VMware Inc. is putting more meat on the bones of its Cloud Foundation integrated hybrid cloud platform.

A new 2.3 version announced today folds in cloud management capabilities that were previously available only as separate add-on components. It also provides for management and provisioning of compute, network, storage and application services across hybrid cloud environments.

Cloud Foundation is intended to ease customers’ migration to a hybrid cloud by providing a common infrastructure that can be deployed on-premises or run as a service from the cloud with a consistent set of tools and controls.

Its SDDC (software-defined data center) Manager provisions, manages, and monitors the logical and physical resources of Cloud Foundation. The latest enhancements enable automated deployment and configuration of vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight as part of the platform’s standardized architecture.

“Cloud management services are now integrated so our lifecycle management configuration tool is aware of them and can automatically use them,” said Matt Herreras, director of product marketing at the virtualization giant. “It’s the simplest way to deploy a hybrid cloud.”

VRealize Automation enables self-services infrastructure personalization, resource provisioning and configuration, along with automated application delivery and container management. Operations Manager provides operational visibility across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. Log Insight delivers real-time log management for VMware environments.

Introduced in summer 2016, Cloud Foundation is a kind of backdoor effort by VMware to get into the infrastructure-as-a-service business after the failure of its own vCloud Air platform. The strategy is to make it easier for customers of the company’s virtualization technologies to easily shift workloads to and from cloud platforms. With Cloud Foundation, “Customers have gone from days to minutes to deploy new clouds,” Herreras said.

VMware said using its platform can accelerate application deployment by sixfold or more, double administrator productivity by automating such functions as patching and updates, and reduce the total cost of ownership of private cloud deployments by 30 to 40 percent.

VMware has a nonexclusive partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. that makes Amazon a preferred cloud provider. Last week, the two companies significantly tightened the integration between their platforms through a series of new migration products.

Customers can model complete application and infrastructure stacks that include compute, storage, networking and security resources and the relationships that tie them together, VMware said. The addition of vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight enables better planning and scaling.

Cloud Foundation 2.3 also adds support for different server models within a single rack as well as the ability to select specific servers for each workload domain. In addition, VMware is working with Intel Corp. to customize Cloud Foundation to take advantage of Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors.

Cloud Foundation is sold on a perpetual per-CPU license. VMware didn’t discuss pricing, but CDW Corp. lists a license price of $12,541.99.

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