VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 – A Unified Platform for All Applications

As modern applications continue to evolve, so must the platforms that support them. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is uniquely positioned as a single platform that seamlessly runs both VMs and containers – bridging the gap between traditional workloads and modern, cloud-native applications. In this session, Broadcom’s Katarina Brookfield will explore the latest innovations in vSphere Supervisor, the integrated Kubernetes-based declarative API layer that’s become foundational to the private cloud experience in VCF. Learn how these enhancements accelerate Kubernetes operations while preserving the control and consistency enterprises demand. We’ll dive into the latest capabilities that elevate flexibility, isolation, and operational efficiency – highlighting enhancements like Management and Workload Zone separation, modular enablement of the Supervisor, namespace isolation integrated with VPCs, and significant improvements to the VM Service, including support for importing existing VMs. We’ll also showcase updates to the vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), offering a powerful, built-in Kubernetes runtime optimized for VCF environments.

The VCF 9 presentation highlighted its unified platform approach, leveraging the vSphere Supervisor declarative API to manage both VMs and containers, providing a cloud-like experience within a private cloud environment. The core idea is extensibility, allowing users to select capabilities from a catalog and introduce new functionalities, while abstracting away the underlying infrastructure complexities like compute, storage, and networking. Katarina Brookfield demonstrated deploying a virtual machine and a Kubernetes cluster through a single user interface, emphasizing new features in VCF9 such as deploying VMs from ISO images, enhanced network configuration with VPC integration, and guided CloudInit inputs, plus improvements to customization of VMs, all handled through a curated interface by administrators.

A significant portion of the presentation focused on vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), showcasing its ease of operation and extensive functionality. Users can customize Kubernetes clusters, mixing operating systems and adding labels. The VCF CLI facilitates managing these clusters, allowing users to register clusters, create contexts, and manage packages, including Istio support. Brookfield demonstrated how cloud admins can update the VKS service version, unlocking new Kubernetes releases for consumer deployment, ensuring governance remains with the cloud admin while empowering consumers with the flexibility to update their clusters.

The presentation concluded with a demonstration of GitOps patterns using Argo CD service, a new addition that enables continuous delivery of applications. Katarina Brookfield showed how to deploy an Argo CD instance and integrate it with a GitHub repository containing YAML files for both Kubernetes clusters and virtual machines. The talk also touched on how the Supervisor layer is decoupled to expedite release of new features. Broadcom emphasized that the latest functionalities are best experienced by making VCF Automation the single point of entry to the whole ecosystem.