Broadcom today made the latest edition of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) generally available, at a time when workloads are increasingly being deployed across a mix of computing platforms.

Prashanth Shenoy, vice president and chief marketing officer for the VCF division of Broadcom, said VCF 9.0 provides a foundation for centralizing the management of private clouds using a platform that makes it possible to govern both virtual machines and containers using an embedded instance of Kubernetes regardless of what underlying IT infrastructure is being used.

At the core of that effort is a unified interface that provides a holistic view of IT workflows. Platform teams can now simplify infrastructure management in a way that provides more granular control of resources, said Shenoy. There is now, for example, a Quick Start App that reduces setup time and complexity, he noted.

That scalable approach to managing a fleet of clusters using a set of pre-configured blueprints simplifies provisioning, reduces manual tasks, and guarantees that IT infrastructure is configured in a way that meets compliance requirements using policies that are now embedded into VCF, said Shenoy. IT teams can also now consolidate logs and take advantage of analytics to better understand workload behavior and control costs by, for example, reclaiming IT infrastructure allocated to virtual machines that are sitting idle.

Broadcom also claims an Advanced Memory Tiering for NVMe can reduce total cost of operations by 38% while VMware vSAN ESA with Global Dedupe can reduce storage costs by as much as 34%. A VMware NSX enhanced data path can increase throughput by a factor of three, according to Broadcom.

Additionally, IT teams can centralize the identity and access management, including single sign-on, password policies, and certificates, in addition to taking advantage of a security operations (SecOps) dashboard to view both policies and the security and data controls being applied.

Broadcom is also making available a set of additional services that can be added to VCF, including VMware ​Private AI​ Foundation​ with NVIDIA, a framework for running graphical processor units (GPUs); a VMware Live Recovery offering that creates a clean room that can be accessed in the event of a disaster; VMware vDefend security tools to secure VCF; a VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) for deploying databases; and an Avi Load Balancer.

Broadcom continues to make a case for adopting VCF as a way to unify the management of IT infrastructure in a way that reduces the total cost of IT. Of course, the platform requires IT teams to standardize compute, storage and networking on a platform provided by a single vendor when many of them are already using separate vendors for each of those functions.

There is, of course, a lot of heated debate these days over how Broadcom now licenses its software but the one thing that is certain is that, as IT environments become more complex, assessing the total cost of IT goes well beyond any fee charged for software. After all, the cost of IT labor remains the single largest element of almost every IT budget, so the simpler IT platforms become to manage, the more that cost can be contained.