After VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom, many anticipated changes in the VMware portfolio. The decision to bundle a suite of licenses into VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) has sparked numerous questions in the market, and Broadcom is actively addressing these concerns. With significant investment planned for the VCF business unit and its features, Broadcom has recently unveiled a range of new features expected to be rolled out by the end of the current fiscal year the company’s Q3 (July 2024).
VMware Cloud Foundation is the industry’s first private-cloud platform that combines the power of public and private clouds with unmatched operational simplicity and proven total cost of ownership value. VCF modernizes infrastructure, supports both virtual machines and containerized workloads on a single platform, enables advanced AI/ML workloads at enterprise scale, and offers integrated data services capabilities.
The latest updates to the flagship VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deliver new capabilities and enhancements that support customers’ digital innovation. In this blog post, we will summarize the main features and benefits of the new upcoming VCF releases and explain why the adoption of VCF might become easier.
What’s coming on the new VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 updates
We have carefully summarized all the significant announcements made by Broadcom. Below, you’ll find the key highlights of their latest upcoming releases and updates:
- New VCF Import capability: This feature allows you to integrate your existing vSphere and vSAN environments into VCF, centralizing management and optimizing resources without needing a full rebuild of your environment. This will transform your current environment and enable greater efficiency, lower costs, and faster time to value.
- Full, integrated support for vSAN Max and vSAN ESA stretched clusters: These features provide you with petabyte scale disaggregated storage and active-active availability, ensuring high performance and reliability for your workloads.
- New VCF Edge: This feature provides an optimized VCF configuration for edge use cases, offering scalable, cost-efficient, flexible, and hassle-free management and consistent infrastructure from data center to edge.
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) as an independent service: This feature delivers asynchronous TKG releases to align with upstream Kubernetes and quickly provide the latest versions to developers, enabling faster and easier application development and deployment.
- Enhancements to VCF networking: These enhancements enable rapid setup and configuration to move from traditional VLAN-based network set-ups to advanced NSX virtual networking, simplifying network integration and facilitating better collaboration among development teams.
- VMware Avi Load Balancer with VCF: This feature delivers self-service load balancing as a service for DevOps and AppOps teams, enabling IT to deploy load balancing at the speed of applications.
- New ESXi Live Patching and Flexible VCF Component upgrade: These features allow administrators to apply critical patches to ESXi hosts and VCF components without requiring maintenance windows, reducing downtime, streamlining patch management, and enhancing system reliability.
- Dual DPU support with vSphere Distributed Services Engine: This feature helps ensure continuity and protection against DPU failures, provides full isolation of dual independent DPUs, and doubles the offload capacity per host.
- vSAN Data Protection: This feature enables administrators to more easily protect and recover VMs from accidental deletions and ransomware attacks.
- VMware vDefend lateral security: This feature delivers increased distributed and gateway firewall scale, security information and event management (SIEM) integration for enhanced east-west ransomware prevention, and on-prem network detection and response (NDR) for threat triaging.
- VMware Avi integration with SDDC Manager: This feature streamlines lifecycle management of Avi software from deployment, through provisioning, to ongoing operations.
Why You Should be mindful of the Latest VCF Release
The new VCF releases deliver significant benefits for private cloud environments, enabling organisations to accelerate innovation, improve developer productivity, and enhance cyber resiliency and security. It also makes the adoption of the new VCF suite across brown field deployments easier.
It is important to note that customers with perpetual licenses that are out of support might not receive zero-day security patch updates, posing a security risk. Only those using the latest supported ESXi versions (currently ESXi 7/8 at the time of this blog’s release) receive these updates. Without purchasing the new subscription offerings, customers may face the following limitations:
- Lack of support and maintenance.
- No zero-day security patches once ESXi 7/8 becomes unsupported.
- Management challenges, as data center managers must continuously update ESXi to the latest version.
That’s why the upcoming releases are so important for those already with VMware footprint on their estate.
What’s Next for VMware Cloud Foundation?
As previously mentioned, Broadcom plans to roll out these new features by the end of its current Q3 (July 2024). Many of these features and upcoming releases will likely be discussed in detail at VMware Explore in Barcelona, taking place from November 4-7, 2024. This premier event for cloud and data center professionals will showcase the latest technologies and future developments from VMware by Broadcom. We encourage anyone interested in staying informed about VMware’s updates to attend VMware Explore 2024.
As a Broadcom Advantage Partner, we maintain productive working relationships and regular touchpoints with Broadcom to ensure our customers are the first to access the latest VMware news and updates. If you’re interested in staying informed about Broadcom’s latest developments and gaining insights into the newest VMware releases, please reach out to your Account Director at Ergo or fill out the form below
