Effective July 24, 2024, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 is generally available. It enhances infrastructure modernization, developer experience, and security resilience.
What is VMware Cloud Foundation?
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is a comprehensive platform that helps businesses manage their IT infrastructure across multiple cloud environments, whether on-premises, at the edge, or in the public cloud. Here are the main capabilities:
- Unified Management: It combines all the essential components like computing, storage, networking, and security into one integrated system. This makes it easier to manage and operate.
- Flexibility: It supports both traditional applications and modern, container-based applications, allowing businesses to run a wide variety of workloads.
- Automation: Many tasks are automated, which reduces the need for manual intervention and helps prevent errors. This also speeds up the deployment of new applications and services.
- Security: It includes built-in security features to protect data and ensure compliance with regulations.
- Scalability: It can easily scale up or down based on the needs of the business, making it suitable for both small and large organizations.
VCF 5.2 brings a range of interesting new features to the table, from infrastructure modernization, over cloud experience enhancements to security related features.
Modernizing Infrastructure with VCF 5.2
- VCF Import Capability: Integrates existing vSphere and vSAN environments into VCF, centralizing management and optimizing resources without requiring a full rebuild. This transformation leads to greater efficiency, lower costs, and faster time to value, making it easier for organizations to leverage their existing infrastructure investments.
- vSAN Max and vSAN ESA Support: Supports petabyte-scale disaggregated storage and active-active availability through vSAN Max and vSAN ESA stretched clusters. This enhancement allows for massive storage scalability and high availability, ensuring data is always accessible and protected across multiple locations.
- VCF Edge: Provides an optimized configuration for edge use cases, offering scalable, cost-efficient, and flexible management from data center to edge. This feature is designed to support the growing need for edge computing, where data processing occurs closer to the source of data generation, reducing latency and improving performance.
Enhancing Cloud Developer Experience
- Simplified Application Deployment: Offers quick start templates, easy network integration, and advanced performance insights, driving faster time to market and increased developer productivity. These tools simplify the deployment process, allowing developers to focus more on coding and less on infrastructure setup.
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG): Provides TKG as an independent service with asynchronous releases to align with upstream Kubernetes, delivering the latest versions to developers quickly. This ensures that developers have access to the most recent Kubernetes features and improvements, enhancing their ability to build and deploy modern applications.
- Enhanced Networking: Facilitates rapid setup and configuration from traditional VLAN-based setups to advanced NSX virtual networking, improving collaboration and efficiency in CI/CD pipelines. This feature streamlines network management, making it easier to create and manage complex network topologies required for modern applications.
- VMware Avi Load Balancer: Delivers self-service load balancing as a service for DevOps and AppOps teams, enabling IT to deploy load balancing at the speed of applications. This service ensures that applications can handle varying loads efficiently, improving performance and reliability.
Boosting Security and Resilience
- VMware Live Recovery and vDefend: Enhances private cloud integrity, availability, network performance, malware/ransomware prevention, and data protection. These add-ons provide comprehensive security measures to protect against various threats, ensuring the continuous operation and safety of cloud environments.
- ESXi Live Patching: Allows administrators to apply critical patches to ESXi hosts without requiring maintenance windows, reducing downtime and enhancing system reliability. This feature ensures that systems remain secure and up-to-date without interrupting business operations.
- Dual DPU Support: Ensures continuity and protection against DPU failures, providing full isolation of dual independent DPUs and doubling the offload capacity per host. This redundancy enhances system resilience, ensuring that workloads continue to run smoothly even if one DPU fails.
- vSAN Data Protection: Simplifies the protection and recovery of VMs from accidental deletions and ransomware attacks. This feature provides robust data protection capabilities, ensuring that critical data can be quickly restored in case of any data loss incidents.
- VMware Avi Integration: Streamlines lifecycle management of Avi software from deployment through provisioning to ongoing operations. This integration simplifies the management of load balancing services, ensuring they are always optimized and up-to-date.
Conclusion
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2, developed with extensive user feedback, introduces significant enhancements in infrastructure modernization, developer experience, and security resilience. Becoming available between August 1, 2024, and October 31, 2024, this release offers businesses an opportunity to upgrade data infrastructure and leverage new capabilities for improved efficiency and security.
More information
For the announcement, please visit: https://www.broadcom.com/company/news/product-releases/62326.
For more info on VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2, please visit: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/06/25/vmware-cloud-foundation-launch/.
For more on VMware by Broadcom, visit our VMware vendor page at: https://www.schneider.im/software/vmware/.
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