DEVOPSdigest

VMware unveiled a new release of its integrated hybrid cloud offering to help customers more easily deploy and operate their cloud environments. VMware introduced Cloud Foundation 3.5 to provide customers with greater deployment options, new Kubernetes support, and the latest innovations from VMware’s leading infrastructure and management portfolio.

VMware Cloud Foundation offers a fast way for customers to build an integrated hybrid cloud by delivering a comprehensive set of software-defined services for compute, storage, networking, security, and cloud management to run enterprise applications in hybrid cloud environments.

VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 will deliver even greater flexibility as well as support an ever-growing set of workloads and cloud initiatives.

VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 will be validated with Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes on Dell EMC PowerEdge MX with additional integration for composing compute, storage and network on this kinetic infrastructure expected in future releases.

This new release will bring composability features to VMware Cloud Foundation with HPE Synergy providing customers the benefits of a composable private cloud infrastructure with even more simplicity and flexibility in managing SDDC environments.

Additionally, the new release will feature integration with VMware NSX-T enabling the automated deployment and lifecycle management of the network virtualization software as well as support for containerized applications and Kubernetes.

VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 will build on top of the extensive set of new capabilities and integrations delivered in VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0 including the choice of physical network switches (compared to previous versions that only supported a predefined list of supported switches).

VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 will deliver:

- Increased Flexibility:

° New - VMware will validate this latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation with Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes on Dell EMC PowerEdge MX, with increased integration expected over time. PowerEdge MX is Dell EMC’s kinetic infrastructure, which was designed for the software-defined data center, with customizable modules of compute, storage and networking. A proven, complete hyperconverged software solution, VMware Cloud Foundation offers ecosystem support for all VMware vSAN ReadyNodes.

° New - Support for composable features will be delivered through deep integration between VMware SDDC Manager and HPE Synergy Composer which is powered by HPE OneView. Customers can now dynamically compose physical resources using the VMware Cloud Foundation user interface to meet the needs of applications running on Workload Domains, thus increasing overall operational efficiency and automation.

- Expanded Customer Use Cases:

° New - Integration with VMware NSX-T 2.3 – which simplifies the implementation of network and security tasks around Kubernetes – will enable support for containerized and cloud-native application use cases. This includes support for VMware PKS, the enterprise-grade Kubernetes solution.

° Previously, VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0 introduced support for multi-site use cases including the use of vSAN Stretched Clusters as well as the quick and easy movement of workloads across private and public clouds using NSX Hybrid Connect.

- Latest VMware Product Innovations:

° New - VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 will include support for recent VMware product releases including vSphere 6.7 Update 1, featuring simple and efficient management at scale, built-in security for applications, infrastructure, data and access as well as increased support for artificial intelligence (AI) and ML workloads, among other capabilities. Integration with VMware NSX-T 2.3 will enable support for container environments as well as a simplified workflow and a new search interface to allow administrators to search for objects and events within the NSX-T system and perform operations quickly. The new release will also feature VMware vRealize Automation 7.5 with broadened developer use case support through VMware PKS integration for Kubernetes cluster management. VMware vRealize Operations 7.0 will enable customers to adopt a ‘self-driving’ approach to monitoring and managing their data centers and cloud environments.

VMware Cloud Foundation provides a simple path to the hybrid cloud through an integrated software offering that delivers a consistent, simple, more secure and agile cloud infrastructure that can be deployed on-premises or consumed as a service from the public cloud via VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, CenturyLink, FUJITSU Cloud Service for VMware, NTT’s Enterprise Cloud (ECL) powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, OVH and Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware.

VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 is expected to be available by end of VMware's fiscal year 2019 (Feb. 1, 2019).