VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Showcase – Modern Private Cloud

What’s New in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

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Step into the future of infrastructure modernization with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, the next evolution of VCF. In this session, Broadcom’s Sabina Anja will walk you through new innovations that will redefine how your private cloud operates. Explore features in lifecycle management, fleet management, virtual private cloud networking, and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) storage. Discover how these advancements will simplify deployment, streamline operational efficiency, and elevate infrastructure performance. Gain insights into the strategic implications of enhanced capabilities and learn how they empower your organization to build and manage a resilient, future-ready private cloud infrastructure.

Personnel: Sabina Anja

Best Practices for Adopting & Deploying VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

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VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 introduces significant architectural enhancements that impact how modern private clouds are built and managed. This session provides some of the real-world upgrade pathways for both existing VCF 5.x users and the broader base of non-VCF customers looking to adopt the platform. From greenfield deployments to brownfield upgrades, Broadcom’s Jared Burns walks through the best practices, key considerations, and deployment strategies that align with diverse IT environments and business needs. This session is designed for IT professionals, cloud architects, and decision-makers who want to understand VCF 9’s transformative architecture and gain actionable insights into a smooth upgrade.

Jared Burns of Broadcom highlights the new VCF 9 architecture centered around the concept of a “VCF Cloud Foundation Fleet.” This fleet consists of one instance along with operations and automation that run across it. The fleet enables centralized management across multiple VCF instances, and multiple VCF fleets can be grouped into a VMware Cloud Foundation and Private Cloud. Key design considerations include centralized operations management, initial deployment based on the VCF fleet deployment basic design, and flexibility with multiple clusters within a single domain. Four deployment designs are presented: Basic, Site High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and a combined HA/DR approach, with the Basic design serving as the foundation for the others.

A key shift in VCF 9 is the increased flexibility in storage options. While vSAN remains supported, Fibre Channel and NFS are now supported out of the box for the management domain, offering more choices for Greenfield deployments. The presentation outlines detailed design decisions for Greenfield deployments, including considerations for fault domains, operations placement, scale, and organizational separation. Two deployment models for operations, Simple and High Availability, are discussed, along with scalability options.  Additional considerations include vCenter limits, host limits, HCL compliance, and IP/DNS requirements. The upgrade process emphasizes the importance of design planning and performing all prerequisites, due to changes like the removal of Enhanced Linked Mode and VMware Update Manager.

For upgrades from vSphere environments, a nine-step process is outlined, emphasizing the shift to keyless licensing and the move to vSphere Lifecycle Manager. The VCF installer now handles the conversion process, simplifying upgrades compared to previous versions. Customers are expected to be able to perform these upgrades themselves with the help of available upgrade guides. Significant changes include the replacement of Enhanced Link Mode with VMware Cloud Foundation operations and VMware Identity Broker, along with new IP address requirements and licensing procedures. Various import scenarios for workload domains are supported, including NSX-attached domains and standalone hosts.  Two distinct depots must be configured: SDC Manager’s depot and the VCF Operations Fleet Manager depot.

Personnel: Jared Burns

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 – The Smarter Way to Operate Private Cloud

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Effectively managing a large-scale Private Cloud environment demands robust operational strategies to effectively operate a large-scale private cloud. VMware Cloud Foundation Operations delivers these capabilities, enabling IT teams to ensure consistent access, security, lifecycle management as well as performance, cost efficiency, resource utilization, and infrastructure and application health Whether you’re an experienced VCF administrator or beginning your VCF journey, you’ll leave this session equipped to confidently operate and optimize VMware Cloud Foundation at enterprise scale.

The presentation highlights the new innovative features available with VCF operations and VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, focusing on fleet management and chargeback capabilities. Fleet management includes a unified single sign-on (SSO) capability via the VCF Identity Broker (VIDB), centralized certificate and password management, configuration drift updates, and simplified lifecycle management for applying patches and upgrades. The goal is to reduce the number of UIs and management points, providing a seamless operating experience from VCF operations, also with automation and API improvements.

The chargeback feature streamlines FinOps processes by integrating financial management with operational processes, enabling cost transparency and accountability. Key capabilities include defining rate cards for compute, storage, and networking, generating bills on demand or via scheduling, and sharing bills with tenants who can view detailed cost breakdowns within the automation console of VCF. The chargeback feature complements VCF’s showback capabilities, which provide visibility into the total cost of ownership, potential savings opportunities, and resource optimization. The demonstration illustrates the cost-saving opportunities through resource reclamation, rightsizing, and transparent resource cost.

Personnel: Kelcey Lemon, Kyle Gleed

VMware Cloud Foundation’s Shift to Self-Service Private Cloud Consumption

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Unlock the next era of private cloud innovation and discover how VCF Automation within VMware Cloud Foundation is shaping the future of cloud infrastructure. This session explores how VCF Automation facilitates modern private cloud operations, enabling quick provisioning and simplified scaling in multi-tenant environments through self-service IaaS. Gain the speed to bring applications to market faster—without compromising control, thanks to policy-based governance designed for the mordern enterprise. Broadcom’s Vincent Riccio will take you on a technical deep dive into the innovations powering this shift: a Modern Cloud Interface that delivers public cloud-like IaaS straight out-of-the-box, advanced tenant management, centralized content control, policy as code, and more. See how your organization can build, run, and manage diverse workloads—faster, smarter, and more securely—as you step into a future-ready private cloud.

Vincent Riccio’s presentation at the VCF 9.0 Showcase focused on Broadcom’s efforts to automate private cloud investments within VCF9. He emphasized the shift towards a self-service consumption model, enabling business units to deploy applications and services with greater agility. Key components of this automation include improved tenant management through the introduction of “organizations,” centralized content control via content libraries, and policy-as-code capabilities for governance. Riccio also highlighted the integration of vSphere services, such as the VM service and VKS service, into the automation framework, enabling users to deploy VMs and Kubernetes clusters more easily.

The presentation also delved into the architecture of the new solution, emphasizing the importance of the supervisor in vCenter for enabling the “all-apps” experience. Riccio explained how regions, comprised of one or more supervisors, abstract resources across the VCF fleet for consumption. He introduced the concept of projects within organizations, enabling further isolation and management of users and namespaces. The presentation concluded with a demonstration of the new features, including the deployment of VMs and Kubernetes clusters using the services UI and the exploration of the catalog for more curated, “anything as a service” type deployments.

Personnel: Vincent Riccio

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 – A Unified Platform for All Applications

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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.

Personnel: Katarina Brookfield

Unpacking Storage In VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

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VMware vSAN as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 brings new functionality that not only extends its capabilities in ways never seen before, but also integrates into VCF in a manner that makes it a natural and cohesive extension. vSAN is clearly the premier storage solution for VMware Cloud Foundation. Broadcom’s John Nicholson will take you through the latest storage innovations, and how they deliver enhanced TCO and flexibility, secure and resilient storage, multi-site operations, and a storage platform for all workloads.

John Nicholson from Broadcom detailed the storage enhancements in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, focusing on improvements to operations, disaster recovery, performance, and security. He highlighted new operational consoles and tools for multi-site management, including diagnostics capabilities and IO Insight for workload analysis. The presentation included a demo showcasing the IO Trip Analyzer for end-to-end IO path troubleshooting and discussed the overhead of VSCSI tracing.

A key feature discussed was the new cluster-wide global deduplication for vSAN ESA, which uses a 4K fixed block granularity and is performed asynchronously to minimize impact on write performance. Nicholson addressed concerns about encrypted storage, emphasizing that vSAN offers data-at-rest and data-in-transit encryption to meet compliance requirements while still enabling compression and deduplication where possible. The presentation also covered support for multiple vSAN deployment types, including single-site clusters, disaggregated storage clusters, and imported clusters, along with the ability to split networking for vSAN storage clusters.

Nicholson also presented vSAN to vSAN replication, enhancing data protection by integrating with VMware Live Recovery (formerly Site Recovery Manager). He showed how this combined solution supports replication, disaster recovery, and ransomware protection, all managed through a single appliance. He also covered improvements in stretch cluster support, like site-based maintenance mode and forced recovery takeover. The presentation concluded with a discussion about the current state of storage technology, highlighting the cost-effectiveness and scalability of NVMe drives and the benefits of vSAN within the VMware ecosystem.

Personnel: John Nicholson

Next-Level Security and Resilience with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

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When you think about cloud infrastructure security there are three main goals you are trying to achieve. First, you want to be secure quickly and stay that way. Second, you want to drive trust in your infrastructure. Third, you want to be resilient, easily. Broadcom’s Bob Plankers will take you through the latest security innovations in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 for providing next-level security, trust and resilience, empowering IT operations amidst regulatory complexities and geopolitical uncertainty.

The presentation focused on security and trust in VCF 9.0, emphasizing a “security first” approach, prioritizing ongoing security practices over infrequent compliance audits. A key theme was enabling customers to be secure faster, recognizing that security is a means to delivering services and running workloads. Plankers highlighted the importance of resilience, referencing features like vMotion and the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, addressing both tactical and strategic scenarios such as failed application upgrades and disaster recovery.

The core differentiator of VCF 9.0 is inherent trust in the stack, moving towards less trust and more continuous verification. This includes verifying the platform’s security state, data sovereignty, and controlled access. The discussion covered lifecycle patching enhancements with Lifecycle Manager, aiming to simplify updates and manage multi-vendor cluster images. Features like live patching, custom EVC profiles, and improved GPU usage were also discussed as facilitating easier maintenance and patching, reducing friction.

The presentation went into deep dive on enhancements inside the hypervisor for security, including code signing, secure boot, and sandboxing. Confidential computing with AMD SEV-ES and Intel SGX technologies was explored, along with the introduction of a user-level monitor to de-privilege VM escapes. Workload security improvements encompass secure boot, hardened virtual USB, TPM 2.0 updates, and forensic snapshots. Cryptographic enhancements included TLS 1.3 by default, cipher suite selection, and key wrapping. Centralized password management, unified security operations, and standardized APIs for role-based access control further enhance security and automation.

Personnel: Bob Plankers