VMware’s reputation has been hurt since Broadcom took over. Colossal price hikes and the termination of perpetual licences sent many sour long-term customers off exploring rivals like Nutanix, Hyper-V, Proxmox and even Red Hat – which is ending support for its RHV, but looking to persuade users that OpenShift Virtualization is a safe alternative.
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, an integrated private cloud proposition announced by Broadcom in Vegas this week, is a bid to show that meaningful innovation as well as customer-squeezing is happening – and perhaps that after all the scorching of earth and salting of fields, VMware finally has a coherent message around its newly unified offering.
What is VMware’s VCF 9?
Amid confusion around its aggressive post-acquisition portfolio rationalisation, Broadcom described VCF in January 2024 as “VMware’s new solution for customers looking to capture the value of full stack infrastructure with a platform that offers vSphere, vSAN and NSX with the full Aria management and orchestration suite with new services included.”
That is, simply, more tightly integrated compute, storage, and networking.
Internally, Broadcom brought together previously disparate product development teams to help deliver this – and VCF 9 aims to meet “the needs of two key groups: infrastructure teams responsible for building and maintaining IT environments and infrastructure consumers like platform engineers and data scientists who leverage these environments to run applications” as one VMware product lead put it this week.
So what’s new in VCF 9?
VCF 9 aims to be a one-stop-shop for those looking for a private cloud alternative to the public cloud, with a centralised console to handle capacity and tenant management and for platform engineers, a “consumption-ready environment that supports traditional VMs, Kubernetes, and containerized applications” – the dozen consoles it would have taken to do all this before stripped back to just two, said VMware.
The story Broadcom CEO Hock Tan told on stage was one of rampant public cloud expense and data exposure risks. Sensible CIOs, he suggested, were looking to repatriate workloads and rebuild relationships with CFOs left frothing at the mouth by the “trauma” of cloud costs. (This may not be the place to refer to the 272%+ VMware renewal quotes…)
VCF 9 will “expose easy-to-consume infrastructure services that enable developers and application owners to deploy any application (VM or containerized) without friction” – Broadcom
Broadcom’s Paul Turner told press in Vegas: “We have a mixed set of environments where customers are running a storage silo, a compute silo; they've probably virtualised the compute silo but haven't done so on the storage, the networking is very much a physically-oriented setup, security is in there afterward trying to figure out how to govern and control the entire environment. Our traditional legacy architecture is really not working in terms of being able to bring governance, control, and agility to a cloud [given] different teams managing different environments…”
VMware had not helped itself here, he admitted: “We didn’t have single sign-on, and we had an independent product lifecycle” – these have now been integrated and with VCF 9 VMware will empower customers to “import VMware NSX, VMware vDefend, VMware Avi Load Balancer and more complex storage topologies into existing VCF environments, and leverage and integrate older versions of existing infrastructure” it said.
Better storage management, better network management, better compute management (VCF 9 will “bring multi-tenant capabilities previously provided separately by VMware Cloud Director” into VCF”) are all on offer and the trio of charts in this piece captures the updates tidily.
Networking improvements, said Sabina Anja, a senior technology product lead for VMware Cloud Foundation, include:
"Native VPCs in vCenter and VCF Automation: Simplifies the creation and management of secure, isolated networks, reducing the complexity and time required to set up virtual networks.
"High-Performance Network Switching with NSX Enhanced Data Path: Delivers up to 3x the switching performance, meeting the demands of modern, data-intensive applications and reducing network latency.
"Easy Transition from VLAN to VPC: Streamlines the migration from traditional VLAN-based networks to VPCs, simplifying network management and improving security.
With that improved multi-tenant workload provisioning meanwhile, enterprise IT teams will then be able to "support different organizations, business groups or development teams on the same shared infrastructure, while allowing application owners and development teams to segment their infrastructure based on their specific requirements for access, workload management, security and privacy” Broadcom promised.
The question at this point is simply for many going to be how the finances stack up and just how far the horse has bolted. VCF 9 looks like a decent lasso, but that stable door has been kicked firmly open and unless The Stack missed it, VMware did not even share a date for VCF general availability; instead pointing to the GA release this week of VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 which is "already making significant strides today."
Broadcom's Hock Tan told the audience at the VMware conference: “You are going to see change – sorry. We are serious business people. So are you. We are all about business at Broadcom: we are here to run your business more efficiently. We are not here to show you bright shiny objects.”
Behind the scenes some of the product integration VCF 9 suggests looks welcome. But wielding the stick quite so heavily before the carrot has fully grown is an unusual approach, even if it is one of "serious business people."
Are we too unkind?
