Broadcom Delivers Modern Private Cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

Broadcom Inc. has announced today the general availability of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, the platform for the modern private cloud. With VCF 9.0, customers gain a consistent operating model for the private cloud, spanning data centers, edge, and managed cloud infrastructure from service providers and hyperscalers. VCF 9.0 combines the agility and scalability of public cloud with the security, performance, architectural control and total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits of an on-premises environment.

VCF 9.0 delivers a single unified platform that supports all applications—traditional, modern, or AI—with consistent operations, governance, and controls across the private cloud environment. With VCF 9.0, customers benefit from a modern private cloud that:

• Accelerates innovation with out-of-box self-service offerings and a consistent experience that frees development teams to focus on applications instead of infrastructure.

• Controls cost through deep visibility and insights into resource usage that allow better planning, predicting, and optimisation of cloud spend.

• Enables sovereignty and security with data control that supports better compliance, cyber resilience at scale and fleet-level management that helps ensure the latest patches are applied quickly, security controls are up to date, and policy compliance continues.

“With this next generation of our cloud platform, VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, we are again raising the bar for the modern private cloud by vastly simplifying the deployment, operations, and developer experience of the cloud,” said Krish Prasad, Senior Vice President and General Manager, VCF Division at Broadcom. “Most enterprises are now looking to the private cloud to run both traditional mission-critical and new AI and containerised applications. VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is the ideal platform for running these modern applications, enabling our customers to be more innovative, efficient, resilient, and secure. We are very excited to see that customers of all sizes are embracing VCF at a rate that has exceeded even our own high expectations.”

“VMware Cloud Foundation has enabled us to execute on our private cloud strategy by breaking down IT silos, removing technical debt, and allowing teams to shift from focusing on keeping the lights on to higher value projects that move our business forward,” said Roger Joys, Principal Technology Strategy Advisor, Cloud & Data, at GCI Communications. “By delivering an ‘everything as code’ private cloud platform, we simply do everything faster and more securely now. Security patches are easier to implement, new applications are deployed in minutes rather than months, and services are updated and rolled out to customers in a fraction of the time. These are all benefits people only thought were possible in the public cloud. We are doing these things in our modern private cloud.”

“VMware Cloud Foundation is at the core of our Digital Application Platform. Using VCF, we have expanded our on-prem delivery capabilities while improving operational efficiency,” said Paolo Bazzica, Chief Information Officer at IPZS. “At IPZS, we feel that we are now on the right track to continue supporting Italy’s digital transition with a modern private cloud that enables full use of our competences to deliver cloud native applications. Compared to more traditional on-prem setup, we saw a steep IT manual tasks reduction by up to 70% through automation while improving our business resilience.”

“With VMware Cloud Foundation, we can offer our customers a private cloud operating model from our own data center,” said Michael Heier, Head of Managed Workplace at Ratiodata. “VCF offers a significantly more flexible and easier-to-manage IT infrastructure with its automation, advanced security features, dynamic networking capabilities, and comprehensive cloud management. VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service enables us to deliver a unified platform for both VM and containerised apps, while VMware Private AI allows us to securely harness AI capabilities across this infrastructure. Increased server performance and superior VM density will reduce our total number of servers, lowering power consumption and costs by an estimated 25–30%.”

“Previously we had a large-scale legacy IT infrastructure that needed to evolve into something that was very agile, flexible, cost-optimised and secure,” said Keith Woolley, Chief Digital and Information Officer at University of Bristol. “With VMware Cloud Foundation, University of Bristol has built a modern private cloud that completely revolutionises the way we operate and deliver services to our academic community. VCF enables us to run our AI jobs. It gives us the sovereignty we were seeking. And we know there’s hidden benefits in the VCF platform that we’re only just starting to discover.”

The Fundamental Shifts in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0​

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 boasts a completely new architecture that empowers IT admins and application teams to accomplish far more and spend far less. The platform delivers a streamlined experience for building, operating, and securing a modern private cloud across on-premises data centres, in hyperscaler and VMware Cloud Service provider clouds, and at the edge. VCF 9.0 is uniquely designed to remove the friction between infrastructure and application teams.

One Interface for Private Cloud Operations

VCF 9.0 introduces a unified interface for cloud administrators, offering a holistic view of private cloud operations. The new Quick Start App significantly reduces setup time and complexity. Integrated cost management and policy enforcement enables immediate compliance and operational efficiency. Scalable fleet management allows administrators to plan, schedule, and execute upgrades across clusters efficiently, increasing daily productivity up to 10x. Centralised identity and access management, including single sign-on, password policies, and certificates, enable consistency across environments. Consolidated log management delivers insights twice as fas, allowing for rapid response. Advanced analytics help administrators understand workload behaviour, enabling targeted responses for security and performance optimisation.

Frictionless Cloud Consumption Experience

VCF 9.0 offers a unified interface for platform and development teams, simplifying infrastructure service delivery and consumption. Platform teams can effectively organize, provision, and manage tenant resources with granular control. More secure, role-based access is enabled through streamlined administration of both admin and tenant identities. Compliance across all deployments is maintained by built-in governance policies, while pre-configured blueprints simplify provisioning, lessen manual tasks, and guarantee repeatable, compliant infrastructure. Developers gain access to automated and elastic self-service IaaS services, creating a genuine cloud-like experience.

Unified VM, Container, and Kubernetes Platform

VCF 9.0 takes a significant leap forward as a unified platform for traditional, cloud native and AI applications. The embedded vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) enables both virtual machines (VMs) and containers to be treated equally. This allows customers to build, deploy, and run Kubernetes and virtualised workloads together and eliminates complex DevOps stacks and integrations. Developers can immediately begin building and deploying, while IT maintains security and consistency. A single interface and operational model manages VM-based applications, cloud-native workloads, AI/ML applications, and traditional enterprise databases.

Superior Cloud Cost Transparency

VCF 9.0 offers distinct cost predictability and transparency advantages over public cloud. Comprehensive insights extend beyond infrastructure, incorporating software licensing, operational expenses, and data centre costs, thus providing a holistic TCO perspective. Additionally, built-in analytics enable predictive cost modelling for effective infrastructure planning and forecasting, helping organisations avoid unforeseen financial challenges. Automated resource optimisation dynamically reclaims underutilised capacity to enhance workload efficiency and prevent unnecessary infrastructure sprawl. Finally, detailed showback and chargeback data, grounded in resource allocation, provide a clear return on infrastructure investment.

Sovereign and Secure

VCF 9.0 is engineered to provide robust data control, compliance, and resilience, empowering IT operations amidst regulatory complexities and geopolitical uncertainty. A key feature is the new SecOps dashboard, offering a quick view of platform security and data controls, along with integrated compliance policies. Regulatory guardrails facilitate consistent governance. VCF 9.0’s support for the latest confidential computing technologies from AMD and Intel will enable organisations to leverage the newest generation of secure enclaves, encrypted memory, and attestation capabilities, allowing IT teams to deploy confidential workloads across heterogeneous infrastructure while maintaining consistent security policies and operational workflows.

Core Innovation Delivers Meaningful Customer Outcomes

VCF 9.0 is built on industry-leading compute, networking, and storage technologies, and Broadcom continues to innovate around these core capabilities to deliver significant customer value. Advanced Memory Tiering for NVMe can deliver 38% lower memory and server TCO. VMware vSAN ESA with Global Dedupe can reduce storage TCO by 34%. VMware NSX enhanced data path can deliver as much as 3x switching performance to maximise throughput. New vSAN-to-vSAN data protection with deep snapshots enables more efficient, native recovery from disasters or ransomware attacks. As a platform for modern AI applications, VCF delivers virtually zero performance overhead when compared to bare metal³ while providing the ability to support zero-downtime vMotion for AI applications.

New Innovation Across Advanced Services for VCF Portfolio

Advanced services for VMware Cloud Foundation are ready-to-deploy solutions that enable customers to accelerate innovation in their private cloud environments. This diverse library of private cloud solutions is similar to what enterprises have come to expect from the public cloud, allowing them to access the tools and technologies they need to rapidly address a variety of use cases and business opportunities. With VCF 9.0, Broadcom is delivering new innovations across the advanced services portfolio:

• VMware ​Private AI​ Foundation​ with NVIDIA: This joint AI solution from Broadcom and NVIDIA is built on VMware Cloud Foundation and includes the VMware private AI package and NVIDIA AI Enterprise. The solution offers air-gap support for isolated deployments; GPU-as-a-Service with multi-tenancy support for AI workloads; NVIDIA vGPU C-Series profile visibility to eliminate manual capacity tracking; improved resource utilisation with enhanced GPU and vGPU monitoring capabilities; simplified model usage and scalability with Model Runtime; NVIDIA NIM for easy, high-performance AI model inference; and more efficient creation of AI Agents with Agent Builder Service.​

• VMware Live Recovery: A single solution for managing cyber and disaster recovery across VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployments, VMware Live Recovery now delivers increased data sovereignty through an on-premises isolated clean room / recovery environment (IRE) for cyber recovery (available as a VMware Validated Solution); flexibility to recover to a VCF isolated clean room on-premises or an existing cloud option; up to 200 immutable snapshots per VM enabled by native replication; and more efficient scaling through the ability to expand storage independently of compute with vSAN storage clusters

• VMware vDefend: This advanced service for VCF provides built-in threat detection and response, zone- and application-level micro-segmentation, distributed lateral security, reduced attack surface, and zero trust enforcement across VCF environments. With VCF 9.0, vDefend has added self-service microsegmentation; VPC-aware lateral security with delegated administration; VCF Import integration to streamline transition of existing vDefend deployments into VCF 9.0; and global IDS/IPS policy management for consistent threat defense policies across multi-site VCF deployments.​ (Read the news blog here.)

• VMware Data Services Manager (DSM): As an advanced service for VCF, DSM 9.0 currently provides enterprise support for PostgreSQL and MySQL, and is now in Tech Preview with Microsoft SQL Server​. New integration with VCF Automation enables IT teams to deliver database as a service (DBaaS), while additional DSM enhancements increase the operational efficiency for large database fleet management.

• Avi Load Balancer: This service provides plug-and-play load balancing services for VM and Kubernetes workloads with built-in global server load balancer (GSLB), application health and latency analytics, and web application firewall (WAF). With VCF 9.0, Avi Load Balancer now supports load balancing as self-service, streamlined operations and lifecycle management, and VPC-aware deployments. Read the news blog here.

Partner Ecosystem Commentary

“AMD and VMware continue to push the boundaries of enterprise infrastructure. The latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 builds on our shared vision to deliver solutions with great performance, exceptional total cost of ownership, and advanced security with AMD EPYC™ processors featuring SEV-SNP. Customers can confidently and efficiently scale modern workloads—from virtualisation to AI—across secure hybrid cloud environments.”

– Raghu Nambiar, Corporate Vice President, Silicon Design Engineering at AMD

“Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is a fully managed VCF service that provides customers the flexibility to combine VMware Cloud Foundation private clouds with the scale and flexibility of Azure. As customers adopt the latest innovations in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, they will be able to take advantage of Microsoft’s support for VCF license portability to extend VMware workloads to Azure as is, with minimal to no refactoring, and benefit from the continuity, scale, and fast provisioning for VMware workloads on global Azure infrastructure.”

– Brett Tanzer, Vice President, Product Management for the Azure Solutions and Ecosystem Team

“As organisations face increasing demands for data security, control and scalability, they’re turning to Dell Technologies to help them easily build private cloud environments. VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 on Dell infrastructure will deliver a private cloud solution that eliminates IT silos, reduces risk and boosts operational efficiency.”
– Gil Shneorson, Senior Vice President, Solutions Platform at Dell Technologies

“Our strong partnership with Broadcom is key to delivering the latest VMware innovations on Google Cloud. With VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, we’re particularly excited about the unified interface for private cloud operations, which streamlines management, and the frictionless cloud consumption experience, which empowers both platform and development teams. We look forward to bringing these advanced capabilities and more to Google Cloud VMware Engine, further enabling our customers to accelerate innovation and optimize their cloud environments.”

– Nirav Mehta, Vice President, Product Management at Google Cloud

“As enterprises embrace hybrid operating models, IT teams are under increasing pressure to modernize infrastructure without adding complexity or compromising on security and resilience. HPE GreenLake for VMware Cloud Foundation with VCF 9.0 will offer a co-engineered, validated solution with flexible consumption, multi-layered security and pre-integrated technology—all designed to streamline an organisation’s private cloud journey.”

– Rajeev Bhardwaj, Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Private Cloud and Flex Solutions, HPE