Introduction to VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0

Today at VMworld Las Vegas, we are excited to announce the launch of VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0. Fundamentally, VMware Cloud Foundation brings together the different virtualization technologies – compute, storage, networking and management – to enable customers to build and operate a private or hybrid cloud as a single entity in an automated fashion. With this upcoming release, VMware Cloud Foundation provides a number of new key capabilities to further deliver on our objective of simplifying how customers build an integrated hybrid cloud. In this blog post, we’ll introduce you to some of the more notable features, which include greater flexibility with support for any network switch and new network topologies, continued expansion of the vSAN ReadyNode ecosystem, greater scalability driven by new multi-cluster workload domains within a single environment, ability to move workloads at scale across private and public clouds with NSX Hybrid Connect, support for new use cases with VVD guidance and finally an improved user experience.

• Bring Your Own Physical Network – In addressing customers’ demand for greater flexibility and choice, VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0 now supports customer choice of any network switch. What this means is that a customer is no longer subject to the limitations of a VMware hardware compatibility list (HCL) for the switching infrastructure in order to make VMware Cloud Foundation work in their environment. This enables the customer to bring their own network vendors and their own network topologies and devices from those vendors, and VMware Cloud Foundation will be able to run on top of those.
• Further Expansion of vSAN ReadyNode Ecosystem – Going another step further in providing greater flexibility and choice, VMware Cloud Foundation is now fully compatible with the entire vSAN ReadyNode Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). This brings in additional vendor choices such as Supermicro, Huawei, Inspur, etc. on the private cloud side. On the public cloud side, VMware Cloud Foundation continues to add additional partners with the newest addition being NTT Communications.

• Greater Scalability with New Multi-Cluster Workload Domains within a Single Environment – With VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0, either at the original time of deployment of a workload domain or during the expansion of a workload domain, customers are presented with the option to create multiple clusters and there is no limit on the number of clusters created. This allows customers to scale their workload domains to more than 64 hosts by adding new clusters to a workload domain and adding hosts to it. Some applications like PKS set availability zones at the vSphere cluster. With multi-cluster, these applications will have the flexibility to add multiple availability zones. Also, some application components, such as databases, are licensed based on underlying cluster CPUs. Having a separate cluster to host these applications gives customers control over license usage for these components.
• Improved User Experience – To provide consistency with other VMware SDDC products and based on customer feedback, the new user interface for SDDC Manager has been updated to provide more intuitive end-to-end UI driven workflows, improved UI responsiveness and performance, and a new dashboard with widgets for better surfacing and discovery of important SDDC information.

• Infrastructure Hybridity and Application Mobility at Scale – VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0 is available with NSX Hybrid Connect, enabling customers to quickly and easily move workloads at scale across legacy environments, private and public clouds. NSX Hybrid Connect delivers optimized data center extension capabilities for seamless and secure connectivity between sites, interoperability across vSphere 5.0+, and live bulk migration of application workloads across data centers and clouds without re-architecting applications.