VMware Private Cloud Now Has a Catalog of Advanced Services

Tired of dealing with cloud providers and mulling a move to a private cloud instead? Broadcom wants you to take a look at its VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), a platform designed to simplify the deployment and operation of a private cloud.

This week at VMware Explore 2024 Las Vegas, Broadcom launched VCF version 9, which includes a new catalog of services designed to offer those features commonly found in public clouds, such as advanced load balancing.

“It’s not just about virtualization anymore. It’s about virtualizing your data center, storage, network, your compute, the automation and operations that you need as an admin team to be able to deliver a service, and, of course, the developer productivity that comes with an agile cloud operating system,” said Paul Turner, Broadcom vice president of products for VCF, in a press briefing.

Broadcom is positioning VCF as a lower-cost, more secure alternative to public cloud computing.

Overall, the goal is to help the organization create an infrastructure that works together as a single, unified whole while supporting modern application architectures.

Big Results Moving to a Private Cloud

According to the company, a private cloud approach can result in:

• Thirty-four percent lower infrastructure costs
• Forty-two percent lower overall cost-of-operations
• Sixty-one percent faster time to deploy new VMs.
• Fifty percent faster network capacity.
• Thirty-two percent faster storage.

Overall, an organization can see upwards of a 564% three-year ROI with only 10 months to pay back (Broadcom drew these numbers from a Broadcom-sponsored IDC white paper, “The Business Value of VMware Cloud Foundation.”)

Turner attributes these improvements to poor-performing legacy environments, either in-house or in the cloud.

“Our traditional legacy architecture is really not working in terms of being able to bring governance control and agility to a cloud, because you’ve got different teams managing different environments, it’s not very efficient,” he said.

👁 A slade showing the business value VCF.

What Is New With VCF 9?

A working private cloud has to provide two things: a unified infrastructure for operations teams to manage, and a set of easy-to-consume services for developers and applications owner.

“For the infrastructure teams, we bring together all of the capabilities, the operations capability, the logging capabilities, the network diagnostics, all into a centrally managed environment with resource control, governance, central asset management, fleet management,” Young said.

To this end, the new version of VCF cuts the number of management consoles, from over a dozen to just two: one for operations and one for automation.

There has also been considerable integration with Legacy VMware products: The new package provides a new UI for importing VMware products into VCF, including VMware NSX, VMware vDefend, VMware Avi Load BalancerMware NSX, VMware vDefend, and the VMware Avi Load Balancer.

For speed, there are new options with tiered memory. Data-intensive applications will get faster memory thanks to support for NVMe, for memory tiering.

A New Services Catalog

In order to help its customers leave the cloud behind, Broadcom has launched a catalog of advanced services for VCF, with each program vetted by Broadcom for security and VCF compatibility.  The catalog is populated with services that users would expect from a public cloud.

Advance services initially available include those for load balancing, edge orchestration, workload automation, and private AI.

👁 AVI loadbalancer slide.

What’s New in VCF Networking?

• Multitenant Ops: VCF 9 supports multitenant operations (previously only possible under a separate product, VMware Cloud Director.
• Native VPC: Virtual Private Connectivity is now available as a native Networking as a Service.
• Nvidia Support: The VMware Private AI Foundation provides support for running AI and data-based applications on Nvidia GPUs.

What’s New in VCF Security?

• Unified Security Management: A new information hub provides VCF-wide security information in a single console, highlighting areas of concern such as configuration drift.
• vSAN remote snapshot replication: Data snaps can be taken and immutably backed to another vSAN, serving as another defense against ransomware attacks. vSAN disaggregated storage can also be deployed for increased scalability and storage efficiency
• Firewall Improvements: The vDefend distributed firewall has been expanded with new capabilities such as impact analysis, distributed intrusion detection and prevention (IDPS) enhancements, rapid threat assessment and on-premises malware prevention for regulated organizations that require air-gapped deployment of VCF.
• AI-based Security: The new Project Cypress provides GenAI-based intelligent assistance for IT security teams to proactively triage sophisticated threat campaigns and recommend remediation options.

👁 Slide on Cypress project.