Making the Move to VMware Cloud Foundation

As organizations seek to renew their VMware licenses, many are finding that their legacy stand-alone products are no longer available. Instead, they are being forced to consider VMware Cloud Foundation, the vendor’s unified software-defined data center platform.

For some, this move initially sparks confusion, or even anger. But when customers look under the hood and see what is available to them through the VCF 9.0 platform, which was released in June, they often see the value in the all-in-one offering.

Here are some of the most compelling features of the current version of VCF and how organizations can make the most of the platform.

VCF isn’t just a hypervisor solution. It’s a full stack, similar to having an entire Infrastructure as a Service  cloud environment in your on-premises data center. In VCF 9.0, VMware combines the vSphere virtualization and hypervisor platform, vSAN native storage, built-in network security through NSX, and a variety of orchestration and automation components.

This represents the culmination of years of rigorous research and development work by Broadcom, which acquired VMware in 2023, and it essentially means that VMware customers are receiving an entirely different product than before. Now, it’s true that organizations won’t get the full value from VCF if they only use one or two components of the platform. But when we sit with customers and help them dig into the new offerings, they often find that they’re able to use VCF to replace other portions of their IT environments, enhancing efficiency and performance.

Many organizations currently operate “Frankenstein” data centers, pulling together countless disparate components and doing their best to integrate them. This can lead to unnecessary complexity and wasted IT staff time.

Organizations that use VCF, by contrast, have access to a full catalog of self-service resources. While API-driven infrastructure is available, these customers have fully integrated self-service setups, allowing users to spin up resources such as web servers in a matter of minutes. That’s invaluable.

Here again, the integration inherent in VCF simplifies and improves upon previous processes, which required organizations to build out and manage integrations between different systems. The built-in security and compliance guardrails of VCF are much tighter than those of most environments that organizations build themselves, with native authentication and authorization tools that are applicable across the entire infrastructure environment.

VCF allows IT administrators to rapidly reallocate or redistribute storage across their infrastructure. This is becoming even more important as enterprises scale up artificial intelligence workloads. Currently, some customers that store their data in the public cloud are racking up enormous data egress and ingress fees for AI applications that run on-premises.

By contrast, VCF provides a cloudlike experience while keeping these data sets close to where they will be processed.

Through a partnership with NVIDIA, VMware has built a platform called Private AI Foundation on top of VCF, enabling organizations to run, move, govern and scale AI workloads. This includes support for model training, fine-tuning and inferencing directly on-premises. The platform addresses critical concerns related to privacy, compliance and cost by supporting AI workloads in a governed and protected environment.

This is one of the most powerful examples of how — and why — VMware is changing up its products. The rise of AI tools and other complex, data-intensive applications demand more than the piecemeal solutions of the past. They require a unified enterprise IT platform. That’s what VMware offers through VCF.