VMware: vSphere Enterprise Plus and Standard return

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In contrast to the US in-house exhibition VMware Explore US, which Broadcom organized in Las Vegas after the takeover at the end of August, the mood among the participants attending the European version of the event had stabilized somewhat, at least in terms of the feeling. The almost 5,000 participants represent the hard core of VMware users in the Europe and Middle East region. However, it is also true that many companies did not come or sent significantly fewer participants to the trade fair.

As in Las Vegas, Broadcom's CEO Hock Tan took to the stage and repeated his philosophy: roll up your sleeves, make good products instead of chasing the next trend every year. This has not always been successful for VMware in the past, as the manufacturer has not been able to extend its technology and market leadership from the VM sector to the cloud and container sector as desired. A retreat into the private sector is supposed to fix this: "The future of the enterprise is private", announced the CEO – and emphasized that it is important for companies to have full control over data, AI and the cloud. And this is only possible with an on-premises environment. Where necessary, the public cloud services can of course be accessed in order to realize load peaks and resource elasticity when required.

VeloCloud returns

In addition to the announcements already made in Las Vegas, VMware presented several new AI-driven services in Barcelona: VeloRAIN, vDefend with Intelligent Assist and fleshed out its private AI strategy based on the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

VMware had already acquired VeloCloud, a manufacturer specializing in SD-WAN, in 2017, then removed the manufacturer name from the products and renamed the products back at the beginning of 2024 – Frequent name and brand changes are the rule rather than the exception at VMware. In the market for SD-WAN technology, VMware's products in the leader category are in second place with Cisco behind top dog Fortinet, according to Gartner at –. Fresh from Explore, Sanjay Uppal, Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's VeloCloud division, presented VeloRAIN, with which Broadcom claims to have introduced an architecture for the secure and robust communication of AI services and applications across data center boundaries for the first time in the industry. VeloRAIN (Robust AI Networking) is designed to improve the security and performance of AI data traffic using AI and ML services. The manufacturer aims to achieve this by identifying encrypted data traffic that could not previously be identified and accelerated by network optimization software and assigning it to suitable QoS categories. In addition, wireless network connections should be able to benefit from a quality of service (QoS) similar to fiber optic cable thanks to AI assistance. Using DABS (Dynamic Application-Based Slicing), the VeloRAIN architecture should be able to assign new applications to the correct QoS category across different networks.

In addition to the VeloRAIN architecture, Broadcom presented new VeloCloud devices and a partner program for managed services providers in this area. The new top models VeloCloud Edge 4100 and 5100 are designed to support up to 30 and 100 Gbps throughput and up to 12,000 and 20,000 tunnels respectively. VeloCloud customers should benefit from a simplified architecture, as they will need to use fewer devices for their network and security services. If bandwidths beyond 100 Gbps are required, the appliances can also be clustered. The manufacturer also presented a new partner program called Titan, which replaces the previous partner program for VeloCloud service providers. The manufacturer also wants to offer license portability and ensure price stability – an interesting aspect, as the change in pricing is at the heart of the criticism of the takeover of VMware by Broadcom.

The VMware vDefend Distributed Firewall, previously known as the NSX Distributed Firewall, has also been enhanced with AI functions. A new feature is the GenAI feature Intelligence Assist, which is designed to assist security administrators with a natural language interface for maintaining firewall rules and interpreting alarms and responding to them automatically.

Better further development of VCF

Within its core product VMware Cloud Foundation, Broadcom has further substantiated the announcements made in the USA. Work on the upcoming version VCF 9 has picked up speed – iX spoke on site with employees of major German corporate and government customers who had taken part in the two-day pre-release program for hand-picked CTAB (Customer Technical Advisory Board) customers and were presented with features and insights into the upcoming version by the manufacturer that were still kept under wraps. Apart from the licensing and pricing issues, which are still causing annoyance, the participants were positive about the further development of the product and the improved focus that Broadcom is bringing to the development process, which was not very well coordinated before the takeover.

As expected, the exhibition associated with the in-house exhibition was much less crowded than in previous years. Of the major server manufacturers, only Lenovo was represented with its own stand and concentrated on the integration of VCF and the Private AI services on the servers developed together with VMware, which for the first time in the industry also enable the redundant operation of two Nvidia Bluefield 2 DPUs hypervisor and network acceleration cards at the same time. There was no sign of Cisco, Dell or HPE at the trade fair –. Dell and HPE in particular are currently making their own moves away from VMware. And: HPE recently acquired Morpheus Data, and the presentation of its own KVM hypervisor based on the acquisition is considered very likely.

On the keynote stage, Chris Wolf, Global Head of AI and Advanced Services, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, Broadcom, presented the latest developments in the VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, which can be booked as an add-on service to VCF. In a subsequent interview with iX, Björn Brundert, Principal Technologist at the manufacturer, was very positive about the developments in the market. With just three servers with VCF in the VI workload domain, compatible Nvidia GPUs such as A100, L40S or H100, customers can set up their own on-premises AI environment to prevent the outflow of data or unauthorized training of models. At the same time, VCF's clustering features ensure optimal utilization of expensive GPU resources with identical or higher performance than bare-metal usage, as Chris Wolf demonstrated in the keynote. According to Wolf, the outstanding performance results are possible thanks to many years of experience with optimizing the scheduler in the VMware kernel.

Further vSphere licenses

The reintroduction of the VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus and Standard licenses in the subscription model, which was announced shortly before the trade fair, went completely under the radar. Broadcom had initially abolished these editions following the takeover of VMware in order to force customers onto the larger private cloud licenses –, causing a great deal of annoyance in the German and European market. Since then, many companies that require pure compute virtualization without major add-ons have been looking for alternatives to the VMware stack –. Perhaps Broadcom would like to catch up with this trend of discontinuation, but perhaps the concession has come too late for many. The manufacturer provides a comparison of the reintroduced product editions in an updated data sheet.

Recordings of the keynote and selected presentations are available online. Whether there will be another European edition of the in-house exhibition in the future was discussed intensively among the participants present. So far, the manufacturer has only announced the date for the next event in the USA – from August 25 to 28, 2025, the VMware community will come together in Las Vegas.

(mki)