VMware Cloud Foundation gains AI model store, other updates

OpenAI nearly imploded last fall when the company fired its CEO and most of its employees threatened to quit, reminding enterprise adopters about the risks of putting all their genAI eggs in one basket. Since then, AI vendors leapfrogged one another in capabilities and features, and a multitude of open-source models hit the scene, offering lower cost or more specialized alternatives.

In addition, regulatory constraints and security concerns are pushing some companies to run their AI in on-premises data centers or in private clouds under their full control.

For all of these reasons, some companies are looking to third-party platforms that don’t lock them into any one particular AI vendor or cloud provider, and VMware – now owned by Broadcom – is one of the leading contenders for the job.

Today, at the annual VMware Explore conference, Broadcom sweetened the deal, announcing support for a new model store for the VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia add-on to its VMware Cloud Foundation 9 platform.

VMware and Nvidia’s joint platform became generally available this past May, and supports Nvidia’s AI models, tools, and frameworks. It is already being used by several customers, including the US Senate Federal Credit Union.

“We see AI in customer service as a powerful use case – from knowledge base-powered chatbot answers to our internal staff, all the way to delivering financial answers to our members on whatever device they use for banking,” said Mark Fournier, CIO at the U.S. Senate Federal Credit Union, in a statement. “VMware Private AI running on VMware Cloud Foundation will deliver tremendous value in allowing us to conform to how we’ve operated with a private cloud environment for years.”

When first released, the joint platform allowed enterprises to deploy generative AI applications and included a vector database so that companies could use retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, to make their generative AI give more accurate and up-to-date answers.

“The piece that we were missing was a model store manager,” says Paul Turner, vice president of products in the VMware Cloud Foundation division at Broadcom.

It allows enterprises to make a curated selection of AI models available to their developers, along with access controls to those models.

“And it makes sure that nobody’s using just general-purpose large language models that you don’t want to support,” Turner says. “Because out there on the Internet, you don’t know the provenance of that LLM and where it’s coming from. This gives you a way to manage those LLMs across your user base so that you can truly let them turn on their generative AI innovation.”

VMware customers can use Nvidia’s AI models, as well as models from Hugging Face and other partners, including Meta’s Llama 3 model and models from Google and Mistral. “Whatever Nvidia supports, we support,” Turner says.

In addition to a model store, other new capabilities include tools to secure the models with integrated access controls, a streamlined deployment workflow, and reference AI workflows for specialized use cases like customer service, drug discovery, and PDF data extraction.

Other improvements to VMware Cloud Foundation include:

The number of management consoles for provisioning services has been reduced from more than dozen to just a single console each for operations and automation.
A new memory tiering capability will speed up data-intensive applications such as AI, databases and real-time analytics.
Improved security features, including unified security management across multiple VMware Cloud Foundation deployments.

However, Broadcom has not announced when VMware Cloud Foundation 9, with all the new functionality, will be delivered.

“What we are announcing is the future direction of VMware Cloud Foundation, our roadmap to delivering VMware Cloud Foundation 9,” says Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of product marketing for the VCF division at Broadcom.

Read more VMware news