Simple, Agile and Secure Hybrid Cloud Platform

BENEFITS

VMware Cloud Foundation delivers a faster path to a true hybrid cloud, increasing admin productivity while reducing overall TCO.

Natively integrated software-defined stack: Cloud Foundation provides a complete set of software-defined services for compute, storage, networking and security, and cloud management to run enterprise apps - traditional or containerized - in private or public environments. Cloud Foundation simplifies the path to the hybrid cloud by delivering a single integrated solution that is easy to operate with built-in automated lifecycle management.

 

Enterprise-grade functionality: Cloud Foundation is based on VMware’s market-leading technologies: vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and vRealize Suite, delivering enterprise-ready services for both traditional and containerized apps.

 

Storage elasticity and high performance: Cloud Foundation is built on VMware’s leading hyperconverged architecture (vSAN) with all-flash performance and enterprise-class storage services including deduplication, compression and erasure coding. vSAN implements hyperconverged storage architecture delivers elastic storage and drastically simplifies storage management.

 

End-to-end security: Cloud Foundation delivers end-to-end security for all applications by delivering micro-segmentation, distributed firewalls, VPN (NSX), VM, hypervisor, vMotion encryption, and AI-powered workload security and visibility (vSphere). In addition, Cloud Foundation includes data at rest, cluster, and storage encryption (vSAN).

 

Self-Driving Operations: Cloud Foundation delivers self-driving operations (vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight) from applications to infrastructure to help organizations plan, manage and scale their SDDC. Users can perform application-aware monitoring and troubleshooting along with automated and proactive workload management, balancing and remediation.

 

Automated Infrastructure Provisioning: VMware Cloud Foundation automatically deploys all of the building blocks of the Software-Defined Data Center – compute, storage, networking and cloud management – as ready-to-run workload domain.

 

Integrated Lifecycle Management: Cloud Foundation simplifies and automates patching and upgrading of the full private cloud stack with workload domain-level lifecycle management.

USE CASES

VMware Cloud Foundation's main use cases include cloud infrastructure, IT automation, hybrid cloud, end-to-end security, and virtual desktops.

IT Automation / Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Rather than installing servers, configuring storage and networking and manually connecting management tools, Cloud Foundation customers can simply provision infrastructure (the full stack of compute, storage, networking and management) automatically and reliably through workload domains. This level of automation eliminates opportunities to introduce human error while greatly accelerating the time it takes to provision ready-to-use infrastructure from weeks to just hours.

 

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: Cloud Foundation provides automated deployment of Horizon 7 virtual desktop infrastructure, including User Environment Manager, Unified Access Gateways and App Volumes components for turnkey virtual desktops deployed in accordance with VMware best practices.

 

Cloud Native Apps: Automated NSX-T Deployments in workload domains is now supported in Cloud Foundation. With NSX-T support, you can now deploy, run and manage Kubernetes workloads through VMware Enterprise PKS within a Cloud Foundation workload domain.

 

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning: Cloud Foundation leverages GPU support provided in vSphere 6.7 to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

 

High-Performance Computing: Leverage multi-cluster workload domains to automatically scale out infrastructure to support high performance compute (HPC) workloads. As HPC workloads demand additional capacity, cloud administrators can simply add compute, storage and network resources to workload domains in just a few clicks through Cloud Foundation’s automated workflows.

 

Big Data: Cloud Foundation supports external NFS and FC storage connectivity for massive data sets typical of Big Data workloads. By combining high performance vSAN storage with massive scale-out external storage, Big Data workloads can leverage the right storage for the right jobs to provide quicker insights into business data.

HOW TO DEPLOY

There are several deployment choices for VMware Cloud Foundation, including private cloud software, composable systems, integrated and jointly-engineered systems, and subscription-based via cloud service providers.

Compare Cloud Foundation Editions

• Basic: For customers who want to automate infrastructure deployment and provisioning, as well as lifecycle management for VMware’s core hyperconverged stack.
• Standard: For customers who are ready to adopt cloud management capabilities in their on-premises data center.
• Advanced: For customers who are evolving their VMware-based software-defined data centers to a cloud operating model and leveraging advanced cloud management tools to enable cloud costing and workload automation.
• Enterprise: For customers who are adopting a hybrid-cloud operating model where private cloud infrastructure may stretch between data centers and span multiple cloud providers.
• Platinum: For customers who need to add application-aware security to their hybrid cloud environments.

View the Cloud Foundation Editions