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Bless. It's VMware and Dell EMC's first jointly engineered hybrid cloud infrastructure solution

Cloud Foundation makes debut on Dell EMC VxRail systems

VMware's Cloud Foundation hybrid cloud stack has hit version 3.7 and is available from April as a component of a pre-built private cloud appliance running on Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) kit.

VMware and parent Dell EMC have billed this as their first jointly engineered hybrid cloud infrastructure.

The virtualization juggernaut unveiled Cloud Foundation – its software stack for setting up on-and-off-premises hybrid clouds – at the company's VMworld knees-up in 2016 as part of the firm's hybrid cloud play. In essence the stack pulls together VMware's vSphere, vSAN and NSX components into a "Software-Defined Data Centre" (SDDC) stack, with the twist that it can be deployed on qualified hardware as an on-premises private cloud, or from the public cloud as a service.

Since launch, Cloud Foundation has popped up on several cloud platforms, most notably as VMware Cloud on AWS, but also IBM Cloud, Rackspace and CenturyLink. It can also be deployed on certified hardware that meets VMware's vSAN ReadyNode validated server configuration specification.

Shapes and sizes

The VxRail appliances come in a variety of configurations, in either a 1U or 2U chassis with varying CPU speeds, core counts, memory sizes, as well as physical disk capacity and SSD caching capacities.

But as with other HCI systems, the software layer is the key, and Dell EMC has promised that Cloud Foundation on VxRail will be lifecycle-managed as one complete, automated, turnkey system.

Dell EMC and VMware hold an advantage here in their ability to commit to the synchronous release of VxRail and VMware software updates, and so keep the on-site stack consistent with instances of Cloud Foundation running in the cloud. With the vRealize management suite, VMware shops should also be able to oversee public and private cloud resources from the same console.

On VxRail, Cloud Foundation calls for a minimum cluster size of four nodes, and can scale up to eight racks, with each comprising up to 32 1U or 16 2U nodes.

The Cloud Foundation 3.7 release also supports fully automated deployment of VMware's Horizon 7 virtual desktop infrastructure software. ®

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