VMware Explore 2024 in Barcelona just finished. It was the first European Explore conference after Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Since this acquisition, Broadcom has changed the licensing model of VMware products from perpetual to subscription, consolidation of SKUs, solution refinement, and streamlining the partner eco system.

With this background, the focus of this year’s Explore was on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), advanced services on top of VCF, VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, and VeloCloud.

The overall message was, that the future of enterprise will be private cloud centric (private cloud, private AI, private data), and VCF is the ultimate sovereign cloud solution to achieve this. It’s about staying on prep, staying in control.

The major innovations announced were:

  • VMware Cloud Foundation
    • Version 5.2/5.2.1 already released, intent announced to deliver version 9, in-place upgrade to version 9 will be possible
    • Can be self-deployed, as a Service on public clouds (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure), or as a Service by VCSP with more than 300 partners
    • Core innovations, e.g. memory tiering, native VPCs, vSAN dedup, live patching.
  • Advanced Services on top of VCF, e.g. Private AI, Disaster Recovery, Advanced Security, Load Balancing, Container Application Services, Data Services, Edge Orchestration
    • Announcement of VMware Live Recovery, available on VMConAWS, in development for GCVE, and on-premises Isolated Recovery Environment (IRE)
      • offers ransomware recovery and disaster recovery leveraging two technology stacks
        • VMware Live Cyber Recovery (formerly known as VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery)
        • VMware Live Site Recovery (formerly known as VMware Site Recovery Manager)
    • Announcement of VMware Tanzu Data Services (in development), highly available, fleet-managed automated lifecycle management including deployment, backups, clustering, security patching and updates of leading open source data services, starting with PostgreSQL/pgvector, MySQL, RabbitMQ, Valkey
    • General availability of Intelligent Assist for VMware vDefend, an interactive chatbot powered by a LLM integrated directly into the vDefend UI, which explains detection events in plain English
  • VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA
    • Model Store: curate and securely provide LLMs, provided by Harbor Registry with extensions, available with VCF 5.2.1
  • VeloRAIN: “Robust AI Networking“, a new network architecture that uses AI/ML to improve the performance and security of distributed AI workloads

Another statement was made regarding the community, as there were announced two updates for VMUG Advantage members:

  • Exam Discounts: 50% off VMware Professional exams (VCP and VCAP)
  • Access to free VCF licenses for up to 3 years (upon successful completion of a VCP-VCF or VCP-VVF).
    Note, that you won’t be able to download eval licenses through VMUG Advantage after 30.11.2024 anymore!
    Starting in 2025, licenses will be accessible through Broadcom’s new program only, provided you meet the qualifications (VMUG Advantage membership, and completion of the VCP-VCF or VCP-VVF certification.

As usual, you can check out the recordings of all the sessions from the video library at: https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/search