With the explosive growth of data fueling today’s global environment, businesses’ ability to readily adapt is becoming more and more critical for survival, and IT managers are under enormous pressure to deliver applications and services that innovate and transform the business.
Regardless of the size of an organization, cloud computing is a fundamental business enabler that powers everything from email and collaboration tools to mission-critical systems. As cloud technology, and the way businesses use it, has evolved, hybrid cloud models have become a dominant way to balance cloud-dependent functionality with considerations that divide workloads between on-prem computing, enterprise data centers, and public and private clouds.
Hybrid clouds have become the norm for many organizations globally, with 92% of organizations having both public and private cloud environments installed, and 90% of modern server environment operators reporting increased value and effectiveness from hybrid cloud initiatives versus just 62% of those running legacy server shops. Similar to the real-world nature of clouds, which come in various types with different environments, hybrid clouds are also dynamic. Sometimes they must be built quickly and flexibly, sometimes they hang around for a long time, and other times they dissipate quickly. Often the data doesn’t just stay on one of these many clouds, and only 50% of all applications are expected to “stay in place” over the next year.
Recently VMware introduced VMware Cloud Foundation 4. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is the future-proof hybrid cloud platform for modernizing data centers and deploying modern apps. VCF is based on VMware’s proven technologies including VMware vSphere with Tanzu (Kubernetes), vSAN, NSX, and vRealize Suite, providing a complete set of software-defined services for compute, storage, networking, security, and cloud management to run enterprise apps – traditional or containerized – across hybrid clouds.
Cloud Foundation delivers enterprise agility, reliability, and efficiency for customers seeking to deploy private and hybrid clouds. Cloud Foundation simplifies the hybrid cloud by delivering a single integrated solution that is easy to deploy and operate through built-in automated lifecycle management.
Cloud Foundation 4 provides consistent infrastructure and operations from the data center to the cloud and the edge, making VCF an ideal platform for hybrid cloud deployments. It serves as an integrated software platform that automates a complete software-defined data center (SDDC) on a standardized architecture, such as Dell PowerEdge and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, which are preconfigured, tested, and jointly certified to run vSAN and take the guesswork out of deploying your environment.
With Cloud Foundation 4, VMware has enhanced the various software stack components to boost manageability, security and development of modern apps. Such new features in the stack include: enhanced support for modern apps with vSphere with Tanzu, vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), upgrades in cloud-scale networking and security with NSX, and updated vRealize Suite.
The Kubernetes addition, now intrinsic to vSphere 7 with Tanzu, enables VCF Services and application‑focused management for streamlined development, agile operations, and accelerated innovation. With native support for Kubernetes, customers can build, run and manage containers and virtual machines in one environment.
vSphere Lifecycle Manager, or vLCM, reduces operational complexity, for day zero- day 2 tasks and reduces the amount of time needed to monitor the environment. It allows 98% less hand-on time and 98% fewer steps when updating an 8-node cluster using vLCM and OMIVV.¹ Before the introduction of vSphere 7 and vLCM, admins often used up to nine tools to manage their VMware environment.
Similarly, the VMware vRealize Suite, a multi‑cloud cloud management solution, provides a modern platform for infrastructure automation and consistent operations. vRealize is included with most editions of VCF and ultimately helps with application operations, allowing developers to quickly release, troubleshoot and optimize performance of highly distributed microservice‑based cloud applications.
NSX 3 enables cloud-scale networking and security by eliminating infrastructure boundaries across clouds. It delivers true single pane of glass capabilities while providing enhanced constructs for data path multi-tenancy and service chaining. With NSX, customers gain federation capabilities to provide a cloud-like operating model for network operators, enhanced multi-tenancy capabilities and service chaining. Also, NSX distributed IDS/IPS, network intelligence enhancements, security anomaly detection, L7 Edge Firewall enhancements and application templates for micro-segmentation all come together to build additional intrinsic security capabilities for Cloud Foundation. IT departments must have the right x86 server infrastructure plus virtualization software to support traditional and modern apps, with the utmost security and simple manageability. For these needs, more and more customers globally have standardized on Dell PowerEdge servers plus VMware software. Flexibly architect and scale your hybrid cloud environment to transform what’s possible for your business, while empowering IT with intelligent automation, consistent management, and multi-layer security across physical and virtual machines and containers, from the core to the cloud to the edge.
To learn more about PowerEdge Servers with VMware Cloud Foundation:
- Read the Solution Brief or Tolly report that shows how you can deploy your private cloud in days rather than weeks with PowerEdge and VMware Cloud Foundation 4.
- Visit the PowerEdge and VMware Solution Page.
¹ Principled Technologies Report, sponsored by Dell Technologies, “New VMware vSphere 7.0 features reduced the time and complexity of routine update and hardware compliance tasks”. August 2020
