At VMware Explore 2024 Barcelona, Broadcom is unveiling new advancements to VMware vDefend and VMware Avi Load Balancer to strengthen security for east-west traffic and optimize performance with Intel in datacenter, private cloud and Kubernetes environments. Building on the product advancements at VMware Explore Las Vegas, these innovations enhance threat detection and remediation, automate load balancing, and help organizations future-proof their infrastructure against evolving security and load balancing challenges.

VMware vDefend: Turbo Charge Threat Defense with GenAI-Driven Intelligence

Implementing Gen AI into security operations continues to gain traction as organizations begin to leverage these technologies to transform their defense strategy. As these technologies evolve, they will become more deeply embedded into security workflows to help enterprises stay ahead of emerging threats. By intelligently prioritizing and correlating large volumes of alerts for appropriate remediation, Gen AI can save hours-or even days-of manual effort. 

In response, VMware vDefend is introducing Intelligent Assist, a generative AI-powered tool designed to accelerate threat detection, analysis, and remediation. Built to empower IT teams of all expertise levels, Intelligent Assist uses a natural language interface to provide explainability, actionable insights, and automated responses for high-priority alerts. This new capability simplifies the way virtualization, network security, and SOC teams understand detailed, contextual information about active threats and their impact. With just a few clicks, teams can initiate remediation, streamlining processes that once required complex workflows across multiple-point products. By democratizing threat response, Intelligent Assist for vDefend enables security and infrastructure teams to operate far more collaboratively to defend against ransomware attacks and make a greater impact.

Its explainability feature breaks down detection events in plain English, making it easier for teams to assess threats and take action quickly. Moreover, the system's automation capabilities enable targeted or comprehensive remediation, depending on risk tolerance and impact, further streamlining security workflows.

Broadcom is also introducing new capabilities to the VMware vDefend portfolio aimed at delivering comprehensive visibility, segmentation, and threat defense with a multi-layered approach. Key innovations that build on vDefend updates at VMware Explore Las Vegas include:

• IDS/IPS Custom Signature Support: For distributed and hypervisor-integrated IDS/IPS offering, customers can now import their own custom IDS/IPS signatures or those sourced from third-party threat feeds, enabling tailored defenses against industry-specific attacks.
• Malware Analysis Test Drive: This capability allows customers to upload artifacts (files/URLs) for in-depth analysis, providing crucial insights into highly evasive malware and zero-day threats.

VMware Avi Load Balancer: Optimizing Performance and Securing Kubernetes Environments

In addition to security enhancements, Broadcom is unveiling new capabilities for VMware Avi Load Balancer designed to optimize load balancing for both VCF and Kubernetes environments. These enhancements focus on automation, resilience, and future-proofing operations, with key updates including:

• Large-Scale Deployments Support: Increased scale by ~2X to support enterprise workloads and 3X+ to improve secure sockets layer (SSL) performance.
• Improved application resiliency with HA with Multi-AZ Support: For more robust and granular failure handling, Avi Load Balancer supports multi availability zone (AZ) across both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) deployments.
• Enhanced Gateway API Support for Kubernetes: Avi Load Balancer is now fully integrated with Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes. This integration leverages next-gen ingress Gateway API, provides first-class observability and analytics, and integrates Avi GSLB for multi-cluster, multi-site support. 
• Accelerated migration off legacy load balancers: Avi Load Balancer Conversion Tool is now generally available to customers.
• Upgrade Intelligence with Dry Run Capabilities: The dry run feature for Avi Controllers allows enterprises to test upgrades in a risk-free and isolated environment, ensuring everything works smoothly before going live.

"Intelligence generation, processing, and data storing are ever more distributed across edge, data center and cloud where TCO and OpEx optimizations are a must," says Bob Ghaffari, VP Network Edge Group, at Intel Corporation. "Protecting intellectual property starts with encryption, and the combination of Avi technology and ubiquitously available Intel compute resources with accelerators such as Intel QAT enables exactly that for organizations driving digital transformation incorporating AI."