VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 General Availability

VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 GA, the VCF team is proud to announce the General Availability of VMware Cloud Foundation+ (VCF+).  VCF+ has been transforming VMware’s on-premises portfolio to a cloud-connected SaaS offering. Like vSphere+ and vSAN+ earlier, VCF+ delivers a class of new cloud services for admins, and developers with solutions to address the most advanced cloud use cases.

VMware Cloud Foundation+ meets a variety of multi-cloud needs that are transforming the IT infrastructure environment, and opening up new potential for efficiency, scale, and cost savings. This allows enterprises to focus on business outcomes by reducing the time and effort necessary to manage their technology investments. VCF+ also meets the rising trend of enabling flexible subscription purchasing mechanisms that give greater predictability and reduced prices.

VMware Cloud Foundation+ provides the data privacy, security and data sovereignty that you expect from your high-performance, low-latency on-premises infrastructure, but VCF+ uniquely adds a new class of cloud-connected services, centrally managed through the VMware Cloud Console.

Admin and Developer Services

Through the unified Cloud Console, enterprises can expedite maintenance periods, monitor their worldwide inventory, and control the security status of all deployed VCF instances, independent of location. This is in addition to the streamlined subscription management and cloud-based keyless entitlement that is now controlled centrally via the VMware Cloud Console.

An overview of some of the cloud services that are included with a VCF+ subscription:

Inventory Service

Provides a high-level global inventory view of any VMware Cloud Foundation+ and vSphere+ connected instances.

Lifecycle Service*

Provides notification to admins if an update is available in a VMware Cloud Foundation instance. The actual lifecycle management is still performed by the local admin through SDDC-manager directly.
(* Lifecycle Service will be enabled prior to the next release)

VM User Service

The VM Service enables an admin to deploy a VM onto any connected vCenter from the cloud, operating just as vSphere+ does today.

Infrastructure Operations Service

The Infrastructure Operations service provides a global overview of all VCF+ instances by providing a centralized view of consolidated events, security status, and capacity state of clusters across vCenters and VCF+ workload domains.

Developer Services

VCF+ customers will have also have unique access to a set of developer services that provide cloud-based tools that complement the embedded TKG (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid) runtime and Tanzu Mission Control that comes with any VCF+ subscription.  These services streamline platform management by providing integrated logging, registry, monitoring ingress and much more.

Resources:

VMware Cloud Foundation Data Sheet

VMware Cloud Foundation FAQs

VMware Cloud Foundation Product Matrix