VMware announced updates to its Edge Compute Stack (ECS), a move that mirrors the message of its new parent company Broadcom in providing new packaging and more integration.

VMware’s ECS is getting “underlying technology” upgrades to its hypervisor, container and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) packaging. It will also gain new features from its Software Defined Edge (SDE) division that includes the new VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator (VECO).

VMware unveiled VECO last year as a replacement for its secure access service edge (SASE) Orchestrator and targeted at helping orchestrate cloud services at the edge. It provides a unified management platform for both SASE and ECS, which is designed to allow for simplified control of edge compute, infrastructure, networking and security.

Sanjay Uppal, SVP and GM of service provider and edge at VMware, said in a press briefing at that time that the orchestrator is targeted at widely dispersed, resource constrained edge deployments that also are highly reliant on automated programmability.

“The ability to scale these infrastructures to thousands or hundreds-of-thousands is absolutely essential,” Uppal said. “These are all dispersed locations so this is why [VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator] with its full-based system is so critical.”

VECO is also a key component of ECS. That platform is the commercialization of VMware’s Project Keswick, which it unveiled in 2022. That lightweight project was designed to work on any VMware-certified hardware as an endpoint for Kubernetes-managed workloads and provide increased security for those workloads by way of a smaller attack surface.

ECS is designed to allow management of edge use cases using a simplified approach to virtual machine (VM) and container-based applications and infrastructure. This includes pull-based configuration with zero-touch provisioning to support deployments and ongoing management.

VMware will be offering two versions of this ECS update: Advanced and Enterprise.

The Advanced edition includes a core of VECO and VMware’s vSphere Foundation (VVF) with software-defined edge production support. VMware said that Advanced is targeted at “customers requiring robust edge computing capabilities, adaptable for single-node deployments on various hardware, including industrial and ruggedized PCs.” VMware added that this version will include telemetry immediately and orchestration will be added later this year.

The Enterprise edition includes the same Advanced core features with the addition of 1 tebibyte (TiB) of vSAN Enterprise storage and software-defined edge production support dedicated for use in edge deployments. VMware said that this is for “customers with more complex needs” and integrates shared storage in multi-node clusters.

More pertinent for Broadcom, the new offerings tie into VMware’s recently unveiled licensing and support structure. This includes subscriptions for 1-, 3- and 5-year terms.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan told investors during the company’s most recent earnings call that Broadcom would be focused on converting its VMware customers as they come up for renewals with deeper software services on a subscription basis. Broadcom quickly moved on those plans by killing its perpetual license program in favor of subscription licenses shortly after it closed on the VMware acquisition.