VMware Marketplace Launches Third-Party Commerce Capability

Originally published on VMware Tech Alliance Partners (TAP) Blog

Authored by Ajay Patel

VMware users can now purchase third-party partner solutions from the VMware Marketplace and deploy these solutions directly to VMware endpoints. Plus, we are delighted to announce a host of upcoming VMware Marketplace portfolio capabilities and services that will accelerate our customers’ cloud adoption journeys and our partners’ go-to-market strategies with VMware.

Recent innovations in digitization have had deep impacts in almost every aspect of our life, from food and healthcare to personal finance and manufacturing. Core to this are innovative IT applications that are more intelligent and powerful than ever before. In part, this is fueled by the wide gamut of tools available to build applications, and the breadth available in multi-cloud computing infrastructure to run these applications. Hence, it is vital for organizations across all industries to empower their development and technology teams with access to the most expansive software tool set to build, run and manage these applications. All actors across the stack, from IT Administrators to DevOps Engineers, to Developers, and Business users, need easy and quick access to the tools to innovate quickly, build effectively and manage efficiently.

The need for an accessible ecosystem

At VMware, we seek to empower our users by giving them the ability to choose the right set of tools for their unique goals. We build deep, meaningful partnerships with industry peers to support our customers’ choices across their full technology stacks. We also make the discovery and usage of these partner solutions simpler through the VMware Marketplace. The VMware Marketplace is that one-stop shop – with over 2,100 solutions spanning categories such as security, storage, networking and more, where customers can discover and deploy validated and certified ecosystem solutions for all VMware products.

Discover, try, buy, deploy

Today, we are proud to announce the launch of commercial capabilities on VMware Marketplace – making it the single location to discover, try, purchase, and deploy VMware ecosystem solutions!

We launched the initial phase of our commercial transactability journey with our design partners at Catchpoint, LicenseFortress, and One Convergence.

In future phases, we plan to expand our commerce capabilities to include other forms of payments and offer types including pay by invoice, credit fund based transactions and usage based billing.

Easing our customer’s digital innovation journey

The VMware Marketplace houses a robust catalog of validated and certified artifacts and images that assures users of interoperability with their choice of VMware platform. VMware Marketplace reduces customer consumption friction, through its easy filter / search functionality and an in-product experience with various VMware products (for example, the VMware Cloud Director App Launchpad).

With the addition of commerce, VMware Marketplace further smoothens that customer journey. Users can discover the right ecosystem solution, try it out, purchase it directly if they are satisfied with the trial, and then deploy that file directly to vSphere or other VMware locations – without ever leaving the Marketplace user interface.

And that’s not all

Apart from this keystone commercial capability, we also announced a few exciting forthcoming capabilities at VMworld 2021:

• We plan to launch image building capabilities, that will enable any user – whether a VMware customer or a VMware partner – to provide us with code or a package that we can build, package, verify, customize, and publish for them in the format of their choice and deployable on the platform of their choice.
• We plan to enable deployments of solutions directly from VMware Marketplace to native cloud endpoints such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform by packaging solutions in the applicable formats (for example, Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for AWS).
• We intend to launch VMware Application Catalog that expands on the capability of Tanzu Application Catalog and enables curation and customization of VM-based images in addition to container images supported today.

Together, these changes will provide our customers with the ability to create a curated catalog of open source, ISV content and their own private images that are compatible with the cloud of their choice.

Next steps

If you are a VMware ecosystem partner and would like to enable sales of your solution through VMware Marketplace, please contact us at VMwareMarketplace@vmware.com.

If you would like to publish a paid listing on VMware Marketplace, please contact us at VMwareMarketplace@vmware.com. If you’d like to start purchasing through VMware Marketplace, head to our catalog page! To learn more about VMware Marketplace, please visit our webpage.

How-To: Deploy Bitnami’s LAMP Appliance to VMware Environments Directly via VMware Marketplace!

If you are a developer, there is a high chance that you’ve utilized the LAMP stack in the past 24 hours. The LAMP stack, consisting of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python, is a web service tool used to quickly build websites and applications through a reliable coding framework. 

For developers who work with VMware environments, the easiest way to deploy the LAMP stack is through the Bitnami-packaged appliance that’s available on the VMware Marketplace – VMware’s one-stop-shop to discover, try and deploy open-source and third-party ecosystem solutions for all VMware products.  

Why use the Bitnami LAMP Appliance? 

LAMP is an extremely popular package of fully open-source services. So - what’s so special about the Bitnami-packaged version? And why use it via the VMware Marketplace, instead of just downloading and configuring it on your own? 

The Bitnami LAMP Appliance provides developers with standalone project directories where they can store their applications. Thus, they can start deploying their PHP applications without the need to set up the entire infrastructure.  This image bundles together the most up-to-date releases of PHP, Apache, and MySQL Linux, as well as phpMyAdmin, PHP modules, and Composer. Apache is configured with the 'event' Multi-Processing Module and PHP-FPM, which is an ideal configuration for high-traffic websites that serve a lot of simultaneous requests.  

Most importantly, the Bitnami LAMP solution is ready for production environments. That means that it includes SSL auto-configuration with Let’s Encrypt certificates and HTTPS/HTTP2 support, all of which allow developers to build more secure sites and applications as quickly as possible.  

The complete Bitnami catalog – including the LAMP appliance – is accessible from the VMware Marketplace, allowing users to easily deploy a wide range of highly secure, industry standardized, and open-source applications across all VMware environments. 

By deploying the Bitnami LAMP Appliance from the VMware Marketplace, developers only need to focus on building applications, without having to worry about governance, security, and so on.  It can be deployed to environments such as VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Cloud Director, and VMware vSphere. Developers can save time, effort, and resources. 

So how does it really work? 

To consume LAMP directly from VMware Marketplace, you would just need to browse the catalog, find the LAMP solution, and hit ‘Subscribe’. From there, just input the deployment configuration parameters. Within seconds, your application will be running in the infrastructure of your choice -whether it is in a public, private or hybrid environment. 

To see the process step-by-step, watch the demo video below, where Bitnami engineer Michiel D’Hont subscribes to the LAMP appliance via the VMware Marketplace! 

Next steps 

Interested in using the VMware Marketplace? Sign up today on our catalog page – it’s free! For more information, refer to our Docs and learn more on our marketing page or blogs page.  

For more information on Bitnami, please refer to the Bitnami and Bitnami documentation websites. 

To get started with subscribing to the Bitnami LAMP, click here!  

 

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