption among organizations “is stuck at just 10 to 15%,” Gelsinger said.

The partnership will “unleash AI for every enterprise,” he said. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a keynote that Nvidia and VMware will put AI “in the hands of all the companies, so they can automate their business and products.”

While details about how the AI platform will work and a timeline for when it will become available were undisclosed, Nvidia said it will provide its AI platform and NGC (Nvidia GPU Cloud) framework for VMware’s cloud infrastructure. The announcement also overlapped with VMware’s Project Monterey introduction, which VMware said would support machine learning and 5G, as well as AI. As part of its partnership with Nivida, for example, Nvidia — which has recently agreed to purchase processor giant Arm — will offer its BlueField-2 data processing unit (DPU) integrated into VMware Cloud Foundation.

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