Broadcom and Lenovo Unveil the Co-Engineered Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series with VMware Cloud Foundation Solution to Enable a Seamless Private Cloud

In today's fast-paced technology landscape, Broadcom's acquisition of VMware is a significant milestone. This strategic move aims to not only transform the virtualization and cloud computing industry, but also drive innovation and empower enterprises to build, operate, manage, protect, and secure applications at scale.

In his post-acquisition statement, Hock Tan, President and CEO of Broadcom, emphasized the importance of guiding customers toward a true private cloud experience with VCF software. Businesses get to maintain control over their on-premises workloads, with the flexibility to integrate with existing public cloud solutions. This helps customers build modern, resilient, and secure data centers equipped with a self-service, virtual private cloud solution that delivers the same user-friendly experience and resilience as hyperscale providers.

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series with VMware Cloud Foundation arrives from the factory as a complete workload ready, integrated solution – preconfigured, tested, validated, and optimized to provide the simplest way to bring a new private cloud environment online. It is easy to manage, while maintaining resilience and security, with full-stack monitoring, lifecycle management and unified support.

The co-engineered solution comes with both onsite and remote deployment options delivered by Lenovo Professional Services and Premier Support to accelerate deployment and provide a single point of support, including a dedicated, direct-line phone number with 24x7 access to end-to-end case management and problem resolution.

Figure 1. ThinkAgile VX650 V3

The co-engineered solution of Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series with VMware Cloud Foundation highlights optimizations through the following key areas:

1. Designed with alignment on specifications of VMware Cloud Foundation’s best practices for deployment and full lifecycle management.
2. Streamlined lifecycle management with vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) and SDDC Manager to update the critical components of the complete solution through integrations with Lenovo’s XClarity Integrator (LXCi).
3. Full-stack monitoring and automation management through integrations with VMware Cloud Foundation Operations (formerly VMware Aria Suite) and Lenovo XClarity Integrator (LXCi) to reduce time wasted in repetitive operations and human error.

Together, Lenovo and Broadcom enable organizations to accelerate their pace of innovation, improve business resilience, and drive better total cost of ownership.

The Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series with VMware Cloud Foundation co-engineered solution provides integrated, enterprise-class compute, networking, storage, and management, and delivers modern workload-ready infrastructure that seamlessly adjusts to meet varying business needs. The solution includes native Kubernetes to support both VM and containerized workloads on a single platform, enables advanced AI/ML workloads at enterprise scale, and offers integrated data services capabilities.

Through VCF innovations and add-ons such as VMware Live Recovery and VMware vDefend lateral security, the co-engineered solution enables higher availability, malware/ransomware prevention, and robust data protection. IT can continuously optimize performance and costs and better protect the business from threats.

By streamlining resource utilization and operations through a single, unified management and orchestration layer, ThinkAgile VX Series with VCF empowers organizations to achieve up to 51% savings¹ in total cost of ownership (TCO) over a 3-year period.

¹VMware Cloud Foundation Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), Technical White Paper, Broadcom. March 2024.

Powered by the latest 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® family processors and 4th Gen AMD EPYC™ series processors, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series features enhancements in performance, security, and energy efficiency. These systems support new DDR memory, PCIe Gen5 PCIe I/O and enable hardware accelerators like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and Data Processing Units⁺ (DPUs). They support vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) as well as the vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) for all-flash and hybrid storage configurations that enable de-duplication, compression, and encryption to give you an optimized, secure, high-performance platform with maximum usable capacity.

⁺DPU support is enabled only on specific models.

The co-engineered solution of Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series with VMware Cloud Foundation offers a quick and seamless path to private and hybrid clouds, that enables customers to simplify their IT infrastructure through pre-configured, workload-ready systems with easy deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management while ensuring resiliency and security.

Brian Faleiro is the Worldwide Technical Product Manager for Lenovo’s ThinkAgile VX Series of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions based on VMware’s virtualization software ecosystem. Brian is responsible for showcasing the business value and differentiation of Lenovo’s hybrid cloud solutions and contributing to the product lifecycle process.

Catherine Maina is the Worldwide Senior Product Manager for Lenovo’s ThinkAgile VX Series, a hyper-converged engineered solution powered by VMware's virtualization software ecosystem. Catherine is responsible for identifying and commercializing opportunities that leverage joint Lenovo and VMware technology in the Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) space.