DEVOPSdigest

Broadcom unveiled the latest updates to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the company’s flagship private cloud platform.

The latest advancements in VCF support customers’ digital innovation with faster infrastructure modernization, 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, Broadcom. “With our latest release, VCF is delivering on key requirements driven by customer input. The new VCF Import functionality will be a game changer in accelerating VCF 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 of VCF puts us squarely on the path to delivering on the full promise of VCF for our customers.”

VCF is purpose-built to modernize infrastructure and accelerate innovation, delivering integrated, enterprise-class compute, networking, storage, management, and security across any environment. VCF includes native Kubernetes to support both VM and containerized workloads on a single platform, enables advanced AI/ML workloads at enterprise scale, and offers integrated data services capabilities. IT can continuously optimize performance and costs, protect the business from threats, and enable the business to focus on outcomes instead of operations through advanced observability and insights. VCF customers benefit from capabilities aligned to every part of their private cloud journey, from Day Zero adoption through Day Two continuous operations. VCF customers benefit from license portability which enables them to purchase subscriptions of the new VCF software and have complete mobility between their on-premises environment and supported endpoints of choice.

New advancements will include:

- Modernize Infrastructure: New VCF Import capability will enable integration of existing vSphere and vSAN environments into VMware Cloud Foundation, centralizing management and optimizing resources without needing a full rebuild of a customer environment. This will transform current customer environments and enable greater efficiency, lower costs, and faster time to value. VCF 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 VCF Edge will provide an optimized VCF 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 of VCF 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. VCF will 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. VCF 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 VCF 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 with VCF 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: VCF and associated add-ons such as VMware Live Recovery and VMware vDefend lateral security enable private cloud integrity, higher availability, optimized 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 VCF Component upgrade provides the ability to apply the latest patches available at the time of upgrading to a new VCF 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.

VMware vSphere Foundation is the next evolution of the 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:

- ESXi 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.

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