VMware VCF expands onramp to Broadcom's private cloud future
New capabilities for VMware VCF can import and manage existing VMware services through a single console interface for a private cloud experience under Broadcom's supervision.
LAS VEGAS -- A flurry of new features and capabilities to the VMware Cloud Foundation platform is so significant that the version is jumping from version 5 to version 9.
The planned updates to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), introduced today at the VMware Explore 2024 conference, aim to create a private cloud individually suited for a customer's enterprise IT. VCF is Broadcom's private cloud platform software*.
The company also debuted updates for VMware Tanzu 10, Broadcom's inherited Kubernetes management platform, and the forthcoming Project Cypress, a generative AI chatbot for threat remediation coming to the vDefend firewall.
The VCF capabilities will enable automation for virtualization tasks, improve performance and offer a catalog of cloud services, according to Broadcom representatives during a briefing prior to the conference. VCF 9 is under active development and has no release date currently.
Broadcom's business strategy to bring the VMware platform back under its control and exclusive licensing represents a significant pivot from the independent VMware strategy of several years prior, according to industry analysts.
VMware spent decades selling individual components and capabilities for its platform rather than offering a monolithic suite, said Naveen Chhabra, an analyst at Forrester Research. Prior to the sale to Broadcom, the company was pursuing a multi-cloud strategy to simultaneously cooperate with and stave off competition.
Now, Broadcom is looking to bring these disparate pieces into just two offerings while shedding any products unrelated to private hybrid-clouds, he said. Individual items sold by Broadcom, such as virtualized compute, storage and network, might work in unison. But how an enterprise has configured its virtualization stack might not align with Broadcom's selling strategy, he said.
"So far, Broadcom has only done the packaging," Chhabra said. "But packaging [software] together doesn't mean they fit together."
A timeline of VMware's history.
Coming attractions
VCF 5.2 was released two months ago, but the jump in capabilities requires ratcheting up to version 9, according to Broadcom.
These capabilities include integrated multi-tenancy and network isolation services that enable the creation of private clouds for different groups within an enterprise as well as a single cloud console to create and automate workflows.
This console enables customers to access VCF Import, an included migration service that provides connectivity to VCF services and features across a customer's entire VMware infrastructure whether on premises or in a cloud. Imported vSphere and vSAN environments can be managed through this console without being rebuilt by the customer within VCF.
The VCF 9 update for VCF Import will add support for VMware NSX, VMware vDefend, VMware Avi Load balancer and other storage configurations.
Other updates include remote snapshots for disaster recovery, enhancements to vDefend and a security console centralizing alerts, threats and other datapoints, and support for Nvidia's Generative AI platform.
The update will also bring a new memory tiering capability with NVMe SSDs in hardware associated with a customer's VCF deployment. Applications running it can now use NVMe SSDs in addition to a server's RAM for additional, if slower-performing, memory.
VMs sell, but who's buying?
These additions, particularly multi-tenancy and VCF Import, aim to create a unified, single private cloud experience for VMware customers without involving other vendors or cloud services, said Sid Nag, an analyst at Gartner.
"This is a Broadcom [strategy] shift. They want to make VMware all encompassing," Nag said.
The desire to become the virtualization obelisk within the customer's data center isn't being met with open arms, analysts said.
Broadcom's core business is not the developer; it's the IT decision maker.
Paul NashawatyAnalyst, Futurum Group
Earlier this year, Broadcom reduced the VMware portfolio to just two offerings, VMware Cloud Foundation and the less-featured vSphere Foundation.
The reduction in options and shedding of other products or services over the past several months has made it certain that VMware's focus has shifted from engineers and developers to IT decision makers or executives like CEOs and CTOs, said Paul Nashawaty, an analyst at Futurum Group.
The shift is epitomized by the culling of the school and vocational licensing programs earlier this month, he said. Broadcom plans to add new training and upskilling certification programs for VCF subscribers. But eliminating an avenue for developers to grow into the platform shows that Broadcom is implementing a pure business focus. Customers will be stuck if they don't have a viable platform to move to, he said.
"Broadcom's core business is not the developer; it's the IT decision maker," Nashawaty said.
Many of those decision makers could be limited to choosing Broadcom's VMware anyways, said Ray Lucchesi, president and founder of Silverton Consulting.
Enterprise-market focused challengers like Nutanix or open-source options like Proxmox do not compete with the ecosystem, technology integrations and general IT presence of VMware, he said.
"What are the substitutions you can do there?" Lucchesi said. "'[VMware's software has] been around forever, and it's got a lot of functionality that people really wanted. That hasn't gone away. What's gone away is the licensing flexibility."
Nashawaty said he wouldn't discount those challengers, however. The market instability created by Broadcom's changes will likely push these platforms to expand and evolve for uptake.
"There's blood in the water, and there are sharks going after it," he said.
*An earlier version of this story misidentified VCF as a SaaS.
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for TechTarget Editorial covering cloud and data storage.
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