‘Intense Focus … on High-Quality Products’: VMware Cloud Foundation Gets Big Updates

First up, VCF 5.2 will come with an import capability supporting data from vSphere, vSAN, VMFS-FC and NFS environments.

This will let users integrate their vSphere and vSAN environments into VCF while centralizing management and avoiding full rebuilds of an environment, according to VMware by Broadcom. The company said this will translate into greater efficiency, lower costs and faster time to value. 

“The new VCF Import functionality will be a game-changer in accelerating VCF adoption and improving time to value,” said Paul Turner, vice president of products, VCF division at Broadcom.

Shenoy agreed.

“The bottom line for our customers is reduced downtime so that they don't need to bring their workloads down or migrate their workloads when they have to bring them into the VCF environment,” he said.

VCF now provides full, integrated support for vSAN Max and vSAN ESA stretched clusters, supporting petabyte-scale disaggregated storage and active-active availability. Also, VCF Edge will deliver VCF configuration for edge use cases. That will offer hassle-free management and consistent infrastructure from data center to edge, VMware by Broadcom says.

Next, look for Cloud Experience for Developers. The module supports a public cloud experience and offers easy consumption of virtual networks, VMware by Broadcom said.

As such, VCF 5.2 simplifies application deployment and management with quick-start templates, easy network integration and advanced performance insights. All of that means faster time to market and higher developer productivity, per VMware. 

VCF further will offer Tanzu Kubernetes Grid as an independent service as part of vSphere Foundation 5.2 (more information in an upcoming slide). That will deliver asynchronous TKG releases aligned with upstream Kubernetes and provide the latest versions to developers. 

Other enhancements to VCF networking will enable rapid setup and configuration for moving from traditional VLAN-based network setups to advanced NSX virtual networking. 

The next major update focuses on security and resilience in VCF.

For starters, new ESXi Live Patching allows administrators to apply critical patches to ESXi hosts without maintenance windows. The new Flexible VCF Component upgrade capability lets users apply the latest patches available at the time of upgrading to a new VCF version. All of that means no downtime, per VMware by Broadcom.

These advancements reduce downtime, streamline patch management and enhance system reliability, VMware by Broadcom said. 

In addition, dual DPU support with vSphere Distributed Services Engine will help with continuity and protection against DPU failures, provide full isolation of dual independent DPUs and double the offload capacity per host. 

From there, vSAN Data Protection gives administrators the ability to more easily protect and recover VMs from accidental deletions and ransomware attacks. 

Finally, VMware vDefend will deliver increased distributed and gateway firewall scale, security information and event management (SIEM) integration for enhanced East-West ransomware protection, as well as on-premises network detection and response for threat triaging. 

“Cybersecurity is always critical and top of mind, not only for the CISO, but also for the CEO and the CFO and the infrastructure folks,” Shenoy said. “They want to have a highly resilient, highly available cloud platform that not only has resiliency built in to the infrastructure and to the applications, but also help them quickly and rapidly recover from any cybersecurity threats that they're facing on a regular daily basis.”

Not to be left out, vSphere Foundation also has been upgraded to version 5.2, as we mentioned a couple of slides back.

With this latest edition, look for new value, VMware by Broadcom says. That looks like better operational efficiency, accelerated innovation for DevOps, elevated security and greater workload performance, according to the company.

Here’s how all of that actually plays out within each bucket:

VCF users also get license portability in this latest version. As a result, they can buy subscriptions for 5.2 and have “complete mobility,” per VMware by Broadcom, between their on-premises environments and supported endpoints.

“Now, with license portability, they can take their license entitlements and give it to the managed service provider without having to pay anything extra for that infrastructure,” Shenoy said. “So it’s a huge benefit for our customers — to provide the flexibility but also that investment protection and choice of how they want to run this and who they want to run it.”

On that note, VMware by Broadcom recently inked portability deals with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

The updated VCF and vSphere Foundation platforms will be available in the coming weeks.

We now move into some discussions on VMware pricing, the OEM strategy, and input and reactions from a cloud managed service provider.

When it comes to reports of higher VMware prices under Broadcom, “nothing can be further from the truth,” Shenoy said, adding that Broadcom cut the price of VCF subscriptions “by half.”

“It was $700 per core per year,” he said. “We brought it down to $350 per core per year. … What we did was move completely from a perpetual CPU-based model that we had in the previous world to a core-based subscription pricing model. And frankly … this is the industry standard that every other infrastructure and enterprise software vendor has brought in for the last several years. And VMware when we were an independent company was the last one to do … perpetual licensing.”

That’s all true, but channel partners and end users still have complained about their VMware costs going up under Broadcom. One partner, Converge Technology Solutions, talked with Channel Futures about the changes. 

Broadcom’s pricing changes have impacted Converge Technology Solutions’ customers, and the company has been working with its users to understand what’s different from a total-cost-of-ownership standpoint, said Emily Martin, executive vice president for hybrid platforms. 

First, Martin noted, it’s “very common” for software buyers to only use a portion of a platform’s functionality.

“So we've spent a lot of time working with customers to make sure they understand what they've got as part of their bundle and what other things they may be able to let go of if they've got duplication," she said.

Converge's Emily Martin

From there, Converge has been assessing factors including support costs and VMware platform TCO over time. All of this “has been part of the activities of what we've been doing over the last several months,” Martin said. “Of course, we have to digest the new changes that they're announcing. But we'll be factoring that into looking at the overall investments that customers who are staying on the VMware platform have, and helping them make sure that they're maximizing the value that they're getting out of those investments.”

Martin predicted that most VMware users will stay with the company “in some way, shape or form … for a very long time.”

“I think it's incredibly difficult to just pick up and leave,” she said.

For its part, VMware by Broadcom says customers are experiencing “a 40-50% better total cost of ownership over a three-year period compared to native public cloud or compared to their traditional three-tier hardware infrastructure and we pride ourselves on that and we take that very seriously,” Shenoy said.

All that said, however, VMware costs do appear to be rising, and Converge’s customers provide just one snapshot of that.

“What we've seen is, generally, if you do an apples-to-apples [comparison], prices are going up,” Martin said. “That said, I think there are a lot of complexities in terms of how these things are getting bundled.”

A caveat is that, at the time of publication, Converge had yet to be briefed on all of the new VCF updates. 

“We haven't had a chance to fully digest that pricing impact change,” Martin told Channel Futures on June 20. “I think there's going to be an impact, there's no question. We just, at this point, don't have full visibility into what exactly it's going to look like. And every customer is slightly different. We're seeing some customers where we've been able to keep them in terms of the total spend for the value that they're getting reasonably flat or slightly up. I'm not sure that I've seen customers going down in price, but again, it really is very customer dependent on what portions of the VMware suite they were using prior to the changes and what they're using now.”

And, yes, Converge does have customers asking to be moved off VMware, Martin said. All VMware partners are fielding those conversations, she noted. But that doesn’t mean organizations will migrate fully or at all.

“VMware is such a critical part of how customers have managed their infrastructure for such a long time, that it's not that simple,” Martin said. “Looking at what value you get from the suites, how you're using it today, what skill sets you have on your team, where there may be opportunities to diversify — those are all conversations that we're having with customers.”

We wrap up this look at VCF 5.2 and the ancillary issues that raises with a quick assessment of Broadcom’s handling of the top 2,000 VMware accounts. 

Recall that, in razing VMware’s partner program, Broadcom said it would handle the most strategic (and profitable) customers directly. That has happened but there has also been more flexibility than the chipmaker initially indicated might take place. While most of Converge’s customers fall into the commercial bucket, it did have some enterprise-level accounts that Broadcom took over, Martin said. 

However, “we've seen the strategic account lists shrink,” she said. 

The Broadcom team seems to be getting a better grasp on what legacy VMware teams think of as enterprise or strategic, she explained. Every organization has different parameters and, because of that, it appears that Broadcom is handling fewer top VMware accounts without partners than originally projected, reclassifying many of those as commercial customers.

We wrap up this look at VCF 5.2 and the ancillary issues that raises with a quick assessment of Broadcom’s handling of the top 2,000 VMware accounts. 

Recall that, in razing VMware’s partner program, Broadcom said it would handle the most strategic (and profitable) customers directly. That has happened but there has also been more flexibility than the chipmaker initially indicated might take place. While most of Converge’s customers fall into the commercial bucket, it did have some enterprise-level accounts that Broadcom took over, Martin said. 

However, “we've seen the strategic account lists shrink,” she said. 

The Broadcom team seems to be getting a better grasp on what legacy VMware teams think of as enterprise or strategic, she explained. Every organization has different parameters and, because of that, it appears that Broadcom is handling fewer top VMware accounts without partners than originally projected, reclassifying many of those as commercial customers.