Broadcom today made generally available its VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 platform, which the company says will provide enterprises with a more secure, predictable, and cost-efficient infrastructure, enabling organizations to consolidate data centers and modernize their IT operations.
First announced at VMware Explore in 2024, VCF 9.0 offers enterprises a unified platform that supports traditional, modern, and AI applications with consistent operations and controls across a private cloud environment, according to Broadcom. Now available, VCF 9.0 can help organizations looking to bring cloud workloads back into a private environment, which enterprises are considering more now, recent Broadcom survey results show.
Broadcom’s Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report indicates that a majority of enterprises will strike a balance between private and public clouds, with a focus on developing new workloads within private clouds. The survey found that 93% deliberately balance a mix of private and public clouds, and their top three-year priority is building new workloads in private clouds. The results also show that 69% are considering repatriating workloads from public cloud to private, with more than one-third (35%) already having done so. In addition, 84% run both traditional and cloud-native applications in private cloud environments.
“Private cloud is not a location, but an operating model for our customers. We’re resetting the bar on what a good private cloud platform needs to look like in the industry. We’re catering to two key personas: the cloud admins who build and operate infrastructure, and the developers who need frictionless, self-service experience to run their applications,” said Pranshanth Shenoy, vice president of product marketing at the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) division at Broadcom, during a press conference sharing the VCF 9.0 news.
VCF 9.0 provides cloud administrators with a unified interface and a new Quick Start app that can help reduce setup time and complexity, according to Broadcom. The platform includes single-pane management, automated lifecycle management, as well as fleet-level upgrades and patching. Centralized identity and access management, including single sign-on, password policies, and certificates, provides consistency across environments, the company says. VCF 9.0 also offers self-service options and insights into resource usage for better planning and optimization of cloud spend, according to VMware.
“Infrastructure is a means to an end, and the end being running your most critical business application. We provide a seamless, frictionless developer experience where they can request an infrastructure service and be able to provision it in a matter of seconds, rather than waiting for it for weeks and months to deliver,” Shenoy explained.
Early adopters say VCF 9.0 helps remove IT silos that cause issues in managing infrastructure and enables easier security patching across environments.
“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 and data, at GCI Communications, in a statement. “By delivering on ‘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 possible in the public cloud. We are doing these things in our modern private cloud.”
Broadcom is also delivering private cloud solutions with its release of VCF 9.0. Among the new offerings is VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, a joint AI platform solution from Broadcom and Nvidia that offers improved cybersecurity with air-gap support as well as GPU-as-a-Service with multi-tenancy support for AI workloads. It also offers vGPU profile visibility to eliminate manual tracking and improved utilization with enhanced GPU and vGPU monitoring capabilities, among other features.
Broadcom also announced VMware Live Recovery, which delivers an on-premises isolated clean room/recovery environment for cyber recovery in the event of a natural disaster or malicious attack. This service provides up to 200 immutable snapshots per virtual machine enabled by native replication and more efficient scaling through the ability to expand storage independently of compute with vSAN storage clusters, the company said. Other new services include:
- VMware vDefend: 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.
- VMware Data Services Manager (DSM): Delivers enterprise support for PostgreSQL and MySQL and integration with VCF Automation enables IT teams to deliver databased as a service (DBaaS).
- Avi Load Balancer: Offers plug-and-play load balancing services for VM and Kubernetes workloads with a build-in global server load balancer (GSLB). It also now supports load balancing as a self-service.
VCF 9.0 is generally available now.
Source:: Network World