VMware Cloud Foundation 9: Future Proofing Federal Technology

Simplified, Fleet-Level Management

Having a single platform for managing a variety of workloads — including legacy apps, virtual machines, containers and artificial intelligence — gives agencies a much easier path to a future-state technology architecture.

“Typically, in order to manage all these workloads, an agency would have to invest in multiple platforms; maybe vSphere for virtual machines and IBM to manage their Kubernetes,” says Preston Harris, manager of VMware U.S. corporate business development at CDW. “And AI and machine learning workloads are still unknowns for many agencies. VCF 9 provides a great deal of utility and a unique integration with NVIDIA for AI, giving them a common tool for managing legacy VMs, containers and AI workloads.”

Being able to access all these resources on a single platform makes fleet-level management a reality for agencies.

“This centralization lets you create your own private clouds for different agency needs; you can segment all levels of virtualization across the environment. VCF Operations allows you to then manage all that infrastructure for the entire fleet,” Harris says. “You get to maintain the standards, terms of security and profile, and you can even write automations for standing up and tearing down different environments.”

With all of the infrastructure together under a common utility, agencies can manage the entire estate, which is powerful, Harris says.

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In addition to reducing the complexity and expense of supporting multiple compute platforms, VCF 9 makes installation simpler and positions agencies to gain benefits from their platform much faster.

“With the prior version, there were many steps to standing it up in terms of installing individual components — things like vSAN vCenter, NSX, all these individual components that make up VCF,” Harris says. “Now, there's a single installer to stand up the platform. Agencies can get the value more quickly because everything gets installed together.”

Meeting Modern AI Workload Requirements

VCF 9 has unique benefits to offer agencies with AI workloads in particular. The platform integrates with the VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA to manage generative AI workloads.

“Agencies running AI workloads are looking to get more out of their GPUs. VCF 9 introduces and improves on things like load balancing, prioritization and resource scheduling on the GPU,” Harris says. “This helps agencies get more from their AI GPU investments. For example, AI workloads can be load-balanced in under 2 milliseconds with VCF 9. For the end user, that’s a fantastic experience.”

Developers using VCF 9 can quickly provision a database, the utilities to control it and a large language model. This gives them access to the ingredients needed to construct an AI app in a private cloud. All this is possible through access to the deep learning VMs that are a core component of VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA.

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“In addition to catalog services and the high availability of resources, developers gain really strong governance with VCF 9,” Harris says. “They can see how much they’re consuming and control how much they are able to request. This establishes a much easier and more productive relationship with the IT staff.”

Robust, Defense-in-Depth Security

VCF 9 incorporates a variety of security tools for a defense-in-depth approach to safeguarding workloads. A centralized console provides a single dashboard for threat visibility, compliance scores, and alerts for advisories and configuration issues.

Both data at rest and data in transit are encrypted through vSAN in compliance with Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2. VM workloads are safeguarded through vSphere, which provides secure boot, Trusted Platform Module 2.0, Virtual TPM and VM encryption. Agencies also get access to vDefend.

“With vDefend, you can do virtual patching. It also gives agencies control over east-west traffic, providing greater protection against ransomware threats that spread laterally,” Harris says. “If an issue occurs, the system can automatically block the communication of that application and sandbox it until it can be looked at more closely.”

UP NEXT: Cyber resilience hinges on user intelligence.

VCF 9 simplifies compliance by enabling automated auditing and remediation, helping avoid compliance drift.

“It lets agencies declare their infrastructure along the lines of common security standards,” Harris says. “Then, if the infrastructure drifts out of compliance, you get an alert so you can remediate it before it becomes an issue. This allows for declarative infrastructure security standards, many of which are just checkboxes built right into VCF Operations.”

A Shortcut to Future-State Architecture

With Broadcom making a big commitment to VCF 9, dedicating 18% of its 2024 topline revenue into its development, agencies can expect this platform to be robustly supported for the foreseeable future.

Additionally, VMware is moving to a 6+1 support model, guaranteeing support for six years, with one year of extended support for major releases. Minor releases will be delivered every nine months.

For agencies looking for a shortcut to a future-state private cloud architecture, VCF 9 is a compelling resource.

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