VMware Explore is happening this week in Las Vegas, NV, and this morning during the event, Broadcom (which now owns VMware) made several announcements regarding VMware offerings, from the latest version of VMware Cloud Foundation to updates to its software-defined edge portfolio.

Here is a breakdown of what has been announced:

VMware Cloud Foundation 9

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is a private cloud platform, and Broadcom says this release will help “accelerate customers’ transition from siloed IT architectures to a unified and integrated private cloud platform that lowers cost and risk.”

It includes several new features, such as a self-service cloud portal for provisioning services, reducing the number of management consoles needed down to one; VCF import for migrating existing environments into the platform; and advanced memory tiering with NVMe, which is helpful for data-intensive applications like AI, databases, and real-time analytics. 

VCF 9 also introduces support for integrated VCF multi-tenancy, native virtual private cloud (VPC) deployment, and new VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA capabilities.

Broadcom also announced the launch of VCF Advanced Services, which are ready-to-deploy solutions. The offerings include a Private Cloud Maturity Model for helping customers assess their cloud capabilities, as well as a Jumpstart Program, which features workshops to help customers review their cloud goals against the Private cloud Maturity Model. VCF Advanced Services also include VMware Cloud Foundation Certification and free digital learning and instructor-led training. 

“VMware Cloud Foundation 9 will redefine the landscape for private cloud by delivering a modern, integrated platform that will unify operations and automation to deliver a cloud experience that enables businesses to be more innovative, efficient, resilient and secure,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager of the VCF Division at Broadcom.

VMware Tanzu Platform 10

VMware Tanzu is a platform that simplifies application delivery and life cycle management by integrating the tools used by both developers and ITOps teams. 

Version 10 introduces Tanzu AI solutions, which is a suite of capabilities for building generative AI apps. It includes Spring AI for building AI apps in Java and an OpenAI-compatible API gateway. It also provides observability for GenAI to help companies visualize, test, and troubleshoot their AI apps. Tanzu AI solutions also support VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA.

This release of the platform also includes a Cloud-Foundry-like developer experience for  Kubernetes featuring an abstraction model that enables management of infrastructure at scale while maintaining consistent governance and compliance. It provides improved contextual app-to-platform visibility across Cloud Foundry foundations and Kubernetes clusters across availability zones.

In addition, VMware Tanzu Platform 10 introduces Application Advisor for Spring security, compliance audits, policy enforcement, automated CVE remediation, as well as enhanced Java buildpacks for Spring applications that result in significantly faster startup times.

Other new features include service binding for connecting apps to middleware and databases while managing credentials and auto-provisioned and hardened OSS databases and messaging. 

Together VCF 9 and VMware Tanzu Platform 10 provide air-gapped environment support, Global Server Load Balancing and Advanced Networking, and hardened VM and OSS images. 

Software-defined edge

New updates in this product portfolio will support companies’ Edge AI workloads. Broadcom announced support for Fixed Wireless Access and satellite connections in the VMware VeloCloud Edge 710, 720, and 740 SD-WAN appliances. According to the company, this enables redundant, always-on connectivity for edge devices and workloads.

VeloCloud SD-WAN points have now been integrated with Symantec points of presence in VMware VeloCloud SASE, which is a solution that was announced earlier this year following Broadcom’s acquisition of Symantec. This new integration will enable customers to incorporate more automation into their cloud access, while still prioritizing performance and security.

And finally, updates to the VMware Edge Compute Stack include zero-touch orchestration, a pull-based architecture, and monitoring for edge infrastructure and applications.

“We uniquely offer enterprises a good, better, best approach to connectivity at the edge by allowing them to tweak real-time WAN performance, gain insights from the network, and program the network,” said Sanjay Uppal, vice president and general manager for the Software-Defined Edge Division at Broadcom. “This convergence of the underlay network enables enterprises to build networks in minutes to support today’s and tomorrow’s workloads.”

VMware vDefend and VMware Avi Load Balancer

The updates to the threat detection platform VMware vDefend improve lateral threat defense by enabling the capabilities needed for protecting against GenAI threats. 

New updates include a generative AI copilot for accelerating alert triage and remediation, VCF 9 import for utilizing existing security configurations, firewall rule analysis, on-premises malware analysis, IDS/IPS support for dense or distributed VCF deployments, and rapid threat assessment for East-West Traffic.

VMware Avi Load Balancer updates are designed to “optimize load balancing for VCF and Kubernetes environments, with a focus on automation, resilience, and AI-driven operations,” Broadcom explained.

These updates include a generative AI copilot, integration with Tanzu Application Service, enhanced Gateway API support for Kubernetes, VCF 9 integration, and support for Intel QAT.