Broadcom and VMware: No more Shiny Objects!

At the first in-house exhibition since the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom showed at Explore where the journey for VMware customers and partners is heading. Unlike in the past, there will no longer be "Shiny Objects" every year. This refers to the Shiny Object Syndrome: a term from psychology for the phenomenon of being distracted by new and trendy ideas until a newer idea distracts you and you forget the previous one. This has often been the case in the past, but now a different wind is blowing at private cloud specialist VMware, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan revealed in his short five-minute guest appearance in the Explore keynote: they are "serious business people" who want to solve problems and fun is not necessarily the main focus. The applause for the controversial Broadcom CEO was limited, as was the enthusiasm of the attendees for the event as a whole. There were reportedly around 5000 attendees, a negative attendance record, as the VMware in-house exhibition had already attracted up to 25,000 participants to Las Vegas in the past.

Popularity with customers and partners is one thing, business success is of course another. Here, the Broadcom CEO can point to successes and there are certainly advocates for his new course at VMware. Everything was too chaotic, there were too many products that were not perfectly integrated with each other due to departmental thinking and uncontrolled growth. Since the takeover, Hock Tan has tidied up – four core products still exist, he has trimmed the partner landscape and reduced the workforce in ongoing waves of redundancies.

In his direct manner, Hock Tan outlined VMware's overarching mission in the keynote: "Here's my view of things – it's quite simple – the future of corporate IT – your company – is not in the public cloud, but in the private cloud, in a private AI, in your privately accessible data. It's about staying on prem and retaining control. Of course, you can still use the public cloud to absorb peak workloads. But in the hybrid IT world, the private cloud is now the critical platform to drive your business and innovation – and to make it all happen, we need to put in some work."

What VCF 9 brings

In order to realize this vision, the manufacturer has done a lot since the takeover and was able to unveil some technical innovations at the event. Since the takeover, VMware has been focusing on the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), which has been upgraded to the flagship and core product and is intended to offer companies everything they need to operate a private cloud. At the event, the manufacturer has now announced an upcoming version 9 of VCF, which should also eliminate the proliferation of version numbers. The current version is VCF 5.2, which in turn consists of vSphere 8 with NSX and vSAN and several other products from the VMware portfolio. Criticism to date has been that, due to the different development histories of the combined products, not everything was smoothly coordinated – different GUIs, different and non-integrated tagging functions in the individual components, to name just a few examples. This is now set to change with the new VCF 9 version – VMware is positioning it as a "Unified Platform" or "A Smarter Way to Cloud" in order to deliver a modern, secure infrastructure with a "Cloud Experience" for administrators and developers in the company as an alternative to expensive public clouds. To this end, Hock Tan announced considerable investments in research and development, which will lead to improvements in VCF 9 and future versions.

In an interview with iX, Björn Brundert, VMware Principal Technologist at Broadcom, summarized the role of VCF: "VMware Cloud Foundation provides the technical foundation for the private cloud at VMware. Built-in services include the operation of virtual machines and Kubernetes-orchestrated containers, network and storage services as well as database management. Further advanced services to be licensed in addition to VCF will then add functions for other areas such as private AI, disaster recovery, advanced security functions (vDefend), load balancing and edge orchestration."

VCF 9 is still based on vSphere as well as the HCI storage software vSAN and NSX as network virtualization. The automation and operational monitoring comes from the previous components of the Aria product line (previously vRealize), while the developer tools for operating containers come from the Tanzu product group. Additional fee-based services such as Load Balancer (from the AVI acquisition some time ago), Data Services and Private AI (in collaboration with Nvidia and Intel) are intended to round off the package. What is missing for a private cloud, however, is a native S3-compatible object storage service. VMware currently recommends either an integration with Minio or customers rely on professional S3-compatible services DataCore Swarm – VMware should follow up on this in the future.

Further updates

The other features announced for the upcoming VCF 9 make good reading overall: VMware wants to anchor multi-tenancy directly in the product – Until now, the VMware Cloud Director was required for this. In future, native VPCs in vCenter and VCF Automation will provide virtual networks with firewalling and load balancing functions, and VMware also wants to simplify the import of existing topologies into brownfield environments. The most impressive technical feature is one that is reminiscent of innovations from the early days of VMware: Advanced Memory Tiering for NVMe, currently available as a Tech Preview, makes it possible to use memory from NVMe-based storage devices as a main memory extension. VMware employee William Lam provides details on the configuration in his blog. It remains to be seen how long the NVMe devices will last under intensive operation – The new function is definitely interesting from a technical perspective.

According to Björn Brundert, VMware Principal Technologist at Broadcom, the manufacturer is not leaving customers who want to join Broadcom on the path to the VCF-based private cloud alone in this transition: "There are many paths to the private cloud and we have launched a new Cloud Maturity Program to help customers with this process." The manufacturer lists information on the new Private Cloud Maturity Model.

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