With the rapidly evolving world of IT and virtualization, staying up-to-date with the latest technologies and obtaining relevant certifications is crucial for career growth and professional success.

VMware is the gold standard when it comes to the most renowned and respected virtualization certifications. In this blog post, we’ll explore the state of VMware certifications in 2023 and identify the best certifications for you.

Is it worth getting a VMware certification?

Short answer: Yes! Obtaining one or more VMware certifications is worth it for IT professionals looking to advance their careers and validate their knowledge and expertise. VMware certifications are well-regarded in the industry and validate the skills and knowledge required to implement and manage VMware products effectively. They can also open doors to new job opportunities and increase earning potential. 

What are the VMware certification tracks?

VMware offers certifications that align with technology tracks across the VMware portfolio. Each track focuses on different VMware products and solutions. There are occasionally small amounts of overlap between tracks, but this is typically only with a handful of exam objectives.

Six tracks are currently available:

• Data Center Virtualization: Design, install, manage, and support vSphere environments

• Cloud Management and Automation: Design, install, configure, optimize, and support VMware Aria and other cloud solutions

• Security: Configure, manage, and support security features of key VMware products

• Network Virtualization: Design, implement, manage, and support an NSX-T environment

• Digital Workspace: Design, configure, deploy, manage, optimize, and troubleshoot Workspace ONE and Horizon with View

• Application Modernization: Develop, manage, and migrate applications through the VMware Tanzu portfolio

What are the VMware certification levels?

Within each VMware certification track, you can achieve different levels of certification. These levels are Technical Associate, Professional, Advanced Professional, and Design Expert. As you can see, these levels align to job roles. Most tracks have all levels available for certification (though there are a few where some of these levels might not exist).

VMware Certified Technical Associate (VCTA)

This is an entry-level technical based certification for those new to the technology, or even new to the industry, and targeted at those who can perform operational tasks with the technology.

VMware Certified Professional (VCP)

These are typically broad technical-based certifications for those who install, configure, manage, and optimize the technology. It’s expected that individuals going for a VCP have worked with the technology in the exam for more than a year.

VMware Certified Advanced Professional (VCAP)

There are two certifications at this level. The first is a VCAP Deploy certification for those who manage and optimize the VMware technology in question. The VCAP Deploy exam is a hands-on experience in a real environment, where you need to show hands-on skills with managing, troubleshooting, and optimizing the products. The second is a VCAP Design certification for those who design and build solutions for VMware technology.

VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX)

This represents the pinnacle of VMware expertise and the highest level of certification. Candidates must hold the VCAP certifications in the relevant VCDX track, submit a design proposal, and defend their design in front of a panel of VMware experts. There are currently 300 VCDXs in the world.

The key VMware certifications available in 2023

With around 30 available certifications, it’s difficult to suggest a few key certifications. If your expertise is in a particular area, such as digital workspace, it makes sense to go deep into that stack from a certification standpoint.

However, if you’re looking for suggestions on key VMware certifications that are helpful from a knowledge perspective and to advance your career in the ever-evolving world of virtualization and modern workloads, the following three certifications top the list.

VMware Certified Professional - Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV)

The VCP-DCV certification is designed for IT professionals who want to demonstrate knowledge and expertise in deploying and managing core VMware vSphere environments. The certification validates their skills in working with VMware’s chief virtualization technology. 

The VCP-DCV is VMware’s flagship certification and often singled out as a key requirement in virtualization role job descriptions. Studies have shown holders of the VCP-DCV have improved career opportunities and higher earning potential compared to those without it.

Assess your Vmware VSphere skills >>

Start prepping for your VCP-DCV certification >>

VMware Certified Professional - Network Virtualization (VCP-NV)

The VCP-NV certification is targeted at IT professionals, virtualization specialists, and network administrators who want to demonstrate proficiency in deploying and managing VMware NSX, which is VMware’s software-defined networking solution.

Networking plays an important role in the reliability and performance of applications, especially as you start to support modern and next-generation workloads in the data center and provide hybrid connectivity between multiple environments and clouds.

I remember sitting for the VCP-NV back in 2018 when the main NSX product was NSX-V. I learned so much about networking in general and took that knowledge into other roles and when working with public cloud platforms.

Start prepping for your VCP-NV certification >>

VMware Certified Professional - Application Modernization (VCP-AM)

Cloud-native and modern applications are hot right now. The VCP-AM certification is targeted at IT professionals and developers who want to showcase expertise and knowledge in modern application design, development, and containerization using VMware Tanzu and Kubernetes.

Kubernetes has been on the rise for many years and has become the gold standard of container orchestration for modern applications in cloud-native environments. VMware has been supporting Kubernetes for a while. Achieving this certification will help you understand how cloud native applications are deployed and run on VMware platforms.

This is a great certification to earn after you have the foundations of the VCP-DCV and the VCP-NV. While they aren’t prerequisites, understanding those technologies at a VCP level will assist with the Application Modernization certification path, as Kubernetes on vSphere relies on core vSphere technologies and NSX-T for the networking provider.

Which VMware certification should I take for a rewarding career?

When you consider the different VMware product tracks, there are approximately 30 certifications available at the VMware Certified Professional (VCP), VMware Certified Advanced Professional (VCAP), and VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) levels. The right VMware certification for you depends on your career aspirations and expertise level.

My advice is to target a few certifications at a VCP level to demonstrate broad experience and knowledge across VMware technologies. Then dive a bit deeper into tracks that make sense for your current role and technology focus by going for the advanced certifications.

If you’re looking to validate your expertise as an architect, the VCDX could be worth considering. But understand that this requires a significant investment of money and time. It’s not for the fainthearted, but I’ve read a lot of stories from people who passed and failed the VCDX noting how much they learned on the journey.

How can I prepare for a VMware certification?

Preparation for VMware certifications is essential, and while your specific approach might differ, my advice is to take a three-pronged approach:

Hands-on experience. Everything at the VCP level and above will expect you to have hands-on experience working with the relevant VMware products in the real world. Yes, you can pass the exams without this level of experience, but the recommended candidate (as described by VMware for VCP certifications) has at least one year of experience with the products and technologies being tested.

Training and study. You’ll want to ensure your knowledge and expertise cover the objectives you’ll be tested on in the exam. My suggestion is to put the exam objectives in a spreadsheet and self-evaluate your knowledge on each one. Then use your favorite training material to solidify what you know and learn new skills as you study.

Test-taking skills. Sitting an exam to achieve a certification from any vendor is almost a skill itself. Questions are typically worded in specific ways. And depending on how many exams you’ve taken, it can be an experience that makes you a little nervous. Take practice exams and assessments to get yourself comfortable with what to expect for the real exam.

VMware publishes documents for all their exams. These exam guides provide information on how the exam will be delivered, which objectives will be tested, and other material you can reference. Always review the exam guide in detail when exploring a new certification. 

Conclusion

VMware certifications continue to hold significant value in the IT industry and have been proven to increase your earning potential and present opportunities for career growth. By understanding the available certifications and tracks, planning for how they relate to your role and aspirations, and ensuring you know how to prepare for a certification, you’ll be setting yourself up for success with VMware certifications in 2023 and onward.

Further learning

If you’re seeking to leap into VMware certification, Pluralsight offers a number of courses that can help you prepare, as well as acquire useful working knowledge — you can sign up for a 10-day free trial with no commitments. If you’re not sure what course to start with, you can do a free Pluralsight SkillIQ assessment.

Here are some learning paths with courses you might want to check out:

David Davis’s vSphere 8 courses are also great for skill building for the core VMware vSphere product:

August 23, 2023, 02:33 PM EDT

In addition to AI offerings with Nvidia and Lenovo, VMware Explore brought enhancements to VxRail from Dell as well as cloud advancements with Oracle and IBM.

At VMware Explore the virtualization all-star unveiled new products that deepen its ties with technology vendors including Nvidia, Oracle, IBM, Dell Technologies and Lenovo with products for channel partners across several lines of business.

“I genuinely believe that VMware is in an interesting situation around engaging with our strategic ecosystem to come up with differentiated solutions,” Zia Yusuf, VMware’s senior vice president of strategic ecosystem and industry solutions, told CRN. “Hopefully our customers will see a very logical story on how we can help them reduce the cost of inference, reduce the cost of training models. Get up and running faster. Leverage stuff that they already have to do that. So much of it is going to be an infrastructure cost issue.”

[RELATED: VMware Explore’s 5 Big Reveals: Updates To Tanzu, vSAN, NSX+, Workspaces And An AI Deal With Nvidia]

The biggest news came with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appearing on the main stage with VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram where they showcased VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, which promises generative AI capabilities. VMware said that globally there is an estimated $4 trillion market oppotunity with generative AI.

“This is a giant offering,” Raghurham told the crowd.

Added Huang: “We been working together for many years on this dream that we’re going to talk about. We are reinventing enterprise computing in order to transition to the future in order to transition to accelerated computing,” Huang told the crowd.

Several other industry partners unveiled new products at VMware Explore, including IBM, Oracle, Dell and Lenovo, all of them as part of the ecosystem that Yusuf said is critical to the company’s progress. He said part of the magic is bringing all those partners together with VMware’s global systems integrators, a project his team has spearheaded.

VMware Explore 2023 stands as a prime example of an event crystallizing new trends, as it offered a platform for experts and enthusiasts to dive into the latest advancements in virtualization and cloud technologies.

In a conversation between theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante (pictured, right) and Rob Strechay (left), some key insights emerged.

“I think getting in there with some of those real customers and talking to them about what they’re thinking about and how they see this playing out, to your point, what their expectations [are], I think there is a lot of learning going on,” Strechay said. “I think there’s also people looking at what their job is today and what their job may be tomorrow.”

Vellante and Strechay spoke as part of a keynote analysis at VMware Explore 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the impact of the Broadcom acquisition, VMware’s strategic artificial intelligence focus and the incremental enhancements to the core products that power the industry. (* Disclosure below.)

Navigating transformation

The atmosphere at the event buzzed with anticipation as attendees sought insights into VMware’s trajectory. The possibilities were vast, from potential enterprise licensing agreement renegotiations to unveiling the company’s future trajectory post-Broadcom acquisition.

A noteworthy development at the event involved the multicloud narrative. VMware’s strategic thrust into the multicloud era was evident, as Broadcom’s multibillion-dollar investment in research and development signified. The event spotlighted the potential and opportunities presented by the multicloud paradigm. The increasing prominence of multicloud solutions raised questions, from interoperability to ease of use across diverse cloud ecosystems.

“They’ve got to go beyond policy management, and they’ve got to really create that true multicloud abstraction layer,” Vellante said. “Then there’s a data lake, which is providing intelligence, which is very important to have the metrics.” 

At the crux of the event lay VMware’s foray into AI. The AI discourse was expected to revolve around cross-cloud services, Tanzu, Aria and developer extensions. Incremental enhancements to core offerings, including vSphere, vSAN and NSX, were anticipated. However, the spotlight truly shone on VMware’s AI strategy.

“I think a big piece of this is how innovative is that? I think it’s good,” Strechay said. “I think it’s a little late to the market. I think also it doesn’t go far enough for the multicloud vision that they have. Hopefully, we’re going to see some of that $2 billion that was talked about going into, ‘Hey, let’s make this a true platform that can compete with an S3 or an EBS or an FSx-type platform.’”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore 2023:

(* Disclosure: This is an unsponsored editorial segment. However, theCUBE is a paid media partner for VMware Explore 2023. VMware and other sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

Intro

Virtualization Benchmarks

By Neil Ticktin, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher

Head-to-Head: How do VMware Fusion 5 and Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac compare?

Why Virtualization?

In 2005, Apple announced the switch of the Mac platform from PowerPC to Intel processors (the first Intel-based models were available in early 2006). This introduced some interesting opportunities for the Mac, including the ability to run operating systems other than Mac OS X on a Mac. This includes not only your everyday Windows 7 or 8, but also other 64-bit OSes including Linux and more.

You may already understand your options for running Windows on a Mac, but in case you don’t, your first choice is to decide between Apple’s Boot Camp, and a virtualization product like VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop for Mac. With Apple’s Boot Camp, you can run Windows 7 natively, but you have to reboot every time you want to switch between OS X and Windows. In addition, you can only use one OS at a time, it’s designed for Windows not Linux, and it doesn’t have support for Windows 8 or even XP. Despite a speed advantage for some things, that’s not particularly convenient. For that reason, MacTech recommends a virtualization product for most users.

In addition, virtualization gives "switchers" (those switching from Windows to Mac) more comfort because they can use their old applications and more easily get to their old data. It gives all Mac users the ability to use some critical piece of software not available on the Mac. For example, your job may require you to run Internet Explorer, the Windows version of Outlook, or some other possibly vertical market software that your corporate systems support. Or, you may simply want to play a Windows game not available on the Mac.

With virtualization, like you’ll see in Parallels Desktop for Mac or in VMware Fusion, you can run Windows alongside OS X, getting the best of both worlds. For many, this may mean running Windows in a “window” on your Mac. Both VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop also have the ability to run Windows applications even more transparently or full screen, but we’ll leave that for another discussion.

Your final option is to use Parallels Desktop for Mac or VMware Fusion to access/use your Boot Camp volume rather than a virtual hard disk. This gives you the option of sometimes booting Windows natively, and other times, using the volume for virtualization. As the performance of doing this has improved so much, this has become a viable option for users.

The Big Question

So which virtualization product do you go with? Which solution is faster? Should you run Windows 7 or 8? One virtual processor or more? Can you run OS X in a virtual machine? In short, there are different answers for different people; it all depends on your needs. More and more, virtualization can accommodate whatever your needs might be.

To tackle this problem, MacTech has once again undertaken a huge benchmarking project. We often wait, as we did this year as well, for a patch or two after major upgrades to deliver time for major new versions to shake out because it often has impact on the testing. This is similar to the virtualization benchmarking projects that MacTech undertook in past. In both cases, as with other MacTech benchmarks, we tested performance of the types of things that everyday users typically do. In this case, it was not just testing the raw performance of the Windows OS, but also commonly used Windows applications. Like last time, based on reader feedback, we paid attention to 3D graphics and gaming. We also looked at how well the products performed supporting the new Retina screens.

The goal was to see how VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop performed, under Windows 7 and Windows 8. Furthermore, we wanted to see some of the differences with different Mac models with different graphics and processor types.

To be clear, this article is not a product review; it’s a benchmarking analysis. The article’s purpose is to assess performance (including issues we found if something didn’t work as expected), and not product features, user interface, etc. You should use your assessment of features, user interface, and support in conjunction with this article’s benchmarking results to make your product choice.

Before you ask why other solutions and products were not included, let’s answer that. This benchmark project is already huge with thousands of collected data points crossing four guest OSes (Windows 7, Windows 8, OS X Lion, and OS X Mountain Lion), five models of computers with mechanical hard drives and SSDs, and over 60 tests each run 3-5 times for most of the environments. There were several thousand tests to be completed, many with a stopwatch. That’s all before a single word of this article is written!

To add even one product would increase this huge test matrix by 50%. As a result, we focused on the two leading commercial virtualization products that come with support. These two products also have free trial versions that you can compare against other solutions (i.e., try before you buy).

One thing to note, however, is that open source and other free products may not be for everyone, especially non-technical users. For many, these offerings can be difficult to understand and install, and they do not have technical or product support behind them. Obviously, users can reach out in forums and the community, but if you don’t understand something, you won’t be able to pick up the phone and call support the way you can with a commercial product. If that works for you, great! If not, as is the case for most users, then a commercial product is likely your solution.

August 22, 2023, 01:59 PM EDT

Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise computing at Nvidia, says the new full-stack software platform will help enterprises take advantage of ‘state-of-the-art’ Large Language Models like Llama 2 and build custom generative AI applications using proprietary information on VMware’s cloud infrastructure to significantly Boost productivity.

VMware is hoping to entice enterprises to build and run generative AI applications on its cloud infrastructure with a new full-stack software platform it has built with AI chip powerhouse Nvidia.

Unveiled Tuesday at VMware Explore in Las Vegas, the upcoming platform is called VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, and it’s designed to help businesses use their proprietary data to build custom Large Language Models and run generative AI applications on VMware Cloud Foundation.

[Related: VMware Explore’s 5 Big Reveals: Updates To Tanzu, vSAN, NSX Plus, Workspaces And An AI Deal With Nvidia]

Both companies emphasized that the platform, which is expected to launch early next year, will help businesses address concerns around data privacy, security and control when building generative AI applications on the infrastructure of their choice.

VMware Private AI Foundation will initially be supported by systems with Nvidia GPUs, DPUs and SmartNICs from Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo. Support for the public cloud will come “in the future,” according to the companies.

The platform was unveiled as Nvidia seeks to continue its dominance in the AI computing space by expanding in the enterprise space through partnerships with IT heavy hitters like VMware. At the same time, VMware is hoping to cement itself as the No. 1 destination for enterprises running AI workloads in multi-cloud environments as semiconductor giant Broadcom gets closer to acquiring the company.

“Generative AI and multi-cloud are the perfect match,” said Raghu Raghuram, VMware’s CEO, in a statement. “Customer data is everywhere—in their data centers, at the edge and in their clouds. Together with Nvidia, we’ll empower enterprises to run their generative AI workloads adjacent to their data with confidence while addressing their corporate data privacy, security and control concerns.”

Platform Will Let Businesses Create Apps With ‘State-Of-The-Art’ Models

Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise computing at Nvidia, said VMware Private AI Foundation will help enterprises take advantage of generative AI—which he called the “most transformational technology of our lifetime”—and build conversational interfaces that connect with business systems.

As examples, Boitano said companies could train Large Language Models “against call records with your customers, your IT tickets and your security configurations” to Boost business processes.

“We see AI being infused into every business over the next decade to make people 10 times more productive, to help them answer these complex questions about their business faster and more efficiently,” he said in a briefing with journalists and analysts.

A critical aspect of the new platform is that it will make it “easy for any enterprise” to build AI applications with “state-of-the-art” Large Language Models like Llama 2, Falcon LLM, MPT and Nvidia Nemo, according to Boitano.

The platform will accomplish this by letting businesses “pull in those models with the best-in-class tools and easily combine them with [their] proprietary information,” Boitano said. This will result in a new model that “has a nuanced understanding” of a business’ proprietary and private information.

Boitano said this is a welcome alternative for enterprises that want to avoid feeding proprietary data into public Large Language Models due to privacy concerns.

“You don’t want to provide those to a model that’s basically taking your proprietary data and encoding it into this publicly available thing, and that’s why the concept of private AI is so important,” he said.

What’s Included With VMware Private AI Foundation

VMware Private AI Foundation will consist of software components from VMware and Nvidia that will help businesses train AI models and then run inference of them for live applications.

“It’s a full workflow product for your AI developers, and it really takes away the complexity of how do I get started on this? Where do I go? What do I need? All of it is comes prepackaged from both of us,” said Paul Turner, vice president of cloud platform at VMware.

At the top of the software stack is Nvidia AI Workbench, a new toolkit from the GPU designer that lets developers create, test and customize pretrained Large Language Models on a PC and workstation and then scale them to any data center or cloud infrastructure.

The top of the stack also includes the Nvidia NeMo framework, which includes customization frameworks, guardrail toolkits, data curation tools and pretrained models to help enterprises build, customize and deploy generative AI models on any infrastructure powered by Nvidia GPUs.

A critical component of NeMo Is Nvidia’s TensorRT framework for Large Language Models that ensures such models run on the company’s GPUs with the best possible inference performance.

On VMware’s end, the platform includes the vSphere Deep Learning VM images and image repository, which will deliver users a “stable turnkey solution image” with preinstalled frameworks and performance-optimized libraries for running AI workloads in virtual machines.

The platform also makes use of the VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture for enabling performance-optimized NVMe storage and supporting GPUDirect storage over RDMA, the latter of which allows direct data transfer between hard drives and GPUs without involving the CPU.

VMware has also tuned the platform to support running AI workloads across up to 16 GPUs or virtual GPUs in a single virtual machine and across multiple nodes. Part of what makes this possible is a “deep integration” between vSphere and Nvidia’s NVSwitch technology that connects multiple GPU systems.

One of the platform’s two foundational elements is Nvidia AI Enterprise, a software suite that contains important building blocks for developing and running AI applications such as NeMo and TensorRT among other frameworks, pretrained models and tools. Nvidia launched it exclusively with VMware in 2021 before opening up the platform to other virtualization vendors and cloud service providers.

The platform’s other foundational element is VMware Cloud Foundation, the virtualization giant’s hyperconverged infrastructure platform for running applications in private or public environments.

VMware Private AI Foundation Will Have GPU-Based Pricing

When VMware Private AI Foundation releases next year, it will be made available as a single product sold by channel partners, either through VMware itself or bundled with OEM systems, according to Turner.

While Turner declined to provide pricing details, he said VMware plans to charge customers based on the number of GPUs they use to create and run their generative AI applications. Nvidia has used a per-GPU pricing model for commercial software it has developed in the past, including Nvidia AI Enterprise.

“As they scale their environment based on the number of GPUs, the Private AI Foundation pricing will be relative to that value that they’re getting,” he said.

VMware Inc. is bringing virtualization to mobile phones through its new Mobile Virtualization Platform, or MVP.

Built on technology acquired from Trango Virtual Processors in October 2008, VMware MVP will help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster. In addition, the platform will let consumers run multiple profiles -- for example, one for personal use and one for work use -- on the same phone.

"We optimize virtualization for mobile phones, which is the foundation of MVP, giving you the ability to run multiple virtual machines on a single device," said Srinivas Krishnamurti, director of product development for VMware, Palo Alto, CA. "Running multiple environments at the same time has a lot of different benefits."

By abstracting the applications and data from the hardware itself, VMware hopes that virtualization will not only enable handset vendors to accelerate time to market but can also pave the way for innovative applications and services for mobile consumers.

Virtualization in the mobile space as a very promising and potentially a fast-emerging market.
Gartner predicts that by 2012, more than 50 percent of new smartphones shipped will be virtualized.

Virtualization can enable enterprises and consumers to manage and secure their phones and it can also help handset vendors reduce bills of materials and shorten development cycles to allow for faster releases.

There is a growing demand for virtualization technologies from both the designers and consumers of next-generation mobile devices using the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processors.

VMware MVP is a thin layer of software that will be embedded on a mobile phone that decouples the applications and data from the underlying hardware.

It will be optimized to run on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones.

The MVP is planned to enable handset vendors to bring phones to market faster and make them easier to manage.

The benefits to handset manufacturers include accelerated time to market and easier migration to rich operating systems.

Today, handset vendors spend significant time and effort getting new phones to market due to the use of multiple chipsets, operating systems and device drivers across their product families.

The same software stack does not work across all the phones and, therefore, must be ported separately for each platform.

This process is slow and expensive and ultimately slows time to market.

VMware MVP will virtualize the hardware, enabling handset vendors to develop a software stack with an operating system and a set of applications that is not tied to the underlying hardware.

This will enable the vendors to deploy the same software stack on a wide variety of phones without worrying about the underlying hardware differences.

At the same time, by isolating the device drivers from the operating system, handset vendors can further reduce porting costs because they can now use the same drivers irrespective of the operating system deployed on the phone.

Increasingly, handset vendors and carriers are looking to migrate from proprietary operating systems to rich, open operating systems to enable their customers to access the widest selection of applications.

With this transition to open operating systems, protection of trusted services such as digital rights management, authentication and billing is becoming an increasing concern.

VMware MVP will allow vendors to isolate these services from the open operating system and run them in isolated and tamper-proof virtual machines, so that even if the open environment is compromised, the sensitive services are not impacted.

The benefits to businesses and consumers multiple profiles and "persona on the go."

Companies are under increasing pressure from employees to support employee-owned mobile devices.

Choice, however, brings with it complexity in managing a wide variety of devices in terms of both cost and security.

It also brings increased risk in securing and managing employee-owned devices, especially if they contain confidential information.

VMware MVP will let IT organizations deploy a corporate phone personality that can run alongside the employee's personal phone on the same physical device.

Smartphones are becoming a combination of a PC and a wallet rolled into one package.

A person's phone persona -- an individuals' collection of applications, pictures, videos, music, emails, bank info, credit card information and PIM -- is becoming much richer and more valuable.

Consequently, the ability to protect and migrate personas will become an important purchasing decision.

VMware MVP will save the persona as a set of files so that all the applications and data on the phone can be managed as a collection of files.

People can then move their persona to a new device, making the upgrade to a new phone more convenient.

VMware specializes in virtualization services from the desktop to the datacenter.

With 2007 revenues of $1.3 billion, more than 120,000 customers and more than 20,000 partners, VMware claims to be one of the fastest growing public software companies.

"The notion of having multiple virtual personalities is interesting," Mr. Krishnamurti said. "I don't want to run my personal stuff on my corporate phone, so instead of having two phones, I have a work profile and a personal profile running right next to each other on the same phone.

"As we look at smartphones, they're not just a communications device, they're a computing device, a combination of a PC and wallet now that people can swipe their cellphone to make payments," he said. "Customers want to run mobile payments apps in secure containers, because they don't want them to be compromised, and virtualization is a key enabler for that as well.

"If you lose your handset or upgrade, wouldn't it be nice to take your entire persona with you onto your new device, reinstalling apps, copying data, copying those files onto your new device and your entire persona appears automatically."

News

VMware Explore: VMware (and NVIDIA) Execs Promise To Deliver on Generative AI's Promise

• By Gladys Rama
• 08/22/2023

VMware on Tuesday debuted a new solution, jointly developed with NVIDIA, that aims to address the legal, privacy and security concerns around the use of generative AI in enterprises.

VMware Private AI Foundation, expected to launch early next year, is an end-to-end platform designed to help organizations benefit from generative AI technologies while ensuring that their data remains private, secure and compliant. Powering it will be VMware's multicloud and NVIDIA's compute solutions.

VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram announced the Private AI Foundation during the opening keynote of the 2023 VMware Explore conference. He was joined onstage by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who touted the product as "reinventing enterprise computing."

"For the very first time, enterprises around the world will be able to do private AI at scale ... and know that it's fully secure," Huang said.

With Private AI Foundation, businesses will be able to custom-create and train large language models (LLMs) on their proprietary data. Per NVIDIA's press release, the LLMs run "adjacent" to the customers' data, whether it's in the cloud, their own datacenters or the edge.

Raghuram stressed during the keynote that Private AI Foundation is key to helping organizations take advantage of the promise of generative AI, which he sees as threefold: the "general applicability" of LLMs, "universal access" that doesn't require data science expertise, and up to "100 times improvement in the economics of creativity."

Eventually, Raghuram predicted, generative AI will underpin the majority of modern application development. "Five or 10 years from now, calling something 'AI-powered' will be like calling something 'database-powered' now," he said.

For enterprises, however, the biggest barrier to taking full advantage of generative AI is concern for the security of their data. The concept of "private AI" navigates that barrier by taking what Raghuram described as an "architectural approach" to meet the specific privacy and compliance needs of an organization while using the cloud to facilitate access to LLMs and generative AI technologies.

"This is inherently a multicloud problem" that requires a multicloud solution, per Raghuram.

Other Announcements
Tuesday's VMware Explore opening keynote was a relatively quick one-hour affair, but it was not short on announcements. Besides the Private AI Foundation news, VMware also announced.

• vSAN Max, a new vSAN product that provides petabyte-scale, disaggregated storage.
• The vSphere+ lifecycle management service for ESXi.
• NSX+, a multicloud management, security and load balancing service.
• The ability to create virtual private clouds on demand using APIs.
• The option to perform automated, concurrent ransomware recovery across multiple VMs.
• The Tanzu Application Engine, designed to streamline requests from developers.
• Tanzu Intelligence Services, which use AI to automatically Boost things application performance, resource management and more.
• Improvements to Apps on Demand.
• Improvements to Edge Cloud Orchestrator, née SASE Orchestrator.

Beyond these announcements, for many VMware stakeholders, the elephant in the room is the impending acquisition of VMware by Broadcom for a cool $61 billion. The acquisition was first announced over a year ago. At VMware Explore on Tuesday, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan appeared via a taped message to assure watchers that the acquisition is set to be completed, as scheduled, by the end of October 2023.

Stay tuned for more AI-related news from the conference, which concludes on Thursday. In the meantime, check out our other conference coverage, which includes: