Unlock the secrets to optimizing your private cloud with insights from Himanshu at Broadcom. Join us for an in-depth discussion as we delve into the transformative advancements in VMware vSphere Foundation. Himanshu sheds light on how Broadcom's streamlined portfolio post-acquisition focuses on boosting operational efficiency, performance, and security, specifically for small to medium enterprises. Learn about the enhancements that make vSphere Foundation a perfect fit for traditional and modern workloads, including Kubernetes and containers, and see how it stands apart from VMware Cloud Foundation, which is designed for more extensive private cloud deployments.
Explore the seamless deployment options that make VMware vSphere Foundation a game-changer in enhancing security and operational simplicity. Discover the advantages of multi-factor authentication, third-party identity provider support, and the seamless integration with your existing IT infrastructure. Himanshu provides real-world examples like disaster recovery and ransomware defense through the VMware Live Recovery (VLR) add-on, emphasizing the importance of adaptable solutions. Don’t miss Hamanshu’s insights on the successful adoption of vSphere Foundation and how it continues to evolve to meet customer needs.
Unlock the secrets to optimizing your private cloud with insights from Himanshu at Broadcom. Join us for an in-depth discussion as we delve into the transformative advancements in VMware vSphere Foundation. Himanshu sheds light on how Broadcom's streamlined portfolio post-acquisition focuses on boosting operational efficiency, performance, and security, specifically for small to medium enterprises. Learn about the enhancements that make vSphere Foundation a perfect fit for traditional and modern workloads, including Kubernetes and containers, and see how it stands apart from VMware Cloud Foundation, which is designed for more extensive private cloud deployments.
Explore the seamless deployment options that make VMware vSphere Foundation a game-changer in enhancing security and operational simplicity. Discover the advantages of multi-factor authentication, third-party identity provider support, and the seamless integration with your existing IT infrastructure. Himanshu provides real-world examples like disaster recovery and ransomware defense through the VMware Live Recovery (VLR) add-on, emphasizing the importance of adaptable solutions. Don’t miss Hamanshu’s insights on the successful adoption of vSphere Foundation and how it continues to evolve to meet customer needs.
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Evan Kirstel:
Hey everybody, exciting update today from Broadcom around vSphere Foundation with an expert within Broadcom, Hamanshu. How are you Doing well, Evan? How are you? I'm doing well. You guys are having a busy summer and this is a busy week. Lots of updates. Before that, maybe introduce yourself and your team.
Himanshu Singh:
Before that, maybe introduce yourself and your team Absolutely. So. I am part of the product marketing organization here at Broadcom, specifically in the VMware Cloud Foundation division, and my team focuses on our compute offerings, so vSphere and then related offerings as well as AI. So that's kind of the area.
Evan Kirstel:
I've been focused on Fantastic. I have so many questions lined up. Maybe we'll start with some basics. Maybe introduce vSphere Foundation from Broadcom. Give us an overview, a kind of 30,000-foot view, of the product and some of the key features, if you would.
Himanshu Singh:
Yeah. So vSphere Foundation is a very foundational product. It's a very foundational product. It's a very foundational offering. If you look at you know how, post-acquisition, we have done this massive simplification of our portfolio and really, really focused on the private cloud space right through two key offerings. So VMware vSphere Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation right.
Himanshu Singh:
So vSphere Foundation is all about taking the customer's kind of you know vSphere-based environment and really focusing on optimization. That's the like, the basic, paramount kind of you know benefit or purpose of the offering in this particular case, right, and what that typically means is we focus on a few key areas. We want to make sure that we're really, really focused on delivering operational efficiency. So if you think about kind of core vSphere, it's been all about back in the day going from physical to virtual, like you know, getting customers the most bang for their buck, you know, making sure that we are providing highest utilization of their underlying resources, they're getting all the ROI from their investments. And really, vsphere Foundation takes it to that next level by adding some of the ops management capabilities that we have and integrating that into core vSphere and making sure that we're really, really taking the operational efficiency thing and boosting it up and taking it to the next level.
Himanshu Singh:
The other key area we talk about is making sure that we are providing a platform that is all about the different types of workload that customers are looking to implement, whether it is traditional virtual machine-based workloads or some of the newer workloads that require Kubernetes, clusters and containers, et cetera and making sure that the entire experience is the same, no matter how you're managing things.
Himanshu Singh:
Basically, we also have a lot of key capabilities in terms of providing the right performance for the workloads that they require, and then, of course, round that out by talking about just security as a key aspect. I mean, it's been a fundamental pillar of what WeSphere delivers to enterprises and has been delivering for all these years, and WeSphere Foundation again takes that to that next level by adding a lot more security capabilities and making sure that we're focused on compliance and regulatory matters, et cetera as well. So, overall, very, very mass appeal type of offering, and it just makes sense for most customers unless they have a really, really small environment for them to be able to really take their core vSphere and look at vSphere Foundation that we introduced back in December 2023. It's one of those things where it just makes sense. You don't need to spend too much time. It's not a complicated value prop, it's basics, it's fundamentals, it just makes sense to you know, adopt it and kind of run it.
Evan Kirstel:
Fantastic and maybe compare and contrast VCR's foundation with VMware Cloud Foundation, what many of us were familiar with, maybe what scenarios sound ideal for vSphere Foundation.
Himanshu Singh:
So vSphere Foundation, I think, is a lot more focused towards enterprises with, I would say, small to medium environments, distributed but not massive.
Himanshu Singh:
As we get into VMware Cloud Foundation, you're looking at the full stack.
Himanshu Singh:
You're looking at a full private cloud deployment in that particular case, with all the resiliency benefits and all the integration of various components coming together to deliver value together as an overall integrated solution.
Himanshu Singh:
So the fundamental difference is like if customers are looking for, hey, I need to basically modernize my private cloud overall and all the different things that come with it, vmware Cloud Foundation is the one that makes sense. And if you're looking at, hey, I'm running a solid virtualized environment and I want to take it to that next level, I really want to get the most bang for my buck. I want to optimize things, I want to be super efficient in how I'm running and making sure that I have the best compute platform the world has to offer today. I'll admit to being biased, but I'll hold my stance on that, and that's what vSphere Foundation is all about. It's pretty simple. That was kind of the idea with how, when we introduced these two SKUs, to make it uncomplicated and to make it really obvious for customers to pick and choose between what's the right path for them, compared to before, when we had a lot of different offerings and so many permutations and combinations.
Evan Kirstel:
Got it Very helpful and talk a little bit about deployment and scalability. What are the different deployment options for vSphere Foundation? And talk about scalability. We're seeing a lot of use cases in massive scale mode and Gen AI and AI, private AI and beyond. How do I scale it?
Himanshu Singh:
Yeah. So the good thing with the vSphere Foundation is it's still your good old vSphere, right, and vSphere has been innovating and has been at the leading edge of technology, making sure that we are meeting the needs of the customers today and tomorrow. So, from a scale perspective, from a support for, for example, dpus, gpus et cetera, to give that performance boost that new workloads really require, vsphere has been innovating and delivering on that. Now you get the power of that both in VMware vSphere Foundation and in Cloud Foundation. Of course you want to do just on the AI piece. I just want to call that out. If customers are looking to do large language models, they want to do that kind of level of investment and they're looking for that VMware Cloud Foundation with the add-on of our private AI offering, which is, in fact, the VMware private AI with NVIDIA offering, that would be the right way to go. And if customers are looking to run traditional AI workloads, ml workloads, smaller language models, more of a DIY kind of a situation, then I would say, yeah, they can absolutely run it on vSphere Foundation as well, because core vSphere is, you know, still supports the level of scale that you need organizations to be able to kind of you know, do you can have, you know, large distributed environments, multi-v-centered, you know, environments. Of course, in the context of VCF it's going to be much, much easier to manage because of the overlay of the SDDC manager. But you can absolutely do that in the context of, you know, vsphere Foundation as well, you know, because vSphere core is still going to be able to support up to, for example, 16 or 32 kind of vGPU environments with DRS and vMotion supporting all that stuff.
Himanshu Singh:
If you're looking for kind of modern workloads at scale as well same idea there as well, as I was mentioning earlier If you're looking for kind of a large footprint with Kubernetes, cluster management, you can kind of do all that as well. But again, you know, coming back to the scale aspect and the optimization angle, the idea is that, hey, if you have an environment today that's, you know, a typical kind of medium-sized environment in fact a while ago we should kind of talk about hey, if you have more than 50 virtual machines, you can definitely benefit from adding this kind of ops management capability on top of your core vSphere. And so that still rings true today. If you're looking like 50-plus kind of workload, 50-plus virtual machines running, and you have that kind of an environment. It's just absolutely going to make sense. And again, vsphere sets the standard for scale from a compute virtualization perspective in the industry, so we support any kind of scale that customers can dream up at this point in time. So no issues there at all.
Evan Kirstel:
Fantastic approach and most customers are moving beyond the notion of basic virtualization. They're looking at true modernization. Maybe elaborate around that and what it means for vSphere Foundation, you know refreshing and modernizing their entire environment.
Himanshu Singh:
Yeah, I mean vSphere has served customers, you know, very well, over the past 20, 25 years and you know, as I mentioned earlier, we've kept up with technology. We've made sure that we're at the breeding edge. We're providing customers what they need today and tomorrow and in that context a vSphere foundation brings all the latest capabilities of kind of core vSphere. So in fact, today we announced vSphere 8, update 3. We actually also announced vSphere Foundation 5.2. And all the newer capabilities are available through vSphere Foundation et cetera as well.
Himanshu Singh:
The key piece and, as I mentioned right in the beginning, one of the key pieces was around how do we make sure that we're providing customers an environment where, no matter what type of deployment they're looking for, how they're looking to modernize either to modernize their existing applications or build and deploy new, modern applications leveraging Kubernetes, clusters, leveraging containers, et cetera that you're able to do that in the same way, just like you've been running kind of vSphere and deploying virtual machines in the past.
Himanshu Singh:
In fact, a few years ago we had a massive kind of replatforming effort with vSphere where we integrated Kubernetes right into the heart of vSphere, which basically meant that you know, you're now able to leverage kind of Kubernetes to manage both your virtual machines as well as your container environment. It's just one way to do it all and that kind of you know that brings, like the operational consistency, operational simplicity that pays dividends on an ongoing basis, day in and day out. Because, at the end of the day, what you want is to make sure that you know you're able to support these modern workloads, you're able to support the needs of your you know internal customers and your line outlines of business, but not at the cost of becoming more inefficient and having different silos to manage, etc. If you're able to do all that, it's just the same way. It's just so much more efficient, it's easier to run, it's easier to manage, it's easier to troubleshoot etc as well.
Evan Kirstel:
Yeah, you mentioned ease of use and management. Those are increasingly important to customers. Maybe talk about what management tools are included and the user experience. What are the ambitions and goals there with vSphere Foundation?
Himanshu Singh:
Yeah, so what vSphere Foundation does is it takes kind of core vSphere Enterprise plus capabilities that we had and it adds on top is vRealize Operations, which has been kind of our operations capability. We used to call it vRealize Operations, which has been our operations capability. We used to call it vRealize Operations. At this point it's ARIA Operations. Also the ARIA Operations for logs capability. Back in the day this used to be called Log Insight.
Himanshu Singh:
The idea here is to take the core virtualization capability, connect vReal, realize operations, the login site capabilities, onto the vCenter and then be able to have a lot better experience.
Himanshu Singh:
There's a new console experience that we're bringing now that's going to be available to customers with this release, as once they can adopt and download and adopt it, which is going to basically be like one-stop shop to be able to manage everything look at your entire environment, entire footprint in one place. Be able to manage, you know, from all the way, from kind of deployment, provisioning, troubleshooting, license management, certificate management, all that kind of in one easy way, in one consistent way as well, so that I think the whole idea of operational simplicity and efficiency is just. You know, we keep chipping at it with every new release and taking things to the next level and how we can make it a simple experience for customers to be here so that they can get things done without having to spend the amount of time that they used to before, and so there's a bunch of new stuff that is coming up in this release, but lots of exciting news to share with customers on that as well.
Evan Kirstel:
Fantastic. You mentioned security, and the whole industry now is doubling down on security. Tell us about security features that might be integrated into vSphere Foundation and what's your best practice there.
Himanshu Singh:
Yeah, so security has been kind of a cornerstone of what we've been delivering with vSphere for the longest time, and one of the things we kind of talk about is today, especially today, because security threats and cyber threats and ransomware and those kind of things are such a big challenge for organizations and it's so prevalent right now that having a platform and having a compute virtualization layer that is fundamentally secure and thinks of security in every capability is very, very important right. So we talk about essentially every feature is a security feature, because if it's not secure, then you know you've got problems. It doesn't matter what functionality you're trying to deliver. In this case, right Now, one of the you know key things has been about, for example, like data encryption, etc. We've been delivering that in the past as well Data encryption both at rest and in motion, and that's critical, in fact, as we integrate with things like vSAN from a storage perspective, the storage encrypted vMotion. That helps with that as well when we're migrating data and those things as well.
Himanshu Singh:
On top of that, some of the recent things I would add in terms of security would be around more of the multi-factor authentication, being able to support a lot of the third-party identity providers as well, so that customers don't have to, for example, store their credentials in vCenter.
Himanshu Singh:
They can use one solution for their entire environment and kind of disassociate that with the whole vSphere. So one, of course. It makes things simpler, just much easier to manage, more secure that way, fewer places where things can kind of break down, for example, and at the same time it just makes sure that if you're looking at maybe from an audit perspective as well, it's just much easier, you know, for customers to go through. You know that kind of things as well. Some of the newer things that we're introducing around security just in this newer release is also around like single sign-on across all the different components of you know, visa Foundation. So it's one shot and you're good to go. I think I mentioned earlier on unified licensing, certificate management etc as well. Just the key idea there is it's about making sure security is part of every capability and also making sure that when we think about security we are also thinking about operational simplicity and just making it easier to be more secure.
Evan Kirstel:
Fantastic approach, well done. So the enterprise is such a complex landscape these days, as you know better than I Maybe. Talk about integrating with existing solutions, whether it's vSphere Foundation, with existing or other VMware products or even existing IT architectures. What are your thoughts on that? What?
Himanshu Singh:
are your thoughts on that?
Himanshu Singh:
So the good thing there is you know, vsphere has been such a universal and ubiquitous offering that if you look at the industry today, it's you know it's kind of, it is the default if you're looking at any kind of on-premises environment, especially right Of course, even in hyperscaler-based environments, you know customers are leveraging VMware Cloud. Customers can actually deploy VMware Cloud Foundation, you know, in any kind of environment, whether it is a hyperscaler or a CSP or their on-premises offerings. And again, it's all about kind of leveraging that core vSphere. You know strata essentially right. So in terms of integration, in terms of ecosystem, for example, I would say you know vSphere and then vSphere Foundation of course offers the widest array of choices. You've got the broadest support available, the goodness of vSphere and all the work that's been done by not just VMware but all our partners over the past decades to make sure that they are building solutions, that they work with vSphere and Vista Foundation and that they are enhancing the value that we're able to provide and really meet additional needs for our customers. So from that perspective, you know there is no difference meet additional needs for our customers. So from that perspective there is no difference or there's no change when it comes to kind of things that work with Core vSphere versus vSphere Foundation. So that's a good thing when it comes to integration with existing VMware offerings, right? So if you look at different kind of components so we do you know we used to have a lot more granular set of offerings. Now we are focused on kind of Visa Foundation or VVF, and then Cloud Foundation or VCF, essentially as two kind of main things.
Himanshu Singh:
But what we have also done in addition is that we've realized that there are these kind of niche, important use cases that customers have that need to be addressed. So one of the big big ones is around disaster recovery, ransomware defense, for example and so what we've done now is we've provided our VMware live recovery offering, vlr, that is available as an add-on on top of Vista Foundation, so customers can actually look at their virtualized environment, their on-prem environment, in addition to just being able to focus on optimization and operation efficiency and security. They can really take that to the next level, have a proper disaster recovery strategy, a disaster recovery available as a service, in this particular case, then, also probably becoming more and more prevalent at this point in time, because I think one of the stats we heard recently was that as much as 70 plus percent organizations have had some sort of like ransomware attack in the past year or so, which is a staggering, staggering number if you kind of think about it. And so we are making sure that through the VLR offering, we're making available the ransomware defense capabilities as well, ransomware recovery capabilities as well, for our customers who are running vSphere Foundation. So in addition to that, there's more add-ons that we're looking to continually assess and introduce. So of course we can add vSAN on top of vSphere Foundation as well.
Himanshu Singh:
Assess and introduce. So of course we can add vSAN on top of vSphere Foundation as well. If you want to, you know, convert your kind of vSphere-based environment into more of a hyper-converged infrastructure. So you can do that too. And then there's additional capabilities that we're looking to as well. So, but you also want to be careful that we, you know, keep this small, nimble solution. If customers are looking for the full stack, hey, we have VCF available. You don't need to take VVF and add a bunch of piecemeal things on top of it. There's a couple of key use cases that we really want to make it a big available. But as customers grow beyond that, vmware Cloud Foundation then becomes a lot more interesting and a lot more kind of applicable there as well. So we just want to make sure that this offering stays kind of focused and really looking at specific kind of needs that customers have.
Evan Kirstel:
Fantastic. Speaking of customers. They tend to be notoriously private when it comes to deployments, but any early success stories or implementations you can highlight at this point, or should we check back? Yeah?
Himanshu Singh:
so I mean, we introduced Visa Foundation in December and of course we've got, you know, as you would expect for something, this fundamental offering had fantastic customer response and adoption overall. The good thing is that the use case here is something that we've been talking to customers even earlier. What we used to talk about is to take Core vSphere and add VDL as operations on top of it. In fact, that's been a use case that's been very, very successful over time. In fact, back in the, a use case that's been very, very successful over time. In fact, back in the day, maybe a few years ago, we had an offering called Bistro with Operations Management, which was, I would say, almost at the level of what Bistro Foundation delivers now, but a more restricted set of capabilities, and it was very successful as well.
Himanshu Singh:
And so customers realize this use case. It's a very fundamental kind of capability and so we've had fantastic success in this particular case for customers to be adopting. What I would say is, even though this is such a kind of a mass appeal type of offering, it's difficult to highlight one or two kind of a mass appeal type of offering. It's, you know, difficult to highlight like one or two kind of key customers. But some of the things that customers have talked about in terms of, you know, fundamental kind of benefits that we're seeing based on this adoption, One is really looking at being able to almost eliminate downtime right.
Himanshu Singh:
Or specifically kind of you know looking at unplanned versus planned separately almost eliminate downtime, right. Or specifically kind of you know looking at unplanned versus planned separately in this case, right. So from an unplanned downtime perspective, you know being able to almost eliminate that and really really run a tight ship where things are running smoothly. You have a lot of you know, early warnings because of the V-Realize operations capability, wherein if there's something is vulnerable, you have an early heads up and you can actually address that before anything actually fails. There's also capabilities being brought in today now where things like vSphere can ESXi live patching, which also eliminates the need for any downtime, for example. So that's kind of one area just from a downtime perspective.
Himanshu Singh:
The other thing we've heard from customers back is that typically, if you look at just from an operational efficiency perspective, they're looking at anything in the range of 75% to 80% of savings just because of some of those operational efficiency, not just improving utilization but in addition, we're looking at the time spent by IT admins on managing, on troubleshooting, because you're able to now get a lot more information in an easily consumable way and so you're spending significantly less amount of time figuring out the problem and you have a lot more guidance available to you so you're able to very quickly act on it, and so, in terms of time spent by admins trying to solve a problem, there's a massive, massive kind of decline. So some of those things are very consistent themes that we're hearing back from customers as they adopt Wister Foundation.
Evan Kirstel:
Wow, that is a mic drop moment, very impressive. What about you personally? What are you looking forward to over the next two, three months as we head into summer? Looks like you have a lot on your plate, to say the least. What's on the agenda?
Himanshu Singh:
Yeah, we've got lots of exciting things coming up.
Himanshu Singh:
I mean, as you said in the beginning, we've had a busy summer.
Himanshu Singh:
We're definitely looking forward to talking more about the new release that literally we just announced Visa Foundation 5.2, and bringing that to customers, talking to customers more about the benefits of that and making sure that we are helping customers adopt that as quickly as possible.
Himanshu Singh:
As we look forward, we've got VMware Explorer coming up in August, so that's something where, as you can expect, we'll have news to share, We'll have updates et cetera as well, and that's an opportunity for customers to come and connect with us in person and not just be able to get the information about some of the latest capabilities, et cetera, but also be able to share back key challenges that they might be having one-to-many or one-to-one type of situations where we learn from newer challenges or newer needs customers might have, and then be able to kind of take that back to the team and so that we can incorporate that in key offerings.
Himanshu Singh:
One of the other things I want to you know we can probably talk about some of the day is, again, private AI, so that's another thing that my team does right. So that's another one that we're very, very excitedly looking forward to explore as well, to talk about some of the new stuff that's coming there and be able to talk more about some of the fantastic customer adoption that we're seeing and really the core value prop of private AI that's resonating in the markets. I think those two areas are what I'm personally super excited about.
Evan Kirstel:
Wow, that is fascinating. I can't wait to hear more Congratulations on all the success and the hard work paying off, and we'll talk soon, himanshu. Thanks so much.
