Broadcom released the first “major” update to VMware’s flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform since it’s now six-month-old acquisition closed, touting an easier path for customers to deploy and manage their cloud infrastructure.

The VCF 5.2 platform gains a new import function that allows existing vSphere and vSAN storage environments to integrate into VCF. This allows users to manage those environments from a centralized VCF control.

The VCF update also includes a new edge platform that provides an optimized VCF configuration for edge use cases. This is designed to ease management of infrastructure in edge environments.

Prashanth Shenoy, VP of cloud platform, infrastructure and solutions marketing at VMware, said in a press briefing that this edge move is important as that is “where a lot of data processing and data analytics is happening.”

“We will we have a new VCF edge offer with highly reduced costs and right sized for the edge infrastructure that we are bringing to the market so that our customers can gain all this benefit, but deployed at the scale and the component and features that they require at the edge,” Shenoy said of the new service.

That edge update come just a week after VMware updated its Edge Compute Stack (ECS) with a handful of new features. These include zero-touch orchestration for the VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator (VECO); a pull-based architecture for ECS hosts to ease scaling; fleet management to help with large-scale edge infrastructure deployments; single-node deployments for resource constrained environments; the ability to de-couple management and the control plane; new monitoring; and automated updates.

That last feature ties into Broadcom’s move earlier this year to align the availability of its ECS platform with the licensing changes it has made to all of VMware’s products.

VCF unleashes Tanzu Kubernetes

The updated VCF now offers VMware’s Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) product as an independent service. Shenoy said this allows the embedded Kubernetes runtime to be “independently upgraded from the rest of the platform, so that you have that flexibility of when to get the latest and greatest from the Kubernetes runtime for their modern application independent of ESXi and other vCenter capabilities.”

“In the previous world they were not quite aligned to our existing vCenter updates and the vSphere release cycles that we have,” Shenoy said. “So what we have done is make sure that the TKG service can be aligned more with the upstream Kubernetes update so they can get the latest and greatest features independent of their vSphere release cycle.”

That Tanzu move follows past comments from Broadcom executives on plans to continue investing in the cloud-native platform that the vendor claims is used in thousands of Kubernetes environments to manage billions of dollars in cloud spending and exabytes of customer data.

“We have millions of apps today running on Tanzu platform – not merely packaged apps, but custom apps [and] mission critical apps across various industries,” Purnima Padmanabhan, VP and GM of Broadcom’s Tanzu Division, previously said of that platform.

VMware security updates

VCF also gained live-patching for the ESXi bare metal hypervisor, which allows critical patches to be implemented without needing a maintenance window. VCF can also apply new updates when a new iteration is implemented, which can reduce downtime and streamline patch management.

There is also a new vSAN Data Protection offer that can help IT teams protect and recover contents of a virtual machine (VM) that has been deleted or hit by a ransomware attack; a vDefend lateral security feature that can increase scaling of gateway firewalls, integration of security information and event management (SIEM), and on-premises network detection and response (NDR) for threat triaging; and new integration of VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) manager with its Avi load balancer for easier Avi management.

VMware’s vSphere virtualized platform also gained similar ESXi live-patching abilities and new dual data processing unit (DPU) support to protect against DPU failure and allow for a doubling in offload capacity per host.

The rash of updates follow on a minor VCF update earlier this year when the 5.1 iteration that was announced just before Broadcom’s acquisition closed hit a 5.1.1 mark. That small update included availability of the VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, which was an add-on to VCF, and the now ubiquitous changes to VMware licensing.

Shenoy explained that the update combined VCF as the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) stack, capabilities built on vSphere to better support generative artificial intelligence (genAI) and broader AI, and the Nvidia AI enterprise software stack. This allows enterprises to run large language models (LLMs) in a private data center.

Overall, the latest VCF updates highlight the ongoing push by Broadcom to focus VMware customers to the VCF product. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan had previously stated that VCF “is our platform for innovation going forward. It’s the solution that will help us address the business outcomes our customers have expressed to me directly as their most critical priorities.”