Broadcom Unveils Significant Updates to VMware Cloud Foundation

Responding to repeated concerns around VMware costs and support, Broadcom announced significant updates to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) aimed at supporting digital innovation through faster infrastructure modernization, improved developer productivity, and enhanced cyber resiliency and security, all while maintaining a lower total cost of ownership.

According to Paul Turner, Vice President of Products for the VMware Cloud Foundation division at Broadcom, the new VCF Import functionality accelerates VCF adoption, improving time to value. Turner added that this new VCF release “puts us squarely on the path to delivering on the promise of VCF for our customers.”

Key Updates and Enhancements

Infrastructure Modernization

The latest VCF update introduces a new VCF Import capability that allows the integration of existing vSphere and vSAN environments into VMware Cloud Foundation. This feature centralizes management and optimizes resources without needing a total rebuild of the customer’s environment. This integration is set to transform current customer environments, enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and accelerating time to value.

Additionally, VCF offers complete, integrated support for vSAN Max and vSAN ESA stretched clusters, providing customers with petabyte-scale disaggregated storage and active-active availability.

VCF Edge provides an optimized VMware Cloud Foundation configuration for edge use cases, ensuring scalable, cost-efficient, flexible, and hassle-free management from data center to edge.

Developer Cloud Experience

VCF simplifies application deployment and management with quick-start templates, easy network integration, and advanced performance insights, thus driving faster time to market and increased developer productivity. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) is an independent service that offers asynchronous releases that align with upstream Kubernetes and quickly provides developers with the latest versions.

VCF networking enhancements facilitate rapid setup and configuration, transitioning from traditional VLAN-based setups to advanced NSX virtual networking.

VMware Avi Load Balancer with VCF delivers self-service load balancing for DevOps and AppOps teams, enabling IT to deploy load balancing at the speed of applications.

Security and Resilience

The updates to VCF, along with associated add-ons such as VMware Live Recovery and VMware vDefend lateral security, enhance private cloud integrity, availability, network performance, and malware/ransomware prevention.

New ESXi Live Patching allows administrators to apply critical patches to ESXi hosts without requiring maintenance windows. The VCF Component upgrade feature enables users to apply the latest patches available when upgrading to a new VCF version, reducing downtime, streamlining patch management, and enhancing system reliability.

Dual DPU support with vSphere Distributed Services Engine ensures continuity and protection against DPU failures, provides total isolation of dual independent DPUs, and doubles the offload capacity per host.

vSAN Data Protection enables administrators to protect and recover VMs more easily and quickly from accidental deletions and ransomware attacks.

VMware vDefend lateral security delivers increased distributed and gateway firewall scale, security information and event management (SIEM) integration for enhanced east-west ransomware protection, and on-prem network detection and response (NDR) for threat triaging.

VMware Avi integration with SDDC Manager streamlines the lifecycle management of Avi software from deployment through provisioning to ongoing operations.

VMware vSphere Foundation Updates

Virtualization has helped customers simplify their IT environments over the past decade. However, modern IT requirements are evolving and must adapt to support AI/ML-enabled applications, developer-driven requirements, and contemporary threats while managing more responsibilities with fewer resources.

VMware vSphere Foundation, the next evolution of VMware vSphere solution, is set to meet modern IT needs by boosting operational efficiency, elevating security, supercharging workload performance, and supporting accelerating innovation. The latest update to vSphere Foundation introduces several innovations:

ESXi Live Patching: This feature allows for faster updates with zero downtime.
Self-Service Infrastructure Access for Developers: Developers can easily access infrastructure services via the vSphere IaaS control plane and a Local Consumption Interface for services like VM and storage.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service: This service becomes independent, with asynchronous updates enabling customers to consume the latest upstream Kubernetes versions faster.
Simplified Management: The simplified console includes global inventory, simplified diagnostics, centralized certificate management, and unified licensing.
Improved End User Experience and Security: Single sign-on across all product components enhances user experience and security.

Availability

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

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