VMware slows release cadence for flagship Cloud Foundation suite, but extends support
Analysts have warned Broadcom may slow innovation
VMware on Wednesday announced it has extended the time between major releases from two years to three and extended support for those releases to six years.
The virtualization giant’s announcement says it changed the lifecycle of its products “in response to customer feedback”.
The changes mean that VMware will release new versions of its flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite every two years, and issue updates every nine months. Customers will therefore get the same number of updates VMware creates for each major release today but stretched over three years instead of two.
VMware says this release cadence will give customers more time to install each update.
The Broadcom business unit has also extended the time for which it will support major releases to six years, up from five. VMware will also offer two years of extended support to some customers, doubling the previous term.
The hypervisor heavyweight will support updates to Cloud Foundation for 27 months; however the last update in each release cycle will receive support for 45 months. Here’s how that lifecycle looks.
VMware pitched these changes as bringing more predictability and flexibility to customers and offering “real value”.
However, there’s no mistaking the fact that VMware will now publish new software less frequently – an outcome that analysts have told The Register Broadcom would pursue as it seeks to lower costs and increase profits.
Broadcom has always been open about its ambition to increase VMware’s profitability. It’s also quietly mentioned ways to bring more functionality to Cloud Foundation without the need for big bang upgrades, by using “supervisor services” – a feature that allows services to run in the hypervisor kernel.
The Register understands that VMware already offers Supervisor services to create its private AI offering, container services, service mesh, and secrets store – and that the biz is exploring ways to add more features to VCF in this way. So maybe future VCF updates could bring substantial additions.
Harder desktop upgrades
In other news, a support document published on Thursday brought news that VMware’s Workstation and Fusion desktop hypervisors will no longer allow automatic product updates.
“Moving forward, updates will need to be manually downloaded from the Broadcom Support Portal,” the document states. “Once the appropriate product update is downloaded, it can be manually installed.”
Another thing worth noting with this new release cadence is that Broadcom prefers to sell three-year subscriptions to VCF, meaning customers can align procurement cycles and release cycles. ®