I recently wrote about VMware vSphere Foundation and how it is a new solution designed to help our customers with an attractive Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and an accelerated Time To Value (TTV).

In particular, I referenced 4 key value propositions; Boost Operational Efficiency, Supercharge Workload Performance, Accelerate Innovation for DevOps, and Elevate Security.

In this blog, I am going to explore these and highlight the capabilities that are helping customers realize these benefits.

Boost Operational Efficiency

Is my use of my infrastructure resources optimal? When will I need more capacity? How much time are my valuable, skilled resources spending ‘keeping the lights on’?

These are the types of questions every customer asks and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) is designed to give you the answer and, if needed, to help turn a wrong answer to the right one!

Here are some examples of the ways that VVF helps drive this goal.

• Intelligent Operations and Advanced Analytics

  • Full Stack Visibility – Collect performance data across all endpoints from physical to virtual and Kubernetes containers to better service SLA’s
  • VM and Container Monitoring – Ensure VMs and containers are running properly by monitoring for performance, availability, and end-user experience
  • AI Driven Trouble-shooting and Remediation – Streamlined trouble-shooting with machine learning indexing for efficient anomaly detection. Provides a single place to collect data with metric correlation and to resolve them including last mile root cause analysis (RCA) reducing MTTR (mean time to resolution)

• Cost and Capacity Management

  • Assess Capacity and Address Shortfalls – Leverage real-time predictive analytics to gain insights into current and future capacity needs along with the ability to react swiftly to changing requirements.
  • Reclaim Capacity and Automate Cost Savings – Identify unused resources such as powered off VM’s, orphaned disks, obsolete snapshots, and idle vm’s to claim back capacity waste. Reclamation workflows streamline and automate the identification and re-allocation of capacity.
  • Infrastructure and Workload Planning – Define and use ‘What-If’ scenarios to model proposed changes to capacity, new workloads, or workload migrations. VVF will check if resources need to be added or removed to support the model as well as providing insight on changes to costs.
  • TCO With Showback/Chargeback – Dashboards provide an holistic view of TCO to optimize expenditure. Resources can be allocated to projects or business groups to provide chargeback or showback options for greater financial transparency of cost.

• Lifecycle Management Enhancements

  • ESXi Lifecycle Management Service – An extremely impactful enhancement that enables admins to centrally orchestrate updates across their entire fleet of ESXi hosts. With the ESXi lifecycle management service, upgrades will require far less time and effort and can be performed more often, allowing customers to stay more secure and take advantage of the latest capabilities of ESXi.
  • Reduced Downtime for vCenter Upgrades – The latest release of VVF dramatically reduces the downtime required to upgrade the vCenter service. During an upgrade, vCenter downtime is reduced roughly from an hour to just a few minutes. Planned maintenance windows can now be far shorter, enabling more frequent upgrades to benefit from the latest vCenter features.
  • Host Configuration at Cluster Level – Manage desired host configuration, compliance, remediation, and security standards seamlessly at a cluster level. Easily copy host configurations for all hosts when new clusters are created.

Supercharge Workload Performance

Can this infrastructure run all of my different types of workloads? Do they run as fast as I need them to? Can I manage their performance in a consistent way?

Having an efficient infrastructure is one thing but it means little if it cannot run every workload that we need it to and if the performance is not up to our requirements.

The heart of VVF is the market leading VMware ESXi with its unmatched ability to run both traditional and modern application types, as well as providing industry-leading support for GPU’s. VVF is also widely supported by 3rd parties for their applications and has a huge ecosystem of technology recognition and vendor partnerships.

Features that supercharge performance for the apps of today and tomorrow include;

• Power AI Workloads

  • Increased maximum vGPU devices per VM from 8 to 16 – Reduce AI/ML model training time and run higher end models with larger data sets.
  • GPU-Aware DRS – Workload placement and load balancing is now GPU aware, and DRS will try to place workloads with similar profile requirements on the same host. This improves GPU resource utilization, which reduces cost, as fewer GPU hardware resources must be acquired to achieve a desired level of performance.
  • Faster and More Scalable GPU Interconnects – Support for NVSwitch Technology allows for extremely high speed (900GB/s) and low latency crossbar switch on a single compute node.

• Continuous Performance Optimization

  • Intent Based Workload Placement – Placement of workloads is driven by business and operational considerations. This also provides for automated remediation of performance issues caused by resource contention, and balances workloads across clusters.
  • Enhanced Memory Monitoring and Remediation – DRS achieves optimal workload placement by factoring in memory statistics on bandwidth.
  • Intelligent Alert Clustering – To improve the ease of consumption of alerts, Aria Operations uses best-in-class object relationship mapping to group alerts based on related objects. This helps both narrow down the alerts and reduce the overall number.

Accelerate Innovation for DevOps

VVF runs both VMs (Virtual Machines) and Kubernetes (for containers). The container integration is not an additive software layer – the engine of VVF is built on Kubernetes itself so that both workload types are supported natively. Kubernetes orchestration can also be used for VMs as well as containers.

Not only does this mean that the workloads run well, it means the features exist to truly enable DevOps practices to drive innovation. That means providing developers with self-service while operations can focus on visibility, access, and operational guardrails.

Some highlights for how VVF enables and accelerates DevOps based innovation are;

• vSphere with DevOps Services

  • New VM Image Registry Service – DevOps teams, developers, and other VM consumers can publish and manage VM images in a self-service manner allowing VMs to be created more quickly without requiring assistance from an IT Admin.
  • VM Service support for Windows and GPUs – The VM service is a great way to provision VMs in a self-service manner and can now also be used to provision Windows VMs alongside Linux VMs to any hardware, security, device, custom or multi-NIC, and passthrough devices that VMs on vSphere support, including VMs that require GPUs.

• Kubernetes Deployment Flexibility

  • Availability Zones – Workload clusters can be deployed to multiple AZs to spread nodes across clusters in different zones to protect management and workloads against infrastructure failure.
  • TKG Lifecycle – Simplify lifecycle and package management with API-driven cluster classes and Carvel tools.

Elevate Security

Great technical features are important, but an organization also needs to rely on their infrastructure to play its part in their ability to observe their compliance and security requirements.

The VVF engine is vSphere ESXi – a robustly tested, battle-hardened and trusted hypervisor – but there are many other features of VVF that elevate your security posture to aid your ability to protect your workloads and data including;

• Resilience

  • Support for Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) – When authentication is handled by a 3rd party identity provider, authentication is no longer processed by vSphere. Since logins and passwords are no longer stored within vSphere, security audits are easier, faster, or not necessary. VMware now supports Microsoft Entra ID in addition to previously supported providers like Okta Identity Service and Microsoft Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS).
  • Ransomware Protection and Recovery (Add-On) – VMware Live Recovery is a purpose-built, industry-leading ransomware recovery-as-a-service solution that empowers organizations to recover from ransomware attacks with confidence and agility. Organizations benefit from a dedicated ransomware recovery workflow that has deeply integrated recovery automation capabilities including a cloud-based Isolated Recovery Environment (IRE) to prevent re-infection of production workloads, guided restore point selection, and embedded next-generation antivirus and behavioral analysis.

• Regulatory and Compliance

  • Integrate Compliance Dashboards – Reduce risk and enforce IT regulatory standards with integrated compliance and automated drift remediation. Ensure your environment’s adherence to common requirements with six out-of-the- box compliance templates—such as for PCI or HIPAA —or create your own custom templates.
  • Sustainability – Green score visibility to dramatically aid ESG reporting and goal compliance by tracking carbon footprint, clean demand, green supply, power consumption, etc and tracking improvements across these many vectors.

Next Steps

These are just a few of the examples of how features and capabilities within VMware vSphere Foundation drive IT value that you can rely on. There are plenty more too and I encourage you to learn more. Check out these helpful resources:

• Visit vSphere.com to learn more about VMware vSphere Foundation
• Read the Aria Operations blog covering release 8.16