Deliver the modern private cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

Broadcom has announced 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 centres, edge, and managed cloud infrastructure from service providers and hyperscalers.

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 VP and GM, VCF Division, 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 9.0 boasts a completely new architecture that empowers IT admins and application teams to accomplish more and spend less, Broadcom said. 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 introduces a unified interface for cloud administrators, offering a holistic view of private cloud operations. 

- The new Quick Start App reduces setup time and complexity. 

- Integrated cost management and policy enforcement enable 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 fast*, allowing for rapid response. 

- Advanced analytics help administrators understand workload behaviour, enabling targeted responses for security and performance optimisation.

Frictionless cloud consumption 

VCF 9.0 offers a unified interface for platform and development teams, simplifying infrastructure service delivery and consumption. Platform teams can effectively organise, 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. 

- Preconfigured blueprints simplify provisioning, lessen manual tasks, and guarantee repeatable, compliant infrastructure. 

- Developers gain access to automated and elastic self-service infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services.

Unified virtual machine (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 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/machine learning (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 total cost of ownership (TCO) perspective. Additionally, built-in analytics enable predictive cost modelling for effective infrastructure planning and forecasting, helping organisations avoid unforeseen financial challenges. 

- Automated resource optimization dynamically reclaims underutilised capacity to enhance workload efficiency and prevent unnecessary infrastructure sprawl. 

- 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.

Other highlights include: 

- 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 metal*** while providing the ability to support zero-downtime vMotion for AI applications.

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 multitenancy 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 deployments, VMware Live Recovery now delivers increased data sovereignty through an on-premises isolated clean room / recovery environment (IRE) for cyberrecovery (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 service 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; virtual private cloud (VPC)-aware lateral security with delegated administration; VCF Import integration to streamline transition of existing vDefend deployments into VCF 9.0; and global intrusion detection system/intrusion prevention system (IDS/IPS) policy management for consistent threat defense policies across multisite VCF deployments.

- VMware Data Services Manager (DSM): 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. 

“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,” said Raghu Nambiar, Corporate VP, Silicon Design Engineering, AMD. SEV-SNP stands for Secure Encrypted Virtualisation - Secure Nested Paging.

“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,” shared Brett Tanzer, VP, 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,” said Gil Shneorson, Senior VP, Solutions Platform, 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 optimise their cloud environments,” added Nirav Mehta, VP, Product Management, Google Cloud.

“As enterprises embrace hybrid operating models, IT teams are under increasing pressure to modernise 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, multilayered security and pre-integrated technology—all designed to streamline an organisation's private cloud journey,” said Rajeev Bhardwaj, VP and Chief Product Officer, Private Cloud and Flex Solutions, HPE.

“VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 on Intel Xeon 6 platforms brings new levels of cost optimisation and advanced security to the modern private cloud. With greater hardware consolidation and Intel TDX enabling confidential computing, our mutual customers can lower total cost of ownership, enhance trust and data protection, and accelerate their AI adoption,” commented Greg Ernst, CVP, Sales and Marketing Group, Intel. TDX are Trust Domain Extensions.

“Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, a co-engineered solution with VMware Cloud Foundation, enables enterprises to implement a hybrid cloud environment using a turnkey solution for faster deployments, seamless lifecycle management and full-stack monitoring with Lenovo XClarity. Built on trusted Lenovo servers that are reliable and secure, this workload-ready solution is tested, optimised and validated for compliance to handle various workloads, including demanding AI projects. 

"With VCF 9.0, Lenovo will offer customers a unified platform for all applications, blending public cloud agility with on-premises security and resilience,” noted Stuart McRae, Executive Director and GM, Data Storage Solutions, Lenovo ISG.

“Enterprises building AI factories need solutions for integrating AI into the heart of their operations. VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA fast-tracks enterprise AI deployments with a secure, full-stack platform for building, customising and running AI models, agents and applications,” said John Fanelli, VP, Enterprise AI Software at NVIDIA.

*Based on internal Broadcom engineering estimates or test results, subject to change. March 2025.

**VSAN Global Dedupe requires a request for price quotation (RPQ). Contact account team for details.

***MLPerf Inference v5 Benchmark results, April 2025.