VMware’s ‘Private Cloud’ Solution Emerges Under Broadcom
VMware Cloud Foundation’s (VCF) new configuration was eagerly awaited. There have been many questions about what VCF would look like exactly and, more importantly, what it would mean for DevOps customers now that VCF is under the Broadcom umbrella. While there has been a lot of discussion about price increases for some customers following licensing changes and other attributes of VMware honing its product portfolio under Broadcom, we have now seen, during the past few days, releases detailing what VCF now means, what it has to offer and what is planned for the future.
To that end, a lot of care has been taken to accommodate more emerging needs, especially for private cloud ownership involving large, geographically distributed operations across many different sectors. This often includes IoT and edge applications that private cloud is configured for. There is also a simplification in VCF’s portfolio now under Broadcom, which we will detail below.
The company detailed several features, including VCF’s management in line with hyper-convergence and combining storage operations environments under a single umbrella, uniting or “de-siloing” them. This offers many advantages and accounts for much of the hype surrounding VCF.
At the same time, the development of VCF’s offering has been in the works for years and VCF’s recent releases show what that is.
“Our strategy has been there for well over five to six years. When we were part of VMware as an independent company,” Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of marketing for the VMware Cloud Foundation division at Broadcom, said during an interview with media and analysts. “What we have done is pivoted our strategy to truly focus on making VCF the best available private cloud platform in the industry.”
This means that VCF offers a cloud operating model designed so that organizations can deploy this platform with compute, network, storage, automation and management as a single, integrated platform, Shenoy said. “They have flexibility to deploy it how they want, where they want. The ubiquitous nature of this platform is extremely crucial so they can deploy this on premises and manage themselves,” Shenoy said. “They can take it to the fetch environment, or they can take it and deploy it as a managed service through their cloud service provider or hyperscaler of their choice.”
Business Realign
VCF before Broadcom was very complete and well-rounded, with something for everybody, for VMs, containers and infrastructure covering the gamut of public and provide cloud, cloud native and on-premises environments. The structure was also arguably unwieldy. VCF is supposed to be a single integrated product, and to that end, “we have restructured our organization,” Shenoy said. “Previously, five different business entities were responsible for delivering our product. We have now consolidated these sectors into one organization with a unified product team, global support team and a single management direction. This alignment ensures a critical focus on product development and seamless delivery.”
Additionally, over the next year, the VCF business unit will concentrate on providing “an integrated product experience,” Shenoy said. “Customers have previously received various components of the platform, but they have not experienced a unified system,” Shenoy said. “Our goal is to streamline the software-defined compute storage with vSAN, networking with NSX, and operations and automation… By eliminating the patchwork approach, we aim to present a cohesive private cloud platform that looks, works, feels and behaves consistently.”
Big-Up Features
Special new features the VCF 5.2 platform offers that Sabina Anja, senior technology product lead and chief evangelist for the VMware Cloud Foundation division at Broadcom, communicated in a blog post include:
Infrastructure:
- Virtualization and compute through vSphere for compute, storage through vSAN and networking by NSX.
- VCF Import — vSphere and vSAN: The goal is to simplify the process of onboarding existing vSphere and vSAN environments into a full stack private cloud platform VCF Import without any downtime.
- VCF Edge — VCF is increasingly designed to bring cloud capabilities to edge locations. VCF Edge is designed to provide consistent operations and infrastructure management across distributed environments. As Anja notes, this is particularly important for organizations that require real-time data processing at remote sites, enabling faster decision-making and enhanced operational efficiency.
Cloud experience for developers:
- TKG as an Independent Service: Offering Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) as a stand-alone service allows developers to manage containerized workloads flexibly, accelerating development cycles and enhancing productivity.
- Simplified Adoption of Virtual Networking: Streamlined virtual network adoption reduces complexity and improves network segmentation and management, ensuring reliable and manageable networking for efficient application deployment.
- Enhanced Management Interfaces: The Cloud Admin Dashboard and Launchpad provide intuitive resource management and automation, while features like GPU Summary for Private AI and I/O Trip Analyzer Cluster View offer critical insights for optimizing AI and big data workloads.
Security:
- Live VCF and ESXi Patching: Live patching minimizes operational disruptions, ensuring continuous system security and productivity.
- Flexible VCF Patching: Greater control over patch schedules and deployments enhances system reliability and proactive security management.
- Dual DPU Support: Supporting dual Data Processing Units (DPUs) improves computational efficiency and workload management for high-performance data processing.
Analyst Look
Under a Gartner definition, VCF meets the criteria of hyperconvergence. With it, storage, computing and networking are converted into a single system that reduces data center complexity and increases scalability, Gartner analysts Henrique Cecci and Philip Dawson write in “Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure Technologies, 2024.” Organizations are especially cost conscious today and are under pressure to optimize resources and seek single management interfaces to do that. Mirroring VCF’s positioning as a platform, use cases Gartner communicated include virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), edge/Internet of Things (IoT), hybrid cloud and cloud native. Gartner has also noted how VMware, a strong player in the HCI software market, is now bundling vSAN and NSX as VMware Cloud Foundation, “driving HCI to its installed base on realigning enterprise agreements and cloud delivery models,” the analysts write.
“With changes to Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware licensing, we are seeing a resurgence of hype related to storage and network virtualization in hyperconvergence as clients look at alternative innovations and vendors,” Cecci and Dawson write.
VCF also meets the requirements of demand for software design infrastructure (SDI). SDI has “gained a renaissance in hype and activity due the impact of re-virtualization options and storage associated with private cloud,” Cecci and Dawson write.
“With Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in November 2023, we are seeing a resurgence of hype related to storage and network virtualization in SDI as clients look at alternative innovations and vendors for private cloud infrastructure,” Cecci and Dawson write.
