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VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0: Modernize Infrastructure, Accelerate App Delivery, and Strengthen Security and Resiliency

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is here, and it’s a game-changer! Say goodbye to complexity and hello to a unified, automated modern private cloud platform that effortlessly adapts to the rapid pace of digital transformation.  

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is a unified private-cloud platform that combines the scale and agility of public cloud with security and performance of on-premises infrastructure. VCF 9.0 is the evolution of the VCF platform to specifically address the challenges faced by organizations of all sizes.  By providing an integrated platform that is optimized to deliver cloud services at production scale, VCF 9.0 empowers infrastructure and operations teams to build scalable cloud services and the platform engineers that consume those services with enterprise grade security and resilience.

In this blog, let’s explore how VCF 9.0 will help infrastructure teams, application teams, and security operations teams resolve their challenges

VCF 9.0 Accelerates Infrastructure Modernization 

Modern infrastructure refers to the advanced, flexible, and scalable infrastructure that enables organizations to rapidly deliver modern applications. The top 3 use cases here are:

  • Build and operate private cloud infrastructure on-premises or at the edge
  • ​​Implement automated infrastructure to provide IaaS
  • Extend data center to the cloud

Let’s see top five VCF 9.0 features that will help infrastructure teams lower costs, improve operational efficiency and simplify management

  1. VCF Installer: Unlike Cloud Builder, VCF installer provides a curated set of steps in VCF Operations UI with GUI/API workflow and embedded pre-checks for a full-stack, holistic VCF deployment on Day 0. It also allows replication of deployments across multiple environments with downloadable JSON configurations. Additionally, the installer allows customers to convert existing vSphere clusters (with or without NSX) into a VCF management domain.

By eliminating the need to manage individual component installations, it streamlines the process, reducing complexity and minimizing the risk of errors by using a validated topology.

  1. Fleet Management: VCF 9.0 delivers comprehensive fleet management capabilities in VCF Operations to ensure you can manage the entire fleet of an infrastructure from a single pane of glass. The Lifecycle Management integration in VCF Operations provides a unified UI for managing upgrades, ensuring minimal downtime, and simplifying maintenance. License Management offers a centralized view across your entire infrastructure, simplifying license tracking and preventing over-assignment, while offering automatic sync capabilities to ensure compliance and reduce administrative complexity. Single Sign-On and Centralized Identity Management through a unified console streamline access management, reducing operational overhead and enhancing security.

With Certificate Management, the ability to manage, rotate, and renew certificates from a single interface reduces human error and the risk of service disruptions. Password Management centralizes local account password management across VCF components, enhancing security and simplifying compliance. Configuration Management allows you to monitor and enforce configuration consistency across vCenters and clusters. Lastly, Unified Tags Management eliminates the challenges of inconsistent and complex tag systems, enabling streamlined resource organization and consistent cost allocation. 

  1. Streamlined Resource Management with Multi-tenancy: With VCF 9.0 multi-tenancy capability,  enterprise IT admins can create a single Organization or multiple Organizations depending upon their business needs and allocate resources, set quotas, permissions etc. to these organizations, each managing users and resources specific to their group. 

This capability enables enterprise IT Admins to gain clear insights into resource utilization, costs, and spending across different orgs, environments, and workload types that helps them optimize infrastructure resources and reduce infrastructure costs. 

  1. NVMe Memory Tiering: For data intensive workloads, this feature allows users to add memory capacity to a host by using an NVMe device as a secondary memory tier that is installed locally in the host, thus resulting in an increase of available memory within the ESXi host. It minimizes performance impact by smartly placing VM memory between fast DRAM and slower NVMe storage

With increase in the memory footprint, NVMe tiering addresses core-to-memory imbalances and helps in better workload and VM consolidation, thus improving overall CPU utilization while lowering the total cost of ownership. 

  1. Integrated vSAN global deduplication: With global deduplication for vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) enabled out-of-the-box, redundant data blocks are identified and removed not just within individual disk groups, but across all hosts in the cluster, thus significantly improving storage efficiency and reducing overall storage costs. Please note that vSAN Global Dedupe will require an RPQ at GA.

Learn more through real world customer stories on how VCF helped customers modernize their infrastructure here

VCF 9.0 Delivers Unified Cloud Experience 

Unified cloud experience refers to providing public cloud like consumption experience to the application teams. Here, the top 3 use cases are:

  • Build, run, and manage Kubernetes and other modern workloads
  • Build, run, and manage Private AI
  • Run, and manage traditional workloads

Let’s check out top three VCF 9.0 features that will help application teams increase productivity, innovate faster and improve resource efficiency

  1. Faster path to self-service private cloud with VPCs: With native integration of NSX VPCs into vSphere UI, even with limited networking experience, VI admins can create and manage VPC networks and subnets directly from vSphere UI, API or CLI and expose those resources to the application teams for consumption. This networking-as-a-service model provides a cloud-like consumption experience, enabling application teams to work independently with secure network isolation and reducing reliance on network administrators. 
  1. Supervisor services: 

In VCF 9.0, VCF Automation provides Supervisor services (VM, K8s, Network, Volume, DB etc.) so that application teams can provision IaaS in a self-service manner when they need it, just like a public cloud, without going through a cumbersome ticketing process. Through the K8s CLI/UI/API, users can create Supervisor Namespaces, create VMs, create VKS clusters, log into the VKS cluster, apply applications and perform Day 2 actions on provisioned IaaS resources in a secure private cloud. 

  1. Custom Blueprint Development for Tailored IaaS Services: 

VCF Automation blueprints in VCF 9.0 let users define machines, apps, and services on VCF using a visual drag-and-drop canvas or low-code YAML. Standardized reusable blueprints can be designed and deployed on any supported endpoint based on inputs and variables that define the placement logic. Platform engineers can also add ecosystem constructs, including networking and security objects, K8S clusters, namespaces and custom resources. 

By eliminating dependency on infrastructure teams, blueprints help application teams accelerate dev/test cycles and improve developer productivity.

Check out real world customer stories on how VCF helped customers accelerate their application delivery

VCF 9.0 Provides Secure and Resilient Platform 

Secure and Resilient Platform refers to an infrastructure designed to protect data and applications and ensure continuous, reliable service. Here, the top 3 use cases are:

  • Implement ransomware protection and recovery
  • Implement disaster recovery
  • Integrate security, compliance, and resilience

Let’s see the top five VCF 9.0 features that will help security teams strengthen security posture, ensure continuous compliance and improve efficiency

  1. Live Patching for ESX : This feature allows ESX platform infrastructure to apply essential patches without taking hosts offline or evacuating VMs, thus reducing overall remediation time, infrastructure downtime and maintenance windows. It delivers critical security updates quickly within a fixed SLA, ensuring rapid response to high-impact issues. It also supports faster, robust, error-free upgrades of NSX, vSAN, user space daemons, and vmkernel updates. 
  1. Out of the box FIPS Compliance: VCF 9.0 now runs in FIPS-compliant mode by default, utilizing FIPS 140-2 certified cryptographic modules as recommended by the U.S. government. This ensures compliance with regulations, enhances data security by protecting sensitive information from breaches and cyberattacks, and fosters trust and confidence in the VCF software. 
  1. vSAN-to-vSAN Replication: With this feature, customers can easily replicate highly performant, scalable vSAN Data Protection snapshots remotely to any vSAN ESA datastore, HCI or disaggregated storage. With immutable snapshots, it strengthens data resilience and security. It delivers a lower-cost, high performance solution for asynchronous replication, and simplifies and accelerates recovery as compared to traditional, array-based solutions. 
  1. Integrated Security Operations: 

VCF 9.0 provides a centralized security operations dashboard with a comprehensive, single pane of glass view of User Security and Infrastructure Security across all VCF deployments. Unified visibility of security operations delivers faster incident response, enhanced threat protection, and proactive risk mitigation, thus increasing the operational efficiency of the Security Operations team. 

  1. Cyber Recovery Enhancements:
  • Cyber Recovery to On-Premises VCF Sites: Customers can now recover from ransomware attacks to an on-premises VCF target. This brings increased data sovereignty and maximized value of their VCF investment with a dual-purpose site for both DR and cyber recovery.
  • Enhanced replication between VCF sites: vSAN remote snapshots enable a deeper history of snapshot copies for on-premises recovery, which is essential in cyber recovery. Users only need to manage a single appliance across cyber and disaster recovery, and can efficiently scale their site capacity with vSAN storage clusters.

Check out how VCF helped customers safeguard their infrastructure with robust security and resiliency here

Looking for deep dive into new capabilities of VCF 9.0, please check out the blogs below to learn more:

Resources to learn more

To learn more about how VCF 9 helps customers resolve their infrastructure challenges across these range of use cases, here are some more resources for you:

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Ready to get hands-on with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0?  Dive into the newest features in a live environment with Hands-on Labs that cover platform fundamentals, automation workflows, operational best practices, and the latest vSphere functionality for VCF 9.0.

Sonali Desai

Sonali Desai is a Product Marketing Engineer for VMware Cloud Foundation at VMware by Broadcom, Inc. Sonali has been working in IT industry for more than 15 years with experience…

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