VMware Cloud Foundation Gets Massive Updates as Broadcom Unveils Newest Innovations for Flagship Platform

Broadcom Inc. has unveiled the latest updates to VMware Cloud Foundation, the company’s flagship private cloud platform. The latest advancements in VMware Cloud Foundation support customers’ digital innovation with faster infrastructure modernisation, improved developer productivity, and better cyber resiliency and security with low total cost of ownership.

“VMware Cloud Foundation is the industry’s first private-cloud platform to offer the combined power of public and private clouds with unmatched operational simplicity and proven total cost of ownership value,” said Paul Turner, Vice President of Products, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, at Broadcom.

He added: “With our latest release, VMware Cloud Foundation is delivering on key requirements driven by customer input. The new VCF Import functionality will be a game changer in accelerating VMware Cloud Foundation adoption and improving time to value. We are also delivering a set of new capabilities that helps IT more quickly meet the needs of developers without increasing business risk. This latest release  puts us squarely on the path to delivering on the full promise of VMware Cloud Foundation for our customers.”

VMware Cloud Foundation: Built to Modernise Infrastructure and Accelerate Innovation

Broadcom’s flagship platform is purpose-built to modernise infrastructure and accelerate innovation, delivering integrated, enterprise-class compute, networking, storage, management, and security across any environment. It includes native Kubernetes to support both virtual machine and containerised workloads on a single platform, enables advanced Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) workloads at enterprise scale, and offers integrated data services capabilities.

IT can continuously optimise performance and costs, protect the business from threats, and enable the business to focus on outcomes instead of operations through advanced observability and insights. VMware Cloud Foundation customers benefit from capabilities aligned to every part of their private cloud journey, from Day Zero adoption through Day Two continuous operations.

Customers also benefit from licence portability, which enables them to purchase subscriptions to the new software and have complete mobility between their on-premises environment and supported endpoints of choice. New advancements will include:

Modernise Infrastructure

New VMware Cloud Foundation Import capability will enable integration of existing vSphere and vSAN environments into VMware Cloud Foundation, centralising management and optimizing resources without needing a full rebuild of a customers’ environment. This will transform current customer environments and enable greater efficiency, lower costs, and faster time to value.

VMware Cloud Foundation now provides full, integrated support for vSAN Max and vSAN ESA stretched clusters, providing customers petabyte scale disaggregated storage and active-active availability. The new VMware Cloud Foundation Edge will provide an optimised configuration for edge use cases, offering scalable, cost-efficient, flexible, hassle-free management and consistent infrastructure from data center to edge.

Cloud Experience for Developers

The new release will simplify application deployment and management with quick start templates, easy network integration, and advanced performance insights, driving faster time to market and increased developer productivity. It will also offer Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) as an independent service, delivering asynchronous TKG releases to align with upstream Kubernetes and quickly provide the latest versions to developers.

VMware Cloud Foundation networking enables developers to focus on coding and testing rather than dealing with intricate network requirements, facilitates better collaboration among development teams, and supports more efficient CI/CD pipelines. Enhancements to the platform’s networking will enable rapid setup and configuration to move from traditional VLAN-based network set-ups to advanced NSX virtual networking. VMware Avi Load Balancer delivers self-service load balancing as a service for DevOps and AppOps teams and enables IT to deploy load balancing at the speed of applications.

Security and Resilience

VMware Cloud Foundation and associated add-ons such as VMware Live Recovery and VMware vDefend lateral security enable private cloud integrity, higher availability, optimised network performance, malware/ransomware prevention, and robust data protection.

New ESXi Live Patching allows administrators to apply critical patches to ESXi hosts without requiring maintenance windows and Flexible VMware Cloud Foundation Component upgrade provides the ability to apply the latest patches available at the time of upgrading to a new version.

Together, these advancements reduce downtime, streamline patch management, and enhance system reliability. Dual DPU support with vSphere Distributed Services Engine will help ensure continuity and protection against DPU failures, provide full isolation of dual independent DPUs, and double the offload capacity per host. vSAN Data Protection will enable administrators to more easily protect and recover VMs from accidental deletions and ransomware attacks.

VMware vDefend lateral security will deliver increased distributed and gateway firewall scale, security information and event management (SIEM) integration for enhanced east-west ransomware prevention, and on-prem network detection and response (NDR) for threat triaging. VMware Avi integration with SDDC Manager will streamline lifecycle management of Avi software from deployment, through provisioning, to ongoing operations.

“The excitement and associated concerns surrounding GenAI and data security reinforce the need for private clouds. Enterprises need to ensure that private corporate data does not find itself inside a public AI model,” said Dave McCarthy, Research Vice President, Cloud and Edge Services, Worldwide Infrastructure Research at IDC. “How customers choose to build private clouds will be driven by the unique requirements of each organisation, such as updating legacy infrastructure, advancing the needs of their developer community, or creating a more secure and reliable environment to support a new generation of AI/ML applications.”

He further stated: VMware Cloud Foundation continues to evolve as a private cloud platform, and the latest innovations Broadcom is delivering should help customers of all sizes accelerate adoption.”

Optimising IT Infrastructure with VMware vSphere Foundation

For the past decade, virtualisation has helped hundreds of thousands of customers in simplifying the IT environment. Today’s requirements are different. Modern IT must adapt to support AI/ML-enabled applications, developer-driven requirements, and modern threats, while at the same time having to take on more responsibilities with fewer people.

VMware vSphere Foundation is the next evolution of the industry-leading VMware vSphere solution, designed to support modern IT requirements by boosting operational efficiency, elevating security, and supercharging workload performance, all in support of accelerating innovation. The newest update of vSphere Foundation will deliver innovations that include:

SXi Live Patching for faster updates with zero downtime.

• Easy access for developers to self-service infrastructure via the vSphere IaaS control plane and a Local Consumption Interface for infrastructure services like vm service and storage service.
• Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service becomes an independent service, with asynchronous updates enabling customers to consume the latest upstream Kubernetes versions faster.
• Easier management of all vSphere Foundation components with a simplified console including global inventory, simplified diagnostics, centralized certificate management and unified licensing.
• Improved end user experience and security with single sign-on across all product components.

Availability

VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 and VMware vSphere Foundation 5.2 are expected to be available in Broadcom’s fiscal Q3FY24.