We are pleased to announce that VMware Cloud Foundation has been recognized as a Finalist in CRN’s 2019 Products of the Year in the Hybrid Cloud category. This recognition shows the building momentum behind Cloud Foundation and a growing preference for a hybrid cloud strategy among IT leaders. But recognition for being a finalist in the Hybrid Cloud category doesn’t tell the full story. Cloud Foundation provides consistent infrastructure and consistent operations across clouds – a prerequisite to a successful Hybrid Cloud strategy – by leveraging VMware’s full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure together with products, services and solutions across our broad partner ecosystem. And many of those full-stack components and partner products appear as finalists and winners in CRN’s 2019 Products of the Year.
VMware Cloud Foundation brings together VMware vSphere (the defacto virtualization platform for businesses of all sizes), VMware vSAN (CRN’s Software-Defined Storage category winner in 2019), VMware NSX (a finalist in CRN’s Software-Defined Networking category), and VMware vRealize products to simplify management of your hybrid cloud. VMware’s full-stack can be deployed in private clouds or consumed as a service in public clouds, allowing you to craft your ideal hybrid cloud configuration.
When deploying Cloud Foundation in a private cloud, customers can choose from a wide selection of VMware ESXi-compatible servers, vSAN ReadyNodes, and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appliances. In fact, every model listed as a finalist and winner in CRN’s General-Purpose Servers category is compatible with Cloud Foundation. You are free to choose from HPE, Cisco, Dell EMC, Lenovo, SuperMicro and a host of other server vendors as you prepared to build the on-premises foundation of your hybrid cloud.
When it comes to physical Networking, you can choose from any enterprise switching solution (winner, finalist or runner-up), deployed in the topology of your choice, to give you the most flexibility in architecting connectivity in your private cloud. Add network virtualization with VMware NSX over any physical switching and you’re ready for any hybrid cloud scenario.
Ready to go to the next level with HCI? VMware and Dell EMC have jointly engineered Dell Technologies VxRail (finalist in the CRN Hyperconverged Infrastructure category) with unique integrations with both vSAN and Cloud Foundation’s SDDC Manager Lifecycle Management for a unified hardware and software updating experience.
With Cloud Foundation 3.9, Fibre Channel joins NFS as supported principal storage for workload domains. This means that you can choose the right storage vendor and connectivity for your environment because VCF supports all types of storage. In fact, every vendor in CRN’s Enterprise and Midrange Storage categories is supported with Cloud Foundation, so you’ll have no problem picking a great storage array to supplement vSAN in your Cloud Foundation environment.
So far, we’ve only looked at the on-prem categories in CRN’s 2019 Products of the Year, but with Cloud Foundation we can also look at other categories that enable you to build a Hybrid Cloud. Cloud Foundation is supported on Lenovo’s TruScale Infrastructure Services (a finalist) when ThinkAgile VX hardware is leveraged, giving you the option of consumption-based economics for your hybrid cloud hardware. Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (also a finalist) is built on Cloud Foundation technologies so you get consistent infrastructure and operations across data center, edge and public cloud environments.
Looking to run Kubernetes in your hybrid cloud? Cloud Foundation can automatically deploy VMware PKS in a Workload Domain to get you running quickly so you can delight the developers that your IT organization supports. In addition, Google Anthos (the CRN winner for Hybrid Cloud in 2019) can be deployed on VMware Cloud Foundation on-premises.
To round out your hybrid cloud strategy, you’ll need to pair a public cloud with your Cloud Foundation-based private cloud. No need to worry – VMware Cloud Foundation is supported on every CRN finalist and winner in the Public Cloud category – Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. You can choose the right public cloud for your workloads based on their capabilities, location and cost. If any of those factors change and you need to migrate your workloads, the consistent infrastructure and operations offered by Cloud Foundation gives you the flexibility to adapt without re-architecting your hybrid cloud.
VMware Cloud Foundation is not only a finalist in CRN’s Hybrid Cloud Category, it amplifies, supports, and unites the best-of-breed solutions across our growing ecosystem of partners give you – our customer – the most flexibility in architecting your hybrid cloud.
Visit https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-foundation.html to learn more about VMware Cloud Foundation or take a VMware Hands-on Lab to learn how to get started with VCF.
