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VMware President Dhawan: We Are Enhancing Ransomware Recovery With ‘Options For Public Cloud’
‘You can run your production workloads in the public cloud, while your primary infrastructure is being fully recovered. It’s all automated. You don’t have to think about ransomware recovery through the lens of just storage appliances,’ VMware President Sumit Dhawan tells the crowd at VMware Explore.

VMware, Nvidia Reveal Private AI Foundation To Help Enterprises Run Gen AI Apps
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 Strengthen productivity.

CEO Raghu Raghuram On VMware’s Gen AI Strategy And How Partners Should Prep For The Post-Broadcom Era
“We have teamed up with Nvidia to create a joint solution that we call the VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia. It’s going to obviously have the Nvidia GPUs but we’re going to build on that to say, “Look, what else do we need to build so that customers can run these language models on top of a VMware Cloud Foundation architecture?’ And then using Nvidia AI software as well as Nvidia AI hardware, how do we almost make it like an appliance that you can work with Dell and Lenovo and HPE and others so customers can deploy it wherever they need to?” says VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram.

VMware Explore’s 5 Big Reveals: Updates To Tanzu, vSAN, NSX+, Workspaces And An AI Deal With Nvidia
The virtualization all-star has been firing on all cylinders as partners sing the praises of the new products it has introduced around mutli-cloud, the hybrid workplace and generative AI.

Broadcom-VMware Deal Approval Comes Amid VMware Partner Renaissance
Partner-led engagements leading to bookings at VMware have nearly doubled to 45 percent, up from 25 percent a year ago, Tracy-Ann Palmer, vice president of partner experience, programs and investments at VMware, tells CRN.

Multi-cloud has become one of VMware’s top focus areas, and the new and enhanced offerings include vSAN Max, which allows storage to be disaggregated and scale independently from compute, as well as new multi-cloud virtual private clouds for storage and networking.

Sumit Dhawan, VMware’s President, onstage at VMware Explore

LAS VEGAS – At the VMware Explore event here, VMware announced a series of announcements focused on advancing the company’s multi-cloud strategy. The next evolution of VMware Cloud has new editions and capabilities that will help customers modernize, optimize, and better protect their organizations, as well as recover faster from ransomware attacks.

“There are two key themes you will hear over and over at this event – multi-cloud and Generative AI,” VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram told his keynote audience. “A few years ago, when we first talked about multi-cloud, very few of you were doing it. Now 75% are using two or more public clouds, plus private cloud, plus the edge.”

Raghuram said that as VMware’s multi-cloud strategy has evolved, they have honed both their strategy and their services offerings.

“Our Cloud Smart approach means finding the right infrastructure for the right application, and this is why we created cross-cloud services,” he stated.

This modernizing of VMware’s cloud infrastructure is built on top of VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere, said Sumit Dhawan, VMware’s President.

“We have seen over 30% growth year over year in VMware Cloud consumption, because you want better infrastructure, management and security,” Dhawan said in the keynote.

Dhawan introduced what he termed five fundamental innovations in the multi-Cloud area.

“When we originally introduced vSAN, it was an amazing announcement that changed the world of storage,” he said. “Now we are introducing VMware vSAN Max, which provides petabyte scale disaggregated storage, which is managed like vSAN.”

“This is a groundbreaking innovation for storage intensive applications and modern databases, said Prasanth Shenoy, VP Marketing, Cloud Platform, Infrastructure and Solutions at VMware. “Customers can now independently scale their storage customers with their vSphere compute clusters. By doing that, we are seeing them have up to 30% less TCO cost.”

This ability of vSAN Max to scale storage elastically and independently from compute to maximize utilization, will scale up to 8.6 petabytes of capacity and 3.6 million IOPS per cluster. It is designed to withstand failures across sites, hosts, and even discrete storage devices in a stretched cluster topology. It can lower TCO up to 30% for mission-critical databases through hardware and license consolidation.

vSAN Max is expected to be available in 2HFY24, will be licensed separately from existing vSAN editions, will be offered as a subscription, and is planned to be licensed on a per tebibyte metric.

The second innovation in this space is vSAN+, virtual private clouds that provide full isolation of networking, security, and services to multiple tenants on a shared VMware Cloud infrastructure managed by a single global NSX interface.

“vSAN+ lets you upgrade your entire ESXi fleet quickly, and  makes doing this on VMware Cloud Foundation three times faster,” Dhawan said.

Third is NSX+, which delivers full SaaS based L2-L7 networking, to provide deep visibility for all a customer’s networking all in one place

“We tech previewed NSX+ last year, when it was known as Project Northstar,” said Umesh Mahajan, SVP and GM, Networking and Security Business unit at VMware. NSX+ VPCs will provide full isolation of networking, security, and services to multiple tenants on a shared VMware Cloud infrastructure managed by a single global NSX interface.

“The newly announced  Multicloud VPCs are the next generation of VPCs, and are specifically designed for multi-cloud,” Mahajan said. “This is a logical unit of networking and is designed for multi-cloud self service.”

“We are also making infrastructure developer-ready to allow them to create VPCs for their DevOps team using APIs like in the Public Cloud,” Dhawan said.

“This is pretty important because multi-cloud VPCs bring about the next generation of VPCs, making it safe and easy to deliver applications faster at cloud speed.” Mahajan stated. “Customers want a self-service capability here. Now in private clouds, VPCs can be created on any physical underlay, fully vendor agnostic, and with security guardrails.”

Finally, ransomware recovery, which VMware emphasizes is more important than just ransomware protection, has also been enhanced.

“It now has options for the public cloud, so it can run there while the primary backup is being recovered,” Dhawan indicated.

“Ransomware continues to be top of mind for every company that we talk to,” Shenoy noted. “We announced our Ransomware Recovery solution last year, and now we have enhanced the foundational capabilities to make recovery time a lot faster by allowing you to recover in parallel. We are also announcing a Tech Preview for Cybersecure storage, which integrates the ransomware workflow with native vSAN snapshots, and expanded where we protect our workloads to include Google Cloud VMware engine. This is now truly a multi-cloud ransomware solution.”

VMware Cloud is now available in five prescriptive VMware Cloud editions (Essentials, Standard, Pro, Advanced, and Enterprise).

VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA is built on VMware Cloud Foundation, optimized for AI and will run fully secure Generative AI applications.

CEOs Jensen Huang of NVIDIA and Raghu Raghuram of VMware onstage

LAS VEGAS – On Tuesday, the big product announcements from the VMware Explore event were unfurled here, with basically all of them revolving around two key themes: multi-cloud and Generative AI. The highlight of the Generative AI news was the announcement of VMware Private AI foundation, the latest fruit from the partnership between VMware and NVIDIA, and the product of four years of joint research from the two companies.

“We are excited to announce VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, which is a giant offering which NVIDIA and VMware have put together,” said Raghu Raghuram, VMware’s CEO, during the event’s opening keynote. “Private AI is an architectural approach which balances business gains from AI with privacy and compliance needs.”

The joint offering is built on VMware Cloud Foundation and optimized for AI. It will let enterprises customize models and run generative AI applications, including intelligent chatbots, assistants, search and summarization.

“With Private AI Foundation, enterprises will be able to do private AI in multi cloud environments and know that it is fully secure,” said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, who joined Raghuram live onstage for the announcement. “This ability to train and fine tune models, will lead to the reinvention of the future of enterprise computing. It should be easy peasy.”

“This is the most transformational event of our lifetimes, stated Justin Boitano, VP of Enterprise AI at NVIDIA. “We see AI being infused into every firm over the next decade.”

Paul Turner, Vice President for Product Management vSphere at VMware, stressed that Private AI overcomes several issues which have retarded the growth of this technology in the past.

“There have been several issues to overcome,” he said. “First, how do we manage data so that you have confidence in it. The second is cost and complexity issues, which we address by building from open base models and just focus on fine tuning. And the third has been performance.” Private AI Foundation runs on NVIDIA accelerated infrastructure to provide performance equal to and even exceeding bare metal in some use cases.

“Generative AI is a new class of workloads which is unique in some ways, such as the scale-out workloads,” said Kit Colbert, VMware’s CTO. “It may need quite a bit of hardware and  compute. We see that as a huge opportunity for us to increase the footprint we have while improving customers’ communication.”

Colbert also stressed that with this, VMware is focused on avoiding broad industry mistakes around cloud in the past.

“AI is another type of workload that we have to support in a multi-cloud environment,” he said. “How do we architect them and how do we learn from the past. Initially, with Cloud First, cloud architectures were single cloud. This led to Cloud Chaos. This time, we need to architect things smarter from the beginning.  We need to skip the Cloud Chaos phase and go straight to Cloud Smart.”

“VMware Private AI foundation with NVIDIA is a full stack platform for private Generative AI with toolkits,” Turner emphasized

“Private AI is critical to protect your data, and fine tuning a large language model will run most efficiently through NVIDIA NeMo and Triton,” Boitano added.

Enterprises will also have a wide choice about where to build and run their models, including the NVIDIA NeMo cloud native enterprise services toolkit to Meta’s Llama 2 toolkit, as well as leading OEM hardware configurations and, in the future, public cloud and service provider offerings.

“AI in the past has been very use case specific, where you had to build a model for each use case,” Raghuram said, noting that this drove up costs exponentially. “With Generative AI and its foundation Large Language Models they have general applicability, not just to a specific use case.”

Out of the gate, VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA will be supported by Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo — which will be among the first to offer systems that supercharge enterprise LLM customization and inference workloads with NVIDIA L40S GPUs, NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs and NVIDIA ConnectX-7 SmartNICs. But these are just the first, with many more offerings from many more OEMs coming on their heels.

“We are announcing a broad system of OEMs, and we expect over 100 servers by the end of the year, running on over 20 OEMs.” Boitano said.

Pricing will be GPU-based. Reference architectures are immediately available, with availability of the full integrated product scheduled for early 2024. It will be available through the MSP program as well.

VMware introduced new Private AI offerings to drive enterprise adoption of generative artificial intelligence and tap into the value of trusted data. Private AI is an architectural approach that unlocks the business gains from AI with the practical privacy and compliance needs of an organization.

To make Private AI a reality for enterprises and fuel a new wave of AI-enabled applications, VMware announced:

• VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, extending the companies’ strategic partnership to ready enterprises that run VMware’s cloud infrastructure for the next era of generative AI.
• VMware Private AI Reference Architecture for Open Source to help customers achieve their desired AI outcomes by supporting best-in-class open source software (OSS) technologies today and in the future.

VMware Private AI is bringing compute capacity and AI models to where enterprise data is created, processed, and consumed, whether that is in a public cloud, enterprise data center, or at the edge. With these new offerings, VMware is helping customers combine the flexibility and control required to power a new generation of AI-enabled applications that will help dramatically increase worker productivity, ignite transformation across major business functions, and drive economic impact. A McKinsey report estimates generative AI could add up to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy.

A multi-cloud environment is the foundation for this new class of AI-powered applications because it makes private yet highly distributed data easier to harness. VMware’s multi-cloud approach provides enterprises with greater choice and flexibility where AI models are built, customized with an enterprise’s private data, and consumed, while still enabling required security and resiliency across any environment.

“The remarkable potential of generative AI cannot be unlocked unless enterprises are able to maintain the privacy of their data and minimize IP risk while training, customizing, and serving their AI models,” said Raghu Raghuram, CEO, VMware. “With VMware Private AI, we are empowering our customers to tap into their trusted data so they can build and run AI models quickly and more securely in their multi-cloud environment.”

Enterprises today face a hard choice when it comes to generative AI. They can either take advantage of public AI models to build their generative AI applications, but with the attendant risks of data exposure and uncertain training sources. Or they can attempt a “do-it-yourself” model, a strategy which lacks cost-efficiency and time-to-value. VMware AI Labs developed VMware Private AI specifically to solve this problem.

VMware Expands Collaboration with NVIDIA to Build Generative AI Platform Running on VMware Cloud Infrastructure

Today at VMware Explore 2023, VMware announced new Private AI offerings to drive enterprise adoption of generative artificial intelligence and tap into the value of trusted data. Private AI is an architectural approach that unlocks the business gains from AI with the practical privacy and compliance needs of an organization.

To make Private AI a reality for enterprises and fuel a new wave of AI-enabled applications, VMware announced VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA; and VMware Private AI Reference Architecture for Open Source.

The VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, extends the companies’ strategic partnership to ready enterprises that run VMware’s cloud infrastructure for the next era of generative AI. However, the VMware Private AI Reference Architecture for Open Source to help customers achieve their desired AI outcomes by supporting open source software (OSS) technologies.

VMware Private AI is bringing compute capacity and AI models to where enterprise data is created, processed, and consumed, whether that is in a public cloud, enterprise data center, or at the edge. With these new offerings, VMware is helping customers combine the flexibility and control required to power a new generation of AI-enabled applications that will help dramatically increase worker productivity, ignite transformation across major business functions, and drive economic impact. A McKinsey report estimates generative AI could add up to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy.¹

A multi-cloud environment is the foundation for this new class of AI-powered applications because it makes private yet highly distributed data easier to harness. VMware’s multi-cloud approach provides enterprises with greater choice and flexibility where AI models are built, customized with an enterprise’s private data, and consumed, while still enabling required security and resiliency across any environment.

Raghu Raghuram, CEO, VMware, said, “With VMware Private AI, we are empowering our customers to tap into their trusted data so they can build and run AI models quickly and more securely in their multi-cloud environment.”

News

'Private AI' Leads AI News at VMware Explore 2023

• By David Ramel
• 08/22/2023

The expected deluge of AI-related news at this week's big VMware Explore 2023 conference sees a "Private AI" initiative with chipmaker NVIDIA, along with AI integrations to the Anywhere Workspace platform and much more.

Private AI is an architectural approach that VMware introduced to help enterprises use generative AI with their private data. The company said it provides privacy, choice, performance and compliance for AI services while also enabling organizations to run various AI solutions on VMware Cloud infrastructure in different environments.

"The remarkable potential of generative AI cannot be unlocked unless enterprises are able to maintain the privacy of their data and minimize IP risk while training, customizing, and serving their AI models," said company CEO Raghu Raghuram in an Aug. 22 post. "With VMware Private AI, we are empowering our customers to tap into their trusted data so they can build and run AI models quickly and more securely in their multi-cloud environment."

AI in general and Private AI in particular were syllabus addressed in Raghuram's opening keynote address for the conference, which is covered in the Virtualization & Cloud Review article, "VMware Explore: VMware (and NVIDIA) Execs Promise To Deliver on Generative AI's Promise."

Private AI
To realize the new Private AI offerings, VMware announced:

• VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, extending the companies' strategic partnership to ready enterprises that run VMware's cloud infrastructure for the next era of generative AI. That's done via a set of integrated AI tools that can help enterprises run proven models trained on their private data in a cost-efficient manner while enabling them to be deployed in datacenters, on leading cloud computing platforms, and at the edge.
• VMware Private AI Reference Architecture for Open Source to help customers achieve their desired AI outcomes by supporting best-in-class open source software (OSS) technologies today and in the future. The initiative integrates OSS technologies to provide an open reference architecture for building and serving OSS models on top of VMware Cloud Foundation. At the conference, VMware said it's showcasing collaborations with leading companies from across the AI value chain thusly:
  • Anyscale: VMware is bringing the widely adopted open source Ray unified compute framework to VMware Cloud environments. Ray on VMware Cloud Foundation makes it easy for data scientists and MLOps engineers to scale AI and Python workloads much more easily by utilizing their current compute footprints for ML workloads instead of defaulting to the public cloud.
  • Domino Data Lab: VMware, Domino Data Lab and NVIDIA have teamed up to provide a unified analytics, data science, and infrastructure platform that is optimized, validated, and supported, purpose-built for AI/ML deployments in the financial services industry.
  • Global Systems Integrators: VMware is working with leading GSIs such as Wipro and HCL to help customers realize the benefits of Private AI by building and delivering turnkey solutions that combine VMware Cloud with AI partner ecosystem solutions.
  • Hugging Face: VMware is collaborating with Hugging Face to help launch SafeCoder today at VMware Explore. SafeCoder is a complete commercial code assistant solution built for the enterprise that includes service, software and support. VMware is utilizing SafeCoder internally and publishing a reference architecture with code samples to enable the fastest possible time-to-value for customers when deploying and operating SafeCoder on VMware infrastructure. Read the full launch blog here.
  • Intel: VMware vSphere/vSAN 8 and Tanzu are optimized with Intel's AI software suite to take advantage of the new built-in AI accelerators on the latest 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

VMware Anywhere Workspace and 'Autonomous Workspaces'
In addition to Private AI, VMware announced the advancement of its Autonomous Workspace vision via AI-powered integrations with its Anywhere Workspace platform, which is part of the VMware Cross-Cloud services portfolio that VMware said automatically optimizes employee experience, drives new vulnerability management use cases and simplifies application lifecycle management.

The Autonomous Workspace idea was introduced in last year's event as covered by Tom Fenton, who noted, "These workspaces will be self-configuring, self-healing and self-securing."

VMware noted the progress made over the past year since that announcement. "Last year, we announced our Autonomous Workspace vision as a path forward for organizations to navigate the challenges brought on by hybrid work," said EUC exec Shankar Iyer. "We are thrilled to unveil new advancements for our customers that expand data sources and insights, integrate with technology partners for improved security, and unify app delivery strategy across all virtual desktops and apps. These innovations continue to progress our vision of providing the next evolution of digital workspaces."

AI Everywhere
While the Private AI initiative and Anywhere Workspace AI integrations were noteworthy announcements at the start of the conference, many other AI-related developments were detailed, including:

• Tanzu: VMware Tanzu is a modular, cloud-native application platform that accelerates development, delivery and operations across multiple clouds. The offering received several enhancements, two of which are powered by AI:
  • VMware Tanzu with Intelligent Assist (tech preview) will Strengthen operations from reactive to proactive and dramatically streamlines operational workflows by providing a conversational chatbot experience powered by generative AI that leverages the federated data architecture across VMware Tanzu Hub's integrated solutions.
  • VMware Tanzu Insights will empower operations teams to better troubleshoot and resolve issues with holistic visibility and deeper ML/AI powered insights across distributed Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure environments. Initial availability planned for Q3 FY24.
• Digital Exployee Experience (DEX) VMware says its AI-driven DEX solution from VMware Workspace ONE Intelligence is the only platform that delivers a comprehensive solution to create a seamless hybrid work experience for employees and empower IT teams to be more proactive with a holistic tool that measures, analyzes, delivers and remediates workplace experiences.

  The VMware Workspace ONE DEX solution now supports broader data capture that empowers IT teams with holistic visibility across their end-user computing (EUC) environment, said VMware, which listed three examples:

  • New network-based telemetry. The hybrid workforce is reliant on SaaS services for maximum productivity, and outages can have a significant impact. The DEX solution conducts synthetic testing that can detect outages of internal or external services before users experience them. These capabilities can prevent an influx of inbound tickets and automate resolution with proactive communications to affected employees.
  • Expanded Android battery and network analytics. Now collected via Launcher on frontline devices, the near real-time data (every 10 minutes) allows admins to identify devices with problems. The issues can include poor Wi-Fi signal or cellular strength, high latency or jitter, and even batteries that are too hot, have a high discharge rate, or never charge to 100 percent.
  • Horizon in-guest session and network monitoring. This solution alerts VMware Horizon admins to common issues, such as long logon time, to help find root cause via its Insights and Guided Root Cause Analysis features. The network performance data helps Horizon admins quickly determine if the poor experience is caused by a remote user's network or high resource consumption by the virtual machines.
• Next-Generation Insights:The last item above mentions Insights, described by the company as AI-driven anomaly detection that informs IT admins of environmental issues."We are excited to announce today that we have released an expanded set of out-of-the-box insights across more data sources, with an underlying re-architecture that enables measurement on dynamic thresholds while also accounting for seasonality," the company said, listing insights support for:
  • Horizon last-mile performance
  • Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) for app or OS install failures and forecasting
  • Workspace ONE Access for logon trends and failures
  • Frontline use cases for long check-in/check-out time or increases in lost devices or devices not checked in

Stay tuned for more AI-related news from the conference, which concludes on Thursday.

VMware kicked off VMware Explore (the conference formerly known as VMworld) with a full ‘day zero’ of activities, booth exhibits, breakouts and training-focused tracks designed to showcase its multi-cloud infrastructure competencies.

Even before day one CEO keynotes, the Computer Weekly Developer Network team battled through Hurricane Hilary’s turbulence and jet lag to grab just a handful of hours of sleep and dive in.

The mid-afternoon partner session was designed to highlight various aspects of VMware’s partner world from the VMware User Group (VMUG) to its work with its  VMware Partner Connect initiative, which exists as a central portal for partner requirements (with a persona-based dashboard) and its VMware Partner Demand Center, the latter being a marketing campaign, content and automation platform.

VMware president Sumit Dhawan took the stage to explain his firm’s approach to what it likes to call ‘cloud smart’ – a term it spreads over a number of main pillars.

Dhawan says that it has been a busy period for VMware and that the  VMware Cloud Foundation technology stack is expanding in terms of use by around a third in the last year making it (what he claims is) the fastest-growing overall cloud that exists.

At VMware Explore 2023, VMware has introduced new Private AI offerings to drive enterprise adoption of generative AI and tap into the value of trusted data.

Private AI is an architectural approach that unlocks the business gains from AI with the practical privacy and compliance needs of an organisation.

VMware Private AI is bringing compute capacity and AI models to where enterprise data is created, processed, and consumed, whether that is in a public cloud, enterprise data centre, or at the edge.

With these new offerings, VMware is helping customers combine the flexibility and control required to power a new generation of AI-enabled applications that will help dramatically increase worker productivity, ignite transformation across major business functions, and drive economic impact.

To make Private AI a reality for enterprises and fuel a new wave of AI-enabled applications, VMware also announced VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, extending the companies’ strategic partnership to ready enterprises that run VMware’s cloud infrastructure for the next era of generative AI.

Additionally, VMware announced Private AI Reference Architecture for Open Source to help customers achieve their desired AI outcomes by supporting best-in-class open-source software (OSS) technologies today and in the future.

“The remarkable potential of generative AI cannot be unlocked unless enterprises are able to maintain the privacy of their data and minimize IP risk while training, customising, and serving their AI models. With VMware Private AI, we are empowering our customers to tap into their trusted data so they can build and run AI models quickly and more securely in their multi-cloud environment,” Raghu Raghuram, CEO, VMware said.

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 Strengthen 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: