VMware opens beta for an upgrade to its midrange vSphere Foundation bundle

VMware has revealed another big upgrade is on the way, this time for its vSphere Foundation suite.

The virtualization pioneer and Broadcom business unit on Wednesday announced the opening of a beta program for version 9 of the bundle, which suits orgs that don’t need a full private cloud but do want software-defined compute and storage capable of running VMs and containers.

To make that possible, vSphere Foundation incudes the vSphere server virtualization suite, vCenter VM manager, vSphere Kubernetes Services, and the VSAN virtual storage tool.

VMware’s lesser offerings, vSphere Enterprise Plus and vSphere Standard, don’t include virtual storage or the ability to run containers natively. We’ve seen no hints they will soon be the subject of beta programs that signal upgrades, but expect upgrades are in train given VMware is now working on version 9 of its two higher-end product and the core hypervisor and ...