VMware, Inc. unveiled new product innovations and partnerships that will enable communications service providers to rapidly modernize their networks in a cost and energy efficient manner and accelerate 5G core, RAN and edge deployments and lifecycle management. CSPs are accelerating the pace of 5G and Open RAN deployments to meet the demands of consumers and enterprises as they increase their appetite for ultra-low latency and high speed networks to support their digital transformation. This rapid pace of deployment introduces operational complexities from network lifecycle management to vendor interoperability along with network service assurance.

Expanded VMware Telco Cloud Platform Ecosystem—Now Supporting 275+ VNFs and CNFs VMware Telco Cloud Platform 2.5 with VMware Telco Cloud Automation 2.1enable CSPs to expedite the innovation cycle to deliver new network services, reduce operational complexities for VNF and CNF onboarding, instantiation, and lifecycle management to achieve substantial TCO savings. The latest release of VMware Telco Cloud Platform adds the capability to: Upgrade control plane and worker node pools separately, amid management of cluster failures. Protect and better secure 5G networks from sophisticated security attacks with intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) for east-west network traffic.

Accelerate the deployment of network services with an expanding partner ecosystem of over 275 virtualized and containerized network functions (VNFs and CNFs) including Mavenir's Converged Packet Core. VMware Telco Cloud Automation 2.1 extends multi-cloud operations and automation capabilities with new support for AWS and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) enabling CSPs to provision CNFs directly on native Amazon EKS. Extended Capabilities for Closed-Loop Operations of Large-Scale Mobile Networks The latest release of VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance 2.0enables new use cases for mobile service assurance, including CaaS, 4G and 5G mobile cores, network slicing, and RAN.

To streamline the testing and proof of concept (PoC) of this software, VMware has expanded its scope of work with its customer DISH Wireless. DISH Wireless is testing VMware's software to monitor its distributed-cloud infrastructure and collect metrics and logs to provide actionable insights and facilitate closed-loop automated provisioning and management. Enabling Rapid Deployment and Cost/Energy Savings for the Disaggregated RAN VMware Telco Cloud Platform RAN™ 2.0 accelerates and simplifies deployments across distributed RAN sites with cloud-smart automation.

This release enables improved performance, operability, and scale, helping accelerate adoption and time-to-launch. The addition of VMware Bare Metal Automation provides CSPs with simplified zero-touch provisioning and lifecycle management from bare metal provisioning to telco cloud infrastructure and network functions. VMware ESXi enhancements (included in the platform) provide bare metal equivalent latency performance and the flexibility, agility, and security benefits inherent to virtualization platforms.