Broadcom has unveiled significant updates to VMware Cloud Foundation, enhancing infrastructure modernization, developer productivity, and security. These innovations aim to simplify IT operations and support advanced workloads across diverse environments.
26 June 2024 – Broadcom Inc. has announced significant updates to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), its leading private cloud platform. These advancements are designed to support digital innovation by accelerating infrastructure modernization, enhancing developer productivity, and improving cyber resilience and security, all while maintaining a low total cost of ownership.
Paul Turner, Vice President of Products for the VMware Cloud Foundation division at Broadcom, highlighted the unique capabilities of VCF, stating, “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. Our latest release incorporates crucial customer-driven requirements, with the new VCF Import functionality set to revolutionize VCF adoption and expedite time to value. We are also introducing new features that enable IT to meet developers’ needs more efficiently without increasing business risks.”
VCF is engineered to modernize infrastructure and accelerate innovation by providing integrated, enterprise-class compute, networking, storage, management, and security across any environment. It includes native Kubernetes support for both VM and containerized workloads, facilitates advanced AI/ML workloads at enterprise scale, and offers integrated data services. IT can continuously optimize performance and costs, protect the business from threats, and focus on outcomes through advanced observability and insights. VCF supports customers throughout their private cloud journey, from initial adoption to continuous operations, with license portability allowing complete mobility between on-premises environments and supported endpoints.
Key Advancements in VCF:
- Modernizing Infrastructure: The new VCF Import capability integrates existing vSphere and vSAN environments into VCF, centralizing management and optimizing resources without a full rebuild. VCF now supports vSAN Max and vSAN ESA stretched clusters for petabyte-scale disaggregated storage and active-active availability. The new VCF Edge provides an optimized configuration for edge use cases, ensuring scalable, cost-efficient, and flexible management.
- Enhancing Developer Experience: The latest VCF release simplifies application deployment and management with quick start templates, easy network integration, and advanced performance insights, boosting developer productivity. VCF will offer Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) as an independent service for faster access to the latest Kubernetes versions. Enhanced networking capabilities support efficient CI/CD pipelines and better collaboration among development teams, while VMware Avi Load Balancer provides self-service load balancing for DevOps and AppOps teams.
- Improving Security and Resilience: VCF and its add-ons, such as VMware Live Recovery and VMware vDefend, enhance private cloud integrity, availability, network performance, malware/ransomware prevention, and data protection. New ESXi Live Patching allows critical patches to be applied without maintenance windows, while Flexible VCF Component upgrade ensures the latest patches are available during upgrades. Dual DPU support with vSphere Distributed Services Engine offers continuity and protection against DPU failures, and vSAN Data Protection simplifies VM protection and recovery. VMware Avi integration with SDDC Manager streamlines lifecycle management of Avi software.
Dave McCarthy, Research Vice President of Cloud and Edge Services at IDC, emphasized the importance of private clouds in ensuring data security in the age of AI. He noted, “Enterprises need to ensure that private corporate data does not find itself inside a public AI model. The latest innovations from Broadcom in VMware Cloud Foundation should help customers of all sizes accelerate adoption.”
