An overview of all projects discussed at VMworld 2021

At VMworld 2021, the premier multi-cloud event, a lot of new innovations are discussed. The latest innovations are wrapped into projects. Each project focusses on a future technology, sometimes available as a technology preview. I’ve created an overview of the projects that are discussed at VMworld, including links to relevant blog articles and/or VMworld sessions. I also recommend to check out session VI3091 “What’s next? A look inside VMware’s Innovation Engine” that talks about some of these innovations in general. Enjoy!

Note that the VMworld general disclaimer is applicable to all these projects, including: it’s about features that are currently under development, there’s no commitment from VMware to deliver these features and new features are subject to change. Check out the linked blogs and sessions below for more details.

Project Santa Cruz – Provide SD-WAN and compute capacity to run containers at the edge. In this way you can add more features to a device at the edge. More information about this in session VI2484, VI2105, EDG2325 and EDG2123.

Project Santa Cruz “TKG bring your own host” – This is about a Cluster API provider to allows you to bring your own bare metal hosts. In this way you can add bare metal hosts to your Tanzu managed environment.

Project Radium – With Bitfusion you can pool GPU resources and make them available through the network. With Project Radium the feature set is expanded to other architectures, including architectures/technologies coming from Intel, AMD and others. More information in session VI1650, VI2729 and VI1624.

Project “cryptograhic agility” – Crypto algorithims have a lifecycle, as compute capabilities advance – algorithims get weaker and need replacement. With crypto agility you can add rapidly switch between algorithms to accomodate security requirements, for example you want to enable post quantum cryptography on VMware’s Unified Access Gateway (UAG). More information in session VI1505, VI2214 and VI1201.

Project IDEM – Project IDEM is about multi cloud scale management automation. This is about an asynchronous and parallel system, so it can run any number of management tasks on any cloud at any time. It’s stateless and very flexible and works with state configuration files. You can see Project IDEM as a next-generation Salt Stack solution. More information in session VI1865.

Project Ensemble – Integrates and automatically deploys vRealize, leveraging and integrating the capabilities of the entire suite. It provides an app-centric view of your cloud and focusses on how different personas interact with those applications. More information in session MCL1301 and in this blogpost.

Project Cascade – Project Cascade embraces the openness of the Kubernetes ecosystem and makes the Kubernetes operator model the abstraction layer to VMware Cloud. More about Project Cascade in this blogpost.

Project Capitola – Project Capitola takes advantage of new memory technologies and uses a “sofware-defined memory implementation that will aggregate tiers of different memory types such as DRAM, PMEM and other future technologies in a cost-effective manner, to deliver a uniform consumption model that is transparent to applications”. More about this latest innovation in this blog article and in MCL1453.

Project Arctic – Project Arctic is the evolution of vSphere in a multi-cloud world, it sometimes called vSphere-as-a-service. It’s about natively integrating cloud connectivity into vSphere – “making vSphere cloud-aware, and making hybrid cloud the default operating model”. Customers will be able to instantly access VMware cross-cloud services through the vCenter interface and take advantage of cloud capacity on-demand. Blogpost with additional details here.

Project Dawn Control – Provides you full visibility into all your cloud assets and dependencies.

Project Monterey (introduced earlier at VMworld 2020) – Project Monterey is about reimaging virtual infrastructure as a distributed fabric through the tight integration with Data Processing Units (also knowns as SmartNICs). Read about the latest development in this blogpost. Various breakout sessions and roundtables discuss Project Monterey.

I hope this was helpful, you can leave your comment below. If anything is missing, please let me know and I will add it to the list.