VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF9) marks a significant advancement in private cloud infrastructure, specifically designed to simplify the deployment and scaling of trusted private clouds. VCF9 empowers organizations to operate private clouds with the efficiency and scale comparable to leading public cloud services.

The Growing Importance of Private Clouds

There’s an increasing emphasis on private clouds, driven by cost considerations associated with running applications across multiple public cloud services. Private clouds offer enhanced control, governance, and compliance, including sovereign cloud capabilities vital for jurisdictional control and regulatory adherence. VMware collaborates with major hyperscalers and a vast network of cloud service providers (CSPs), including numerous certified sovereign cloud providers, to assist organizations in meeting stringent regulatory frameworks.

Key Innovations in VCF9

VCF9 introduces several pivotal innovations:

• GPU as a Service: This capability enables providers to offer sovereign AI services, facilitating the seamless migration of GPU workloads and simplifying the execution of demanding applications like PyTorch inferencing.
• Memory Tiering (vSphere): This innovation is projected to increase virtual machine density by approximately 40%, leading to substantial cost savings.
• VSAN with Enhanced Storage Architecture (ESA): Re-architected with NVMe drives, VSAN delivers predictable latencies under one millisecond, improved resilience through distributed failover, and reduced costs compared to traditional storage arrays.
• Native Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs): VCF9 natively integrates VPCs, allowing users to define virtual boundaries for applications and manage network settings such as firewalls and load balancing directly within the vCenter console.
• Native Kubernetes and Container Services: Treating both virtual machines and containers as native elements, VCF9 includes out-of-the-box management for essential Kubernetes services, streamlining the deployment and orchestration of containerized applications.

VCF9 represents a significant evolution, establishing itself not only as a robust platform for virtual machines but also as a leading solution for running and orchestrating containers with Kubernetes. It is engineered to support emerging use cases like AI workloads and to address contemporary security challenges, including ransomware.