VMware presents Cloud Foundation

With the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), VMware laid out the vision for the architecture of the hybrid cloud. In an SDDC, compute, storage, and networking services are decoupled from underlying hardware infrastructure and abstracted into logical pools of resources that can be more flexibly provisioned and managed. VMware wants to bring customers a standardized SDDC environment with VMware Cloud Foundation.

VMware Cloud Foundation is the next step and greatly simplifies private and hybrid cloud development. It is a unified software-defined data center platform that integrates VMware compute, storage, and network virtualization and automates the installation, update, and lifecycle management of private cloud software. Cloud Foundation is also available ‘as-a-service’, meaning customers can get the full power of the SDDC in a hybrid cloud environment. Cloud Foundation allows companies to enable their business to achieve the operational and cost efficiency of web-scale cloud service providers.

VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Cloud Foundation represents another step forward in the era of agility. VMware Cloud Foundation is a next-generation hyper-converged infrastructure for building private clouds that for the first time combines VMware’s highly scalable hyper-converged software (VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN) with the world’s leading network virtualization platform, NSX. Cloud Foundation provides a consistent multi-cloud IaaS that is simple to deploy, operate, and maintain, and gives applications a consistent, scalable and highly available infrastructure services, regardless of where they run.

A big part of the SDDC Manager is its automation capabilities. It automates storage configuration, cluster configuration, and virtual and physical network configuration as well. The idea is that this would simplify SDDC deployment and free cloud admins up to focus on areas outside of installation.

Cloud Foundation’s management component is the SDDC Manager, which is a tool for cloud admin to build and maintain the cloud. The SDDC manager is focused on day zero to day two operations, and can help users build out a cloud in a few hours. The VMware Cloud Foundation will integrate with VMware vRealize Suite, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers, VMware Integrated OpenStack, and VMware Horizon.

VMware also announced at VMworld 2016 that Cloud Foundation is not just available in private data centers, but as a service from a major public clouds with our announced partnership with IBM Cloud. This is significant because it means you can run the same scalable cloud infrastructure that IBM is running in its own cloud data centers. No other hyper-converged infrastructure vendor can make that claim.

Many organizations see value in this solution because it frees time to focus on business differentiators, rather than on automated and programmatic infrastructure. VMware Cloud Foundation is well-suited for practically any workload, from enterprise applications to cloud-native applications to specialized workloads such as virtual desktops. Because it’s a multi-cloud solution, you can be assured of the same operational consistency regardless of where an application runs. This allows IT teams to offer a common IaaS, and gives developers the flexibility to layer whatever application platform or PaaS that suits their needs right on top. There isn’t another multi-PaaS, multi-cloud IaaS platform on the market today.

Cloud Foundation’s benefits don’t stop at the initial deployment, either, with automated lifecycle management, patching and upgrades that extend from the infrastructure to the management components. This truly allows you to spend your time where it matters most: on business-differentiating innovation.

Cloud Foundation will be available in the third quarter of 2016.