Join us on CarahCast as Ethan Palmer and Nick Wager from Carahsoft breaks down VMware Cloud Foundation 9. Learn about the new graphical installer, unified VCF Operations for easier management, memory tiering to NVMe, GPU enhancements, vSAN deduplication, modern networking with virtual private clouds, and updated licensing. This episode is packed with insights for IT professionals looking to streamline deployments, boost performance, and maximize flexibility in their private cloud environments.
Anthony Jimenez
Welcome back to Carahcast, the podcast from Carahsoft, the trusted government IT solutions provider. Subscribe to get the latest technology updates in the public sector. I'm Anthony Jimenez, your host from the Carahsoft production team.
On behalf of VMware by Broadcom and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast. Focused on VMware Cloud Foundation 9, Ethan Palmer, Carahsoft senior pre-sale solution engineer, and Nick Wager, Carahsoft senior pre-sale solution engineer, we'll discuss VCF 9's new installer, the launch of VCF operations, and major compute upgrades like memory tiering and GPU enhancements. Broadcom is actively assisting organizations in navigating licensing transitions and overcoming obstacles.
Nick Wager
Hello ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning into our Carahcast, discussing the future of private cloud. Today on the show we have Ethan Palmer, Carahsoft senior solution architect for VMware technologies, and me, your host Nick Wager, also a senior solution architect here at Carahsoft. To jump right in, you know Ethan, recently VMware by Broadcom made VMware Cloud Foundation 9 generally available. Can you tell us a little bit about this update?
Ethan Palmer
Sure. So VMware Cloud Foundation 9 is the latest flagship release of VMware's private cloud platform, and this represents a massive leap in technology and the integration of their platform. This release includes updates to many components inside the platform, including vSphere, vCenter, VCF operations, automation, logs, vSAN, VCF networking, the replication appliance, and even the installer. This is a truly a massive release and really bringing together all of the different VMware solutions that we've talked about in the past into this consistent platform.
Nick Wager
It sounds like there's been a lot of changes and improvements. Can you, you know, just present a few of your personal favorite highlights for this release? You know, the things you're most excited about and you see folks that are most excited about?
Ethan Palmer
Yeah, sure.So right off the bat, I think it starts with the VCF installer, which was formerly called Cloud Builder, and there's been an update to this tool with a graphical user interface or GUI. You know, in the past there was a worksheet and you created a JSON file in order to deploy from. Now there's a guided installation.
They've also made converting your existing environment, bringing in existing infrastructure, what we would call a brownfield deployment, into VCF. So they added a capability in VCF 5.2 in order to be able to convert or import existing environments, where we used to not be able to do that in the past. But now they've taken away even more restrictions and they've actually made it easier for folks who already have VMware deployments to bring their environments or existing environments and infrastructure into VCF so that they can take advantage of all of the goodness of that platform.
And then one of the biggest changes was expanding the principal storage for that first management cluster or management domain. So now in addition to vSAN, there is NFS or fiber channel support, so it gives customers additional flexibility so that they can adopt a VCF and be part of that full platform, whereas they might have been a little bit handcuffed in the past.
Nick Wager
You know, and I do think that's great, right? I know in the past a lot of the restrictions have prevented folks from being able to move from, say, piecemeal VMware infrastructure towards the true integrated cloud foundation stack, you know, without having to do a full redeploy here. Can you maybe expand on that and how VMware has sort of broadened up what cloud foundation can do and how it helps folks?
Ethan Palmer
Yeah, exactly. So VMware wants to be able to meet our customers where they are and get them to a private cloud experience, right? You know, what we're seeing in this update with the SDVC manager and ARIA operations being merged into one and now being called VCF operations is we're seeing this consolidation of the number of interfaces in order to manage your fleet, what we're now calling fleet management.
It's also, operations also becomes a licensing server in order to simplify some of the licensing processes. In the past, you know, the more VMware environments you've had, the harder it was to manage license keys and figure out, you know, what you were using and how to apply these different keys. So now we've streamlined and consolidated some of that as well.
So really taking a look at what are some of the challenges that folks have had when it comes to deploying and using VMware and really trying to simplify that, consolidate that, and wrap it into this operations lifecycle management and automation wrapper that is going to allow folks to take full advantage of the platform. Extending that beyond just what used to be VCF operations and the SDVC manager, but also, you know, bringing in log data and our operations for networks data. Also building additional dashboards for security compliance to make all of that very front and center in this interface and to give administrators sort of that one view of their environment, their full stack, so that they can see what's going on and potentially what's going wrong inside their environment.
Nick Wager
That really is great. Everybody's environment is unique, but in the past, you know, everybody's got to set up their own unique deployments and integrations, and folks might have been wrangling with four or five different management interfaces to use all of the great technology that VMware had to offer, and it made it a real struggle to manage and keep track of anything. It's really good to see it all come together.
Can we maybe move to changes with the core compute virtualization platform? You know, that thing everybody is familiar with and knows well.
Ethan Palmer
This is not just an update, of course, to VCF operations and to the SDVC manager, but along with it, updates to everything that makes up the platform, right? So, you know, in the core of VCF or the core of VVF9, vSphere Foundation 9, is vSphere and vCenter, which have had their 9.0 releases as well, and in this, there have been many improvements, the largest of which, I think, for vSphere is this idea of memory tiering. So, you know, if you imagine that you have a large in-memory database, you need a lot of RAM, a lot of DDR5 RAM in order to support that, and DDR5 RAM costs a lot of money.
So, we can actually do memory tiering to NVMe inside of those hosts, and therefore, you can get extremely high density for workloads out of these hosts, and you're able to use that memory tiering in order to offset some of the costs where you would have had to buy RAM in the past. So, a really cool way to drive down some of that CapEx cost when you're buying new hardware. They've also updated the image-based patching.
So, in the past, if you work with VMware a lot, you're very familiar with vSphere Update Manager, which then became vSphere Lifecycle, and then they had this idea of baselines, and then they put out this idea of images and the way that we patch our hosts using images, and that was really a big step forward for VMware because it allowed you to update vSphere as well as the host drivers and different updates from the hardware manufacturers that you might have needed to add when you're updating. So, it allowed you to create one image to update your hosts.
Problem was, in the past, we can only support one image per cluster. So, if you had a mixed cluster where maybe you have some HP hosts, some VMs, and all of a sudden, you couldn't use images in order to patch that cluster. Now, we can support up to four different images per cluster, so you're able to patch more environments.
Again, that's kind of meeting customers where they are in terms of giving them the tools they need to be able to patch, be more consistent in that way. They've also, in that same conversation about patching, increased the amount of live patch support. So, now we can do live patching for VMkernel for the user space as well as for the NSX components.
So, you can patch more frequently and in a less disruptive way in order to, you know, sort of stay compliant to continue to make sure your environment is secure in order to prevent CVEs and different things like that inside your environment. And then, you know, one of the last updates to this kind of core virtualization platform with vSphere and vCenter is improving the way that vSphere handles GPUs. So, when we look at customers' use of GPU, we've gone a lot beyond just, oh, maybe some folks have some for virtual desktops where they need high graphics, right?
Obviously, AI is a huge conversation and folks are dabbling in AI and trying to figure out how it's going to work best for them. And so, with that, VMware has added some GPU-specific dashboards and monitoring. We've also improved the way that we can vMotion and allow DRS to balance workloads using GPUs, you know, just really extending our capabilities from a GPU perspective when it comes to being able to support those AI and machine learning workloads where customers may need them.
Nick Wager
That really is fantastic. I'm seeing a big uptick in AI conversations. Everybody's excited about it, looking at ways to use it themselves and running it in your own data centers that you're quite confident in is always a great strategy as opposed to, say, lifting and shifting everything to an alternate location to do so.
You know, and VMware is really working with customers on their strategy for that. But moving on to another really foundational technology, I hear there's some really exciting news around vSAN.
Ethan Palmer
Yeah, so vSAN, again, another huge component when it comes to VCF as well as included in BBF. We've had some really big updates. Probably what I'm the most excited about in terms of this VCF 9 update is the improvements to vSAN.
I think that when you look at what's happened with the vSAN platform over the past couple of releases with 803 and then now with 9, you're really seeing the maturity of a storage technology that really can go out there and compete with the dedicated storage vendors. So VMware with this release with 9 has added global dedupe. You know, in the past, space efficiency wasn't always the best when it came to vSAN.
And when we look at some of the global dedupe numbers that we're now getting with 4x or more consolidation ratios with that, that one terabyte of storage, raw storage that you're getting with VCF becomes an incredible amount of storage with this new global dedupe. Then when you factor in the fact that we can do vSAN to vSAN replication, we have deep snapshots with vSAN now, you can do stretch clustering, right? So you can actually have sort of a zero RPO, right?
Zero data loss and you could lose a site and recover as HA restarts on your other site with no data loss. vSAN is a serious storage contender now. And they've also added in 9 dedicated vSAN kernel ports so we can segment out vSAN traffic, speeding up operations and isolating it from the rest of the network.
So again, I'm the most excited, I think, about the vSAN updates with this. It's a true storage competitor now and definitely something that folks should be really considering when they're doing hardware refreshes and things like that.
Nick Wager
Yeah, and I would definitely agree. But we've touched on the compute side, just hit storage, let's hit the trifecta here and focus a little more on the networking side, you know, what's new on that side of the house.
Ethan Palmer
Yeah, so again everything got sort of touched in this update. So in the VCF networking, the overlay is no different. So in terms of what's really changed with the VCF networking is bringing this idea of tenancy or VPCs, right?
So, you know, in the public cloud, you do isolation through this idea of a virtual private cloud. And VMware is bringing that to the on-prem world, this idea of logically isolated tenancy. So VMware has introduced tenancy with role-based access control and new capabilities within NSX, which is now, you know, the VCF networking platform.
So they've added some new gateways. So they have a multi-tiered gateway model, which allows administrators to make independent connectivity decisions. So inside of VCF networking, they're called projects.
So each tenant is effectively a project. So you can have a project administrator, which would manage a transit gateway, and then that connects a project to the external network. And then there's a VPC admin who can manage the VPC gateways.
So those would be the subnets within each virtual private cloud. And these can be consumed by VCF automation, which is, you know, how we consume this modern cloud platform. We do that in order to deploy workloads in the right place with the right permissions, the right policies, and the right network every time in a scalable fashion, right?
So what we've done with this NSX release is really focused on how large-scale customers consuming networks and make it as cloud-like as possible in order to deliver what customers need in order to really get the speed and scale that they would have in a public cloud, but we're doing it inside the private cloud with that controllable cost model on-prem with the on-prem hardware.
Nick Wager
Definitely is a whole lot of great innovations on the software-defined data center side, you know, a whole new way of thinking about using virtualization on-premise. You know, earlier on you did mention that VCF operations is now the licensing server. Can you touch on, you know, what might have changed regarding how licensing works and entitlement to services?
Ethan Palmer
Yeah, of course. So we can't talk about the VCF9 release without discussing some of the changes to how the solution is licensed, and I sort of alluded to this earlier. VMware is moving away from the license key, that 25-character long key that you used to apply to your vCenter and other specific solutions inside the platform, to a license file, and that license file will carry information about your entitlement and the period of performance inside of that file, and then you will put that file into VCF operations.
VCF operations does become a required component as it holds that license file, and it gives the entitlement to the vCenter, which then will flow the licensing down to the hosts. And then along with this license file, VMware wants to understand the usage that you have. So there is a mandatory compliance reporting every 180 days where the hosts in the vCenter need to check in with VCF operations, and you can download a usage report and upload it to the file, or if you have a connected VCF operations deployment, then that can automatically communicate the usage, but you still will have to manually click to download the new license file and apply it and let that flow out to your vCenters and your hosts and things like that. I also wanted to mention that there are some restrictions to who is entitled to version 9.
So in order to be entitled to version 9, you must have a new subscription-based entitlement to VCF or VVF at this time, and then there are a few exceptions for core-based subscriptions like vCloud Suite and Cloud Paks. And again, because VCF operations is a required component, only subscriptions that include operations are entitled to version 9. So just wanted to make that clear.
Nick Wager
This is all fantastic information to know. Ethan, I want to thank you for your time today. I really do appreciate it, and I hope our listeners do too.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to your team here at Carahsoft. Ethan and I would be happy to assist and answer any questions that you may have around VCF and VVF version 9. Thank you everyone for joining us today.
Please be on the lookout for more episodes on VMware Cloud Foundation from your Carahsoft team.
Anthony Jimenez
Thanks for listening, and thank you to our guests Ethan Palmer and Nick Wager. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to Carahcast, and be sure to listen to our other discussions. If you'd like more information on how VMware by Broadcom can assist your organization, please visit www.Carahsoft.com or email us at VMwarePartnerTeam@Carahsoft.com.Thanks again for listening, and have a great day.