Unlike the US in-house exhibition VMware Explore US, which Broadcom held in Las Vegas after the acquisition in late August, the mood among participants at the European edition felt at least somewhat stable. Approximately 5,000 participants represent the hard core of VMware users in the Europe and Middle East region. But the truth is also this: many companies stopped coming to trade fairs or sent significantly fewer participants.
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As he did in Las Vegas, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan took the stage and reiterated his philosophy: Instead of chasing the next trend every year, roll up your sleeves, make good products. This has not always been successful for VMware in the past, as the manufacturer was unable to extend its technology and market leadership from the VM sector into the cloud and container sector as desired. A return to private life should fix this: “The future of the enterprise is private,” the CEO declared – and stressed that it is important for companies to have full control over data, AI and the cloud. And this is only possible from an on-premises environment. Where necessary, public cloud services can of course be accessed to realize load peaks and elasticity of resources if necessary.
VeloCloud returns
In addition to the announcements already made in Las Vegas, VMware has now presented several AI-powered services in Barcelona: Valoren, VDefend with Intelligent Assist and its own private AI strategy based on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
VMware had already acquired the manufacturer VeloCloud, which specializes in SD-WAN, in 2017, then removed the manufacturer’s name from the products and Products renamed in early 2024 – Frequent name and brand changes at VMware are more the rule than the exception. In the SD-WAN technology market according to Gartner, VMware and its products are in the leading category – Cisco is in second place behind top dog Fortinet. Fresh from Explore, Sanjay Uppal, vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s VeloCloud division, presented Veloren, with which Broadcom seeks to introduce an industry-first architecture for secure and robust communication of AI services and applications across data center boundaries. Using AI and ML services, Veloren (Robust AI Networking) aims to improve the security and performance of AI data traffic. The manufacturer seeks to achieve this by identifying and accelerating encrypted data traffic that was previously unknown to network optimization software and assigning it appropriate QoS ranges. Furthermore, wireless network connections should be able to benefit from the same quality of service (QoS) as fiber optic cables with the help of AI. Through DABS (Dynamic Application-Based Slicing). valoren architecture Assign new applications to the correct QoS range on different networks.
In addition to the VeloRain architecture, Broadcom introduced new VeloCloud devices and a partner program for managed service providers in the region. The new top models VeloCloud Edge 4100 and 5100 are said to support up to 30 and 100 Gbps throughput and 12,000 and 20,000 tunnels respectively. VeloCloud customers will benefit from the simplified architecture as they will need to use fewer devices for their network and security services. If more than 100 Gbps bandwidth is required, devices can also be clustered. The manufacturer also introduced a new partner program called Titan, which replaces the previous partner program for VeloCloud service providers. The manufacturer also wants to offer license portability and ensure price stability – an interesting aspect, as the changed price is the main point of criticism of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.
VMware vDefend Distributed Firewall, known as NSX Distributed Firewall before the name change, has also been expanded with AI functions. GenAI feature is new intelligence supportThe purpose of which is to help security administrators maintain firewall rules and interpret alarms and respond to them automatically with a natural language interface.
Better development of VCF
Within its core product VMware Cloud Foundation, Broadcom has made further announcements presented in the USA. Work on the upcoming version VCF9 has gathered momentum – IX spoke on site with employees from large German corporate and government clients, who attended a two-day introductory event for hand-selected CTAB (Customer Technical Advisory Board) customers. and those who were still keeping secret features and got insight into the upcoming version presented by the manufacturer. Apart from the issue of licensing and pricing, which still causes anger, participants in the conversation expressed positive comments about the further development of the product and the better focus that Broadcom is bringing to the development process, which will be facilitated by the acquisition. Was poorly coordinated before.
As expected, the exhibits that were part of the in-house exhibition were more organized than in previous years; Of the major server manufacturers, only Lenovo was represented with its own stance and focused on the integration of VCF and private AI services. The servers were developed together with VMware, which for the first time in the industry had two Nvidia Bluefield 2 DPUs at the same time. Hypervisor and network acceleration enable redundant operation of cards. There was no sign of Cisco, Dell and Cape at the trade show – especially as Dell and Cape are currently seeing their withdrawal activities from VMware. And: Apache recently acquired Morpheus Data, and the idea of its own KVM hypervisor based on the acquisition is considered very promising.
On the keynote, Chris Wolf, global head of AI and Advanced Services, VMware Cloud Foundation division, Broadcom, showed current developments in VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, which can be booked as an additional service for VCFs. In a subsequent conversation with iX, Björn Brundtert, the manufacturer’s chief technologist, was very positive about developments in the market. With at least three servers with VCF in the VI workload domain, along with compatible Nvidia GPUs such as A100, L40S or H100, customers can build their own on-premises AI environment to prevent data exfiltration or unauthorized training of models. Are. Also, the clustering features of VCF ensure optimal use of expensive GPU resources while maintaining the same or higher performance when using bare metal, as Chris Wolf showed in the keynote. Wolf says the excellent performance results are possible because of many years of experience optimizing the scheduler in the VMware kernel.
In the keynote, Chris Wolf showed that the performance of virtualized GPUs can match or even exceed that of bare metal (comparison price: 1.00).
(Image: Broadcom)
Additional vSphere Licenses
The re-introduction of VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus and Standard licenses in the subscription model, which was announced shortly before the trade fair, was completely ignored as a side note. Broadcom initially phased out these editions after taking over VMware in order to force customers to use larger private cloud licenses – and thus caused a lot of anger in the German and European markets. Many companies that require pure compute virtualization without major additions have since been looking for alternatives to the VMware stack – perhaps Broadcom wants to catch up on this phase-out trend again, but perhaps that’s already too much for many. It’s late. Manufacturer provides comparison of reproduced product versions In an updated data sheet Ready.
Recording of keynote speeches and selected lectures available onlineThere was intense discussion among the attendees on whether there would be another European edition of the in-house exhibition in the future. The manufacturer has so far only announced the date of the next event in the United States – the VMware Community Meeting is scheduled to take place in Las Vegas from August 25 to 28, 2025.
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