Following up on the VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 GA announcement, the VCF team is proud to announce General Availability of VMware Cloud Foundation+ (VCF+). VCF+ has been a tremendous effort initiated as part of Project Arctic with the key objective of transforming VMware’s on-premises portfolio to a cloud connected SaaS offering. Like vSphere+ and vSAN+ earlier, VCF+ delivers a class of new cloud services for admins, developers with solutions to address the most advanced cloud use cases. You can learn more about VMware Cloud Foundation+ on this page.
VMware Cloud Foundation+ addresses a number of multi-cloud requirements that are changing the IT infrastructure landscape, creating opportunities for new levels of efficiency, scale and cost savings. This enables organizations reduce the time and effort required to manage their technology investments so they can focus on business outcomes. VCF+ also directly addresses the growing trend to support flexible subscription purchasing mechanisms that provide better predictability and lower costs.
VMware Cloud Foundation+ provides the data privacy, security and data sovereignty that you expect from your high performance, low latency on-premises infrastructure, but VCF+ uniquely adds a new class of cloud connected services, centrally managed through the VMware Cloud Console. These services include admin services, developer services and add-on hybrid cloud services that improve efficiency, broaden the developer’s reach and open up additional cloud connected use cases such as DRaaS, Ransomware Recovery and many more.
Figure 1: VMware Cloud Foundation+ Features and Benefits
Admin and Developer Services
The admin services enable organizations to streamline maintenance windows and monitor their global inventory, manage security status of all deployed VCF instances, regardless of location, through the centralized Cloud Console. This is coupled with the simplified subscription management and cloud based keyless entitlement that is now centrally managed through the VMware Cloud Console.
Figure 2: Screen shot of VCF+ Admin Services with drill down on Inventory Service
An overview of some of the cloud services that are included with a VCF+ subscription:
Inventory Service
Provides a high-level global inventory view of any VMware Cloud Foundation+ and vSphere+ connected instances.
Lifecycle Service*
Provides notification to admins if an update is available in a VMware Cloud Foundation instance. The actual lifecycle management is still performed by the local admin through SDDC-manager directly.
(* Lifecycle Service will be enabled prior to next release)
VM User Service
The VM Service enables an admin to deploy a VM onto any connected vCenter from the cloud, operating just as vSphere+ does today.
Infrastructure Operations Service
The Infrastructure Operations service provides a global overview of all VCF+ instances by providing a centralized view of consolidated events, security status, capacity state of clusters across vCenters and VCF+ workload domains.
Developer Services
VCF+ customers will have also have unique access to a set of developer services that provide cloud-based tools that complement the embedded TKG (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid) runtime and Tanzu Mission Control that comes with any VCF+ subscription. These services streamline platform management by providing integrated logging, registry, monitoring ingress and much more.
Add-on Hybrid Cloud Services
Perhaps one of the most exciting capabilities is the set of hybrid cloud services that are enabled through connectivity with VMware Cloud (VMC). Many of these features are still in development to be delivered in the future, but they open up an entire set of use cases that provide highly anticipated services such as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Ransomware recovery that will be enabled through deep integrations with VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery.
Upgrading to VMware Cloud Foundation+
For existing customers, there are paths to be able to move to VCF+ quickly to enable those customers to support these advanced cloud services and new capabilities. In order to upgrade an existing VCF environment to VCF+, the environment must be brought up to VCF 4.5, which is now GA.
Deploy vCenter Cloud Gateway
Next, the vCenter Cloud Gateway appliance needs is deployed.
The new Onboarding workflow within SDDC Manager (which we will discuss shortly) links to the VMware Customer Connect site. Administrators can log in to download and configure the vCenter Cloud Gateway virtual appliance.
Connect vCenter Cloud Gateway to VMware Cloud and SDDC Manager
The VI admin then registers the Cloud Gateway to the VMware Cloud Console. No VPN connection is required. To do this they authenticate to the VMware Cloud over (port 443) using their VMware Cloud account. Following this, SDDC Manager needs to be registered with the Cloud Gateway instance. At this point the VCF+ instance appears in the VMware Cloud inventory.
Complete the Subscription Process
Lastly, the VCF Admin subscribes the VCF+ instance to the VMware Cloud Console. New Workloads domains will be subscribed automatically at the time of creation. The VI Admin can then start to configure and consume services from the VMware Cloud Console.
Subscription Options for Disconnected Environments
For environments that have security requirements that may not support a cloud connected option, there is an option in the form of VMware Cloud Foundation Subscription (VCF-S). VCF-S provides all of the platform benefits of the traditional VCF environments, but there is no cloud connection making it suitable for secure sites or sites that have air-gap requirements.
Take the Next Step:
VMware Cloud Foundation+ is the latest in a series of solutions that transform VMware’s portfolio of on-premises solutions, so we encourage you to contact your local VMware account team or channel partner to learn more.
Resources:
What is VMware Cloud Foundation+?
