VMware Wants To Redefine Private Cloud With VCF 9

We all had been wondering what VMware would look like when it became part of Broadcom’s massive universe following the semiconductor giant’s $69 billion acquisition of the virtualization juggernaut. Now, we are finding out.

The industry got a glimpse in June, when Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of product marketing for the company’s VMware Cloud Foundation division, said that during the first six months after the deal closed in November 2023 VMware streamlined its product portfolio, slimming down to two umbrella offerings – VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation – with all of its various technologies for private clouds, compute, storage, network, security, and application services all nesting somewhere in them.

That was when VMware showed off the latest enhancements in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2. Organizations at this week’s VMware Explore 2024 show in Las Vegas – the first under Broadcom ownership – were introduced to VMware Cloud Foundation 9, the company’s push to become the only private cloud vendor they’ll ever need.

“It’s delivering a private cloud for our customers,” Paul Turner, vice president of products for Broadcom’s VCF division, told journalists and analysts during a briefing before the event. “It’s not just about virtualization anymore. It’s about virtualizing your datacenter, virtualizing your storage, your network, your compute, the automation and operations that you need to as an admin team to be able to deliver a service and for developer productivity that comes with an agile cloud operating system. Virtualization has helped customers and saved lots of money by increasing the density of virtual machines and machines onto single servers. But we can do more than that. We can virtualize the entire datacenter.”

The goal is to offer organizations and their developers a unified and tightly integrated platform that can scale to sizes equal to public clouds but with enterprise security and performance, offering a landing place for businesses that at one time enthusiastically shifted many of their enterprise workloads to the public cloud only to start bringing some of them back due to costs, security issues, and other factors.

A Citrix survey earlier this year found that 42 percent of the 350 U.S. organizations surveyed either are considering or already have moved at least half of their cloud-based workloads back to their on-premises datacenters. In addition, 94 percent had repatriated some of their workloads.

“Ten years ago, your CEO, your board of directors, fell in love with the promise of the public cloud and it drove you to the public cloud. Because of this, I say to you, you all are suffering from PTSD,” Broadcom president and chief executive officer Hock Tan said during his keynote this morning, adding that organizations have been hit by the “three Cs of cloud”: cost, complexity, and compliance with regulatory policies, which can be expensive. “It’s very simple: the future of the enterprise – your enterprises – is private cloud. It’s about staying on-prem and in control. Of course, you continue to use public cloud for elastic demand and bursting workloads. But in this hybrid world, the private cloud is now the platform to drive your business and your innovation.”

Most IT workers today inherited legacy infrastructures that are populated by silos in compute storage and networking, which is a key reason so many opted for the public cloud in the first place, Tan said.

“You are very siloed,” he said. “You are so screwed.”

VMware is including a host of new features and enhancements – enough to push VCF forward from version 5.2 to 9 in a couple of months – that offer enterprises a private cloud stack as a modern alternative to these traditional environments. No timeline for VCF 9’s release has been announced.

“This is one of the challenges of existing legacy architectures,” Turner said. “We have a mixed set of environments where customers are running a storage silo and a compute silo. They probably have virtualized the compute silo. They haven’t done so on the storage. The networking is very much a physical-oriented networking setup. And then security is in there afterwards, trying to actually understand, ‘How can I govern and control the entire environment?’ It’s incredibly difficult to do. 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.”

He said the physical server footprint needed to run existing environments is 40 percent more than running VCF, or $2,307 more per server per workload. Meanwhile, a VCF environment offers 34 percent lower infrastructure costs, 61 percent faster VM deployment time, and a 546 percent three-year ROI.

VFC 9 includes a number of interfaces, from AI and machine learning to traditional VMs to Kubernetes containers, and now has a self-service cloud portal for provisioning services and – in line with the push for simplification – winnows the number of management consoles from a dozen-plus to one, with integrated workflows easing the transition between operations and automation tasks. Other enhancements include advanced memory tiering using NVM-Express to accelerate throughput and reduce latency for AI and other data-heavy workloads, integrated multi-tenancy – previous provided by VMware Cloud Director – for better support of multiple business groups or development teams, and virtual private clouds as native networking-as-a-service experience for faster provisioning of workloads.

The company also is including advanced services as part of VCF 9 for such areas as load balancing, edge computing, data services, and developer platforms.

Including all these features and services within VCF 9 is a key part of Broadcom’s strategy to simplify the offerings from VMware, which for a couple of decades had sold such functionality and services as individual pieces.

VMware is also making VCF 9 available via multiple avenues, including hyperscalers like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform, more than 300 managed services providers that VMware partners with – as well as its own cloud provider service – and OEMs like Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, and Hitachi.

In addition, VMware is making it available through its more than 4,000 distributors and resellers.

With VCF 9, VMware is looking to define what the private cloud is, with Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s VCF Division, saying at VMware Explore that it’s focused on the enterprise owning the infrastructure. Prasad noted that with VCF 9, an organization using Amazon Web Services (AWS) doesn’t run the workload on an EC2 instance. Instead, they’re running their workload on bare-metal servers that have the VCF 9 stack on top of it.

As laid out over the past couple of months, VMware has undergone it’s share of changes since the Broadcom acquisition and probably see more. At the show, VMware also unveiled Tanzu 10, the company’s Kubernetes management platform, talked more about its Private AI effort, detailed several security initiatives, and announced a tighter relationship with Nvidia.

Tan told the crowd at his keynote that the company saw an opportunity to streamline VMware’s mass of offerings to create a more focused portfolio but that there is still more to do. VCF will likely be in the middle of many of them.