The VMware Cloud Foundation team is proud to announce General Availability of VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.1, supporting the Initial Availability of the VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA in addition to new Solution Licensing, which delivers the first phase of a multi-phase program to deliver the full stack as a single product. The following provides an overview of these important new capabilities as well as additional resources in order to reference additional materials.
VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.1 Bill of Materials:
Figure 1: VMware Cloud Foundation Software Bill of Materials
VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA
As announced at the 2024 GTC AI Conference, Broadcom has announced initial availability of VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA as an advanced add-on to VMware Cloud Foundation. VMware Private AI Foundation marks the beginning of a new era for infrastructure solutions, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation to support a wide range of Generative AI use cases. Read more about VMware Cloud Foundation AI/ML Solutions here.
VMware Cloud Foundation is the core infrastructure platform for VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, delivering modern private cloud that enables organizations to dynamically scale GenAI workloads on demand. VMware Cloud Foundation provides an automated, self-service cloud experience that accelerates productivity for developers and data scientists, while delivering comprehensive security and resilience to protect and recover an organization’s most sensitive intellectual property.
Figure 2: VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA
VMware Cloud Foundation addresses many of the challenges faced when deploying infrastructure to support GenAI workloads by deploying a full-stack software-defined platform architecture, bringing together best of breed GPU resources tightly coupled with compute, storage, networking, security and management.
Within VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.1, there are unique documentation workflows within SDDC Manager for the Private AI workload domain setup and configuration. There is also a VCF automation catalog setup wizard that simplifies configuration of these systems. By integrating the latest Aria releases with Vmware Cloud Foundation 5.1.1, there are new management capabilities that are enabled by Aria Operations and Aria Automation. Aria Operations includes new GPU monitoring properties and metrics that provide cluster level and host level metrics to manage the health and utilization of GPU resources. Aria Automation delivers new Automation Services for VMware Private AI, providing a self-service private cloud deployment model that enables developers and data scientists to configure and reconfigure infrastructure building blocks to support a wide range of use cases. This new capability not only improves performance, but also increases efficiency of these GPU based solutions, improving utilization and lowering total cost of ownership (TCO). The versatility offered through this architecture enables cloud admins to utilize different workload domains which can each be customized to support specific workload types, optimizing for workload performance and GPU resource utilization.
VMware Cloud Foundation Solution License Support
In order to further simplify deployments, VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.1 has the option of deploying a single Solution License Key, which now includes a 60 day evaluation period and is detailed in this post. The component products of VMware Cloud Foundation can now derive their entitlements from a single solution license key (note that the vSAN TiB license is the exception at this point and still must be applied separately). Individual component license keys continue to be supported, but this new solution key feature should simplify solution licensing for VMware Cloud Foundation deployments. Refer to the VMware Cloud Foundation Administration Guide and Release Notes for more information.
VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.1 is available immediately and is the latest release that provides organizations with a private cloud platform that enables modern infrastructure, deliver a cloud experience for developers with solutions that are secure and resilient.
Resources:
Blog: Simplified Licensing for VMware vSphere Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation
Blog: Announcing Initial Availability of VMware Private AI Foundation
Blog: Automation Services for VMware Private AI
Web: VMware Private AI
Ready to go on your AI/ML journey? Complete this form* to request access!
* Submitting this form does not guarantee access to software. Availability is subject to approval and may be limited.
