Broadcom wants to unlock private cloud’s potential with VMware Cloud Foundation 9

Broadcom has unveiled VMware Cloud Foundation (VFC) 9, the latest iteration of VMware’s private cloud platform intended to dramatically improve the speed, ease, and cost of deploying private cloud for businesses.

In its latest major overhaul of VCF, Broadcom has lifted the curtain on a raft of private cloud improvements across its cloud deployment, management, and operational layers.

VCF 9 enables native multi-tenancy for customers, allowing different enterprise teams or departments to share infrastructure while maintaining control of their respective privacy controls and access rights.

Customers can also make use of more centralized cybersecurity controls in VCF 9. Through a new centralized information hub, security teams can assess threats across their private cloud and raise insights on misconfigurations.

Broadcom emphasized its intention to help customers future-proof their private cloud via VCF as much as possible, and to this end, customers can also use VCF 9 to deploy generative AI models more easily via VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, with new options such as GPU reservations and a dedicated service for building AI agents.

With its focus on helping businesses to automate their infrastructure and modernize it as much as possible, VCF 9 will combine existing cloud management consoles into just a single point of control for operations and automation, simplifying manual tasks for IT teams and providing them with better control observability.

This focus on automation is mirrored with new native support for VMware vSAN remote snapshots, intended to automatically preserve customer data to be recovered in the event of a ransomware attack, alongside a generative AI security assistant dubbed Project Cypress which can help teams investigate security threats and provide recommendations on remedies.

AI advancements and readiness run throughout the announcements. The new Advanced Memory Tiering with NVMe function will also provide a performance boost to AI workloads within a customer’s environment, alongside data analytics applications and databases.

“Memory is one of the highest growth costs inside a customer’s infrastructure environment,” said Paul Turner, VP of products, VCF Division at Broadcom.

“Up to 50% of the cost of servers today is often in the memory cost, so bringing down that cost is key for us.”

The firm reports up to 40% improvement in memory efficiency among customers using NVMe Tiering, citing the reduced cost of memory and licensing achievable through proper optimization.

Broadcom said that enterprises can use VCF to improve the time to deploy virtual machines (VMs) by as much as 61% and reduce infrastructure costs by 34%, per a whitepaper it produced alongside IDC.

Easing the weight of legacy infrastructure

In a briefing with assembled media, Turner emphasized the major problem that VCF 9 aims to solve:  

“We have a mixed set of environments where customers are running a storage silo, a compute silo, they’ve probably virtualized the compute silo but haven’t done so on the storage, the networking is very much a physically-oriented setup, and security is in there afterward trying to figure out how to govern and control the entire environment.

“So, 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.”

The announcement was made at VMware Explore 2024 Las Vegas, the company’s annual conference and the first such event since Broadcom closed its acquisition of the firm in November 2023.

Broadcom announced improvements to VCF in June, dropping new features such as VCF Import which lets customers move siloed environments into their private cloud without re-architecting and streamlines patching and identity and access management (IAM).

VCF Import is being expanded in VCF 9, with the intention of making it easier than ever for customers to embrace the platform. With this in mind, businesses will now be able to transfer a business’s existing VMware NSX, vDefend, or Avi Load Balancer environments into VCF. This allows for better-centralized fleet management and automation across their VMware environment, moving closer to achieving what Turner dubbed “a true cloud experience”.

With VCF 9, Broadcom also aims to further meet customer needs while reducing the overall complexity of the platform by bringing services like VMware Cloud Director under the VCF banner and enabling a single point of observability for admins.

This focus on ease of deployment is also reflected in the newly announced VCF Advanced Services, off-the-shelf services across common enterprise tasks like edge orchestration, data management, containers, or disaster recovery.

“To break the infrastructure silos, reclaim control of public cloud sprawl, and capture the opportunity for AI in the enterprise, our customers are shifting from best-of-breed siloed architectures to a modern private cloud platform,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager, VCF Division at Broadcom.

“VMware Cloud Foundation 9 will redefine the landscape for private cloud by delivering a modern, integrated platform that will unify operations and automation to deliver a cloud experience that enables businesses to be more innovative, efficient, resilient, and secure.”