VMware Presents at Cloud Field Day 21

Private Cloud, Simplified – Introducing VMware Cloud Foundation

Watch on YouTube
Watch on Vimeo

Since the completion of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, we have been all about change. For the VMware Cloud Foundation division, all of this change was necessary to transform our business to deliver faster innovation with more value to customers, and even better profitability and market opportunity for our partners. So, what’s changed now, post-acquisition, and why will this benefit your organization? In this session we will lay out VMware’s business model transition to subscription licensing which is the standard in the industry, the radical simplification across our portfolio, go-to-market and organizational structure to make it easier to do business with us, and the standardization across our ecosystem.

In this presentation, Prashanth Shenoy from VMware, now part of Broadcom, discusses the significant changes and strategic shifts that have occurred since the acquisition. The primary focus has been on simplifying VMware’s offerings, particularly through the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), which integrates various components like vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and ARIA automation into a unified private cloud platform. Shenoy emphasizes that the goal is to provide a consistent and seamless experience for customers, whether they deploy on-premises, at the edge, or through hyperscalers like AWS or Google Cloud. This shift is aimed at addressing customer feedback about the complexity of VMware’s previous offerings, which included thousands of SKUs and multiple independent business entities. By consolidating these into a single business division and product line, VMware aims to accelerate innovation and provide a more streamlined, integrated solution.

Additionally, Shenoy highlights the transition to a subscription-based licensing model, which aligns with industry standards and offers customers greater flexibility in deploying their cloud infrastructure. VMware has also introduced license portability, allowing customers to move their licenses between on-premises and cloud environments without additional costs. The company is also focusing on customer success by offering value-added services, professional support, and training programs to help customers adopt and optimize their private cloud deployments.

Personnel: Prashanth Shenoy

VMware Cloud Foundation Platform Overview

Watch on YouTube
Watch on Vimeo

This session provides a summary of the VMware Cloud Foundation platform architecture, components and outcomes to build, deploy, operate and consume Private Cloud infrastructure for traditional and modern app workloads. This session will close with a brief overview of the latest VCF 5.2 release.

In this presentation, Rick Walsworth from VMware, now part of Broadcom, provides an overview of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and its evolution since the Broadcom acquisition. He explains how the acquisition has streamlined operations, allowing for faster innovation and a more focused go-to-market strategy. VCF is designed to help organizations build, deploy, and manage private cloud infrastructure using cloud methodologies, while still maintaining the privacy, security, and performance of on-premises systems. Walsworth highlights the challenges customers face when modernizing their infrastructure, particularly when trying to integrate cloud methodologies with traditional three-tier architectures. He notes that many organizations initially view public cloud as a quick solution but often face cost overruns, leading to a trend of repatriating workloads back on-premises. VCF aims to provide a hybrid solution by combining the best of both worlds—on-premises control with cloud-like automation and scalability.

Walsworth also delves into the architecture of VCF, which caters to two main personas: cloud administrators and platform teams. Cloud administrators are provided with tools for capacity management, tenancy management, and fleet management, enabling them to operate infrastructure at scale. Platform teams, on the other hand, focus on delivering infrastructure as a service to developers, often using a combination of traditional VMs and containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. VCF integrates with various advanced services, such as AI workloads, disaster recovery, and security features, which can be added on top of the core platform. The platform also supports automation through infrastructure-as-code methodologies, allowing for seamless integration with DevOps pipelines. Walsworth emphasizes the importance of ongoing education and professional services to help customers fully utilize the platform’s capabilities, especially as they scale and customize their environments.

Personnel: Rick Walsworth

Import, Migrate, and Extend VMware Cloud Foundation

Watch on YouTube
Watch on Vimeo

VMware Cloud Foundation simplifies infrastructure administration by automating lifecycle management workflows and password/certificate rotation at scale. You don’t have to start from scratch to benefit from these capabilities. Discover how the latest release enhancements enable you to manage existing VMware vSphere deployments with VCF, as well as seamlessly migrate to and from VCF environments, whether on-premises or in the public cloud. In this presentation we will review:
● Introduction to VCF Import
● HCX overview and mention other tools to migrate to VCF
● Extend to the cloud with a focus on Google Cloud VMware Engine

In this presentation, Eric Gray from VMware by Broadcom discusses the technical aspects of importing, migrating, and extending VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environments. He explains how VCF simplifies infrastructure lifecycle management by automating tasks like updates, password management, and certificate rotation. One of the key points is that organizations don’t need to start from scratch to benefit from VCF. Existing VMware vSphere environments can be integrated into VCF through a process called “conversion” for management domains and “import” for workload domains. This allows administrators to bring their current infrastructure under VCF management, enabling them to take advantage of VCF’s lifecycle management features without having to rebuild their environments. Gray also highlights the flexibility of storage options, noting that while VCF typically uses vSAN, existing environments with NFS or Fibre Channel storage can still be imported and managed.

The second part of the presentation focuses on migrating workloads to VCF environments, particularly using VMware HCX, a tool that facilitates seamless migration of virtual machines (VMs) from older vSphere environments or even non-vSphere infrastructures like Hyper-V and KVM. HCX allows for live migrations with zero downtime by stretching Layer 2 networks, ensuring that workloads can retain their IP addresses during the move. Gray demonstrates how HCX can be used to migrate workloads between on-premises environments and public cloud platforms like Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE). He also touches on other migration options, such as NSX Layer 2 extensions and cross-vCenter migrations, but emphasizes that HCX is included with VCF and is a robust, mature solution for large-scale migrations. The session concludes with a live demo showing the migration of a web application from an on-premises environment to GCVE, illustrating the ease and efficiency of the process.

Personnel: Eric Gray

Monitoring Cost, Capacity, and Health of VMware Cloud Foundation

Watch on YouTube
Watch on Vimeo

VCF Operations offers full-stack visibility into the VMware Cloud Foundation based private clouds you manage. This includes the cloud components, infrastructure, virtual machines (VMs), containers and applications. VCF Operations provides continuous health updates, performance optimization, as well as efficient cost and capacity management.

● The demonstration will cover the following:
● Full Stack visibility and health across your VCF clouds
● Application and container monitoring
● Cost analytics, including TCO and potential savings
● Predictive capacity management with actionable rightsizing and reclamation tools

In this presentation, Kelcey Lemon from Broadcom demonstrates how VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Operations provides comprehensive monitoring and management tools for private clouds. The platform offers full-stack visibility, allowing users to monitor the health of their cloud infrastructure, including virtual machines (VMs), containers, and applications. VCF Operations consolidates various diagnostic tools into a single interface, enabling users to track performance, identify underutilized resources, and address capacity shortfalls through predictive analytics. The platform also helps with cost management by offering insights into total cost of ownership (TCO), potential savings, and resource reclamation, such as deleting idle VMs or old snapshots. Additionally, it provides compliance monitoring, ensuring that the infrastructure adheres to industry standards like HIPAA and CIS, while also tracking sustainability metrics like power consumption and carbon footprint.

The presentation also highlights the platform’s capacity management features, which use historical data and predictive analytics to forecast future resource demands. VCF Operations offers tools for right-sizing VMs, helping users optimize performance and reduce costs by adjusting CPU and memory allocations. The platform also includes reclamation tools that allow users to reclaim unused resources, further optimizing capacity and reducing operational expenses. The unified dashboard provides a centralized view of the entire cloud environment, enabling users to quickly identify and address issues, such as capacity shortages or performance bottlenecks. Overall, VCF Operations aims to streamline cloud management by offering a comprehensive, user-friendly interface that integrates health monitoring, cost management, and capacity planning.

Personnel: Kelcey Lemon

Run Enterprise Workloads with Kubernetes on VMware Cloud Foundation

Watch on YouTube
Watch on Vimeo

VMware Cloud Foundation allows customers to run any modern workload alongside any traditional workload, all on the same platform, using a unified set of management tools. In short demos we’ll walk through capabilities of main services, such as VM Service and vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), and demonstrate their seamless integration with underlying Network and Storage infrastructure to provide Load-balancing and Persistent Volumes for our workloads. Later we’ll discuss how VCF Automation takes the consumption experience to the next level with the introduction of Blueprints and Self-Service Catalog. In addition we will discuss governance and policies, lifecycle management and ongoing cost visibility of your workloads and applications.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) offers a unified platform for running both traditional and modern workloads, such as virtual machines (VMs) and Kubernetes clusters, using a consistent set of management tools. The platform integrates compute, storage, and networking resources, allowing users to deploy workloads in a seamless manner. VCF’s declarative API, called the VCF Supervisor, enables the deployment of Kubernetes clusters and VMs, providing resource isolation through vSphere namespaces. This allows administrators to set governance policies, such as access control and resource allocation, while also offering additional services like private container image registries and ingress controllers. The platform supports hybrid applications, where both containers and VMs can coexist, and provides a seamless experience for managing these workloads using the same tools. The demo showcased how easy it is to deploy Kubernetes clusters and VMs using VCF’s interface, with options for customizing configurations, such as networking overlays, storage policies, and VM classes.

In addition to workload deployment, VCF also offers automation capabilities through its VCF Automation tool, which allows users to consume and deploy services across private cloud environments. The tool supports templates and self-service catalogs, enabling users to deploy hybrid applications that combine VMs and containers. The automation tool integrates with various services, such as load balancers and persistent volumes, and provides governance features like lease policies to manage resource usage. The demo highlighted how users can create YAML-based templates to automate the deployment of Kubernetes clusters, VMs, and other services, while also offering flexibility for DevOps teams to manage infrastructure as code. Overall, VCF provides a comprehensive solution for managing both traditional and modern workloads, with a focus on automation, governance, and seamless integration across the infrastructure stack.

Personnel: Katarina Brookfield, Vincent Riccio

The VMware Cloud Foundation Approach to Platform Security

Watch on YouTube
Watch on Vimeo

VMware Cloud Foundation offers a wide array of features and capabilities to help organizations be and stay secure. In the short time we have we’ll talk about recent improvements aimed at making hard security tasks easy or non-existent (ESXi Live Patch, Image-Based Lifecycle Management, audit & remediation tools, Identity Federation and its relationship to attacker trends, etc.)

In this presentation, Bob Plankers from VMware by Broadcom discusses the VMware Cloud Foundation’s approach to platform security, emphasizing the importance of making security features easy to use and adopt. He highlights that VMware’s goal is to ensure that security is intrinsic to the system, with minimal effort required from users to enable it. The focus is on reducing friction in security processes, making it easier for organizations to comply with regulatory requirements and adopt security best practices. Plankers explains that VMware has been working on several improvements, such as ESXi Live Patch, Image-Based Lifecycle Management, and audit and remediation tools, all aimed at simplifying traditionally complex security tasks. He also touches on the importance of defense in depth, where multiple layers of security are implemented, starting from hardware-level protections like secure boot and trusted platform modules (TPMs) to software-level features like code signing and encryption.

Plankers also delves into the broader security landscape, discussing how VMware Cloud Foundation integrates security across the entire stack, from infrastructure to workloads. He emphasizes the importance of availability and resilience, noting that features like V-motion, DRS, and high availability are critical security features that ensure systems remain operational even during attacks or failures. Additionally, he discusses VMware’s efforts to support post-quantum encryption, identity federation, and continuous monitoring for security controls. The presentation concludes with a focus on reducing the friction associated with patching and updates, including the introduction of live patching for ESXi, which allows for faster and less disruptive updates. Overall, VMware’s approach is to make security a seamless and integral part of the infrastructure, allowing organizations to focus on their workloads while maintaining a strong security posture.

Personnel: Bob Plankers