VMware Cloud Foundation 9 New Features Accounced
Big news coming from VMware at VMware Explore 2024. They have unveiled VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9. There are many noted features that are coming with VCF 9. Broadcom is aimed at continuing their goal of IT to shift from traditional infrastructure to private cloud and hybrid cloud. Let’s see what this new announced version of VCF brings to the table.
Operations and Automation improvements
There are several new features to note with operations and automation that include the following:
- New Self-Service Cloud Portal: There is a new portal that allows you to have access to easy provisioning of services. This helps with management console “sprawl” so you don’t have yet another management console to log into. The consolidated effect helps with the management experience and helps to reduce the burden on IT.
- Workflow integration: There are new and improved workflow integration according to Broadcom that will help with operations and automation tasks. Along with the new workflows, there are new analytics and insights that help you to be more proactive with management.
- Better VCF Import: There are now much better options for you to import existing VMware infrastructure. Things like VMware NSX, VMware vDefend, and VMware Avi Load Balancer can be imported now into your VCF environment. This again helps with the transition to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.
New NVMe Memory Tiering
A great new feature with VCF 9 is Memory Tiering with NVMe. Broadcom makes a note that this new feature will be helpful for data-intensive applications. For example, things like AI, databases, and real-time analytics.
I have been testing this functionality out in the home lab with NVMe memory tiering in VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 3 for a few weeks now and I can say that it is pretty awesome. In a mini PC, I was able to take it from 96GB of memory to 468 GB or so.
Check out my blog post about it here: NVMe Memory Tiering in vSphere 8.0 U3: Quadruple your Mini PC memory!
Also, you can watch my YouTube video on the topic here:
NVMe memory tiering can help to reduce latency and increase data throughput with AI training. This makes sure that AI applications can have better performance without more investment in hardware and storage in particular.
Using memory tiering organizations can manage high storage demands in a more cost-effective way which helps to enable AI that are still high performance.
Better cloud experience
VCF 9 is designed to provide a seamless cloud experience, allowing for easy consumption of infrastructure resources:
Now there is integrated multi-tenancy in VCF 9. I think this especially will be a great feature for MSPs or very structured organizations that are supporting different business units or different organizations. It allows businesses to segment everything and make sure that the specific specific requirements for user access, the workloads, and security and privacy are able to be met.
VMware Cloud Foundation 9 introduces Native VPC Deployment capabilities. These will help with simplified networking, and by providing self-service, isolated connectivity without using VLANs and the complications with that. Also it will allow you to integrate with existing networks and be able to deploy load balancers in one click.
VMware Private AI Foundation
Another feature of VCF 9 is new AI capabilities with VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA. What will this allow for and provide?
New features include things like vGPU profile visibility, new GPU reservations, and also data indexing and retrieval services . There is also an AI agent builder service to help organizations to deploy, to manage, and scale up their AI applications on top of VCF.
These new AI features allow organizations to have the latest AI features and capabilities while keeping this running on their private infrastructure as security, privacy, and other concerns are front and center with cloud hosted AI solutions.
Improved security and compliance
Security remains a core focus in VMware Cloud Foundation 9:
VCF 9 introduces what is referred to as native Security Operations (SecOps) capabilities. It will allow customers to strengthen their security posture. It will also help them to continue efficient operations across their deployments. It features a centralized information hub that will give admins a real-time security feed for visibility and risk assessments.
With Native vSAN-to-vSAN Data Protection VCF 9 including features like immutable snapshots and remote snapshot replication. These features will help with data resilience, reduce downtime, and simplify disaster recovery. These features will help to protect data with the growing threat of ransomware and making sure businesses have an isolated recovery environment.
VCF 9 also has Advanced Cyber Threat Prevention that will help to expand the capabilities of VMware vDefend. These will include distributed firewall rule analysis of impact and apply them and intrusion detection and prevention (IDPS) enhancements. Project Cypress will have GenAI-based assistance for proactive threat triage and remediation recommendations.
VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Advanced Services
Another new development and announcement from Broadcom is that it has introduced VMware Cloud Foundation Advanced Services:
It has introduced a Comprehensive Catalog of Solutions that provides a group of ready-to-deploy applications that customers can use for many different use cases. The nice part about the new catalog is that each solution is fully vetted and tested by Broadcom. It also has architectural guidance for each solution to speed up deployment.
Broadcom is also investing in programs like the Private Cloud Maturity Model and Jumpstart Workshops. These will help guide customers through their private cloud modernization efforts and tasks. These will help organizations with things like assessing their current infrastructure and capabilities, then planning their private cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation.
Wrapping up
Broadcom is committed to continuing the evolution of VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF) and helping customers to adopt the platform and make it easier to use the technologies for things like AI workloads. It has great new security features and built-in cloud services. The new VMware Cloud Foundation 9 helps businesses to have the tools needed for AI and other modern workloads.
