VMware Cracks -> VCF 9.0 Update

On June 17th 2025, VMware released VCF 9 (VMware Cloud Foundation). The first new release since Broadcom has taken over VMware. 

VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9) is the latest evolution of Broadcom’s flagship private cloud platform. It brings together compute, storage, networking, security, and cloud operations under a single, fully integrated stack. The goal is to deliver a consistent hybrid cloud experience, simplify operations through automation, and provide a secure foundation for both traditional enterprise workloads and modern AI-driven applications.

VCF 9 introduces major innovations in automation, resilience, efficiency, and governance while streamlining the way enterprises operate private clouds at scale. Below is a comprehensive breakdown of its capabilities, organized by domain.

Unified Operations and Lifecycle Management

One of the most important advances in VCF 9 is the introduction of a single, unified operational experience. In previous versions, lifecycle management was split across multiple tools, such as Cloud Builder and SDDC Manager. VCF 9 replaces these with the new VCF Installer and VCF Operations modules, which simplify setup and ongoing management.

  • Deployment Simplification: The new installer streamlines the process of standing up a VCF environment. It eliminates many of the manual prerequisites and provides guided wizards for creating workload domains, configuring infrastructure, and deploying clusters.
  • Fleet-wide Operations: With the VCF Operations dashboard, administrators can now see the health, compliance, and capacity of all managed environments in one view. This helps avoid the siloed operations that previously existed between clusters.
  • Consistent APIs and Policies: VCF 9 aligns operators and developers by exposing a unified API and policy engine. This ensures that automation scripts, blueprints, and policies work consistently across all domains.

Together, these changes reduce the operational overhead of managing large-scale private clouds and create a platform that feels much closer to the elasticity and simplicity of public cloud services.

Compute Enhancements

VCF 9 introduces major advances in compute efficiency, scalability, and security.

  • Advanced Memory Tiering: By automatically moving cold memory pages to NVMe devices while keeping active pages in DRAM, VCF 9 improves performance efficiency. This allows up to 40% greater VM density per server without sacrificing application performance.
  • Confidential Computing: Security-sensitive workloads benefit from support for Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP, which create trusted execution environments at the hardware level. This ensures memory and workload isolation even from privileged system software.
  • Scalability Improvements: Virtual hardware version 22 enables VMs with up to 960 vCPUs. This supports the most demanding workloads, such as real-time analytics or AI training jobs.
  • Kubernetes and Containers: Through the vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), VCF 9 treats Kubernetes as a first-class citizen. It supports both Linux and Windows containers, introduces VPC-based networking for clusters, and improves GPU-aware scheduling and live migration for ML/AI workloads.
  • Virtual Machine Flexibility: Enhancements include finer-grained namespace write protection, custom vTPM options for compliance workloads, and API-driven live guest customization.

These innovations make VCF 9 capable of running everything from traditional business applications to cutting-edge AI workloads with improved efficiency and stronger security guarantees.

Storage Advancements (vSAN)

Storage in VCF 9 is powered by an enhanced version of vSAN, which now offers higher resiliency, better data efficiency, and new disaster recovery capabilities.

  • Deep Snapshots with vSAN-to-vSAN Replication: Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) as low as 1 minute are now achievable, making vSAN a viable solution for business-critical disaster recovery scenarios.
  • Global Deduplication: By applying deduplication across an entire cluster, storage utilization is improved by up to 46% per terabyte, reducing hardware costs and power consumption.
  • Stretched Cluster Enhancements: The Express Storage Architecture (ESA) now supports stretched sites, allowing workloads to remain operational during multi-site failures.
  • Improved Network Isolation: Storage traffic can be separated from vSphere client management traffic, leading to greater flexibility and less contention for bandwidth.

Overall, these changes allow enterprises to build more cost-effective and resilient storage backbones within their private cloud.

Networking Innovations (NSX and VPC)

Networking in VCF 9 is redesigned around simplicity and performance.

  • Native Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): Administrators can now create isolated, software-defined networks directly from vCenter. This reduces dependence on VLANs, which are complex to scale, and simplifies tenant isolation.
  • Enhanced Data Path (EDP): NSX introduces performance improvements of up to 3x by optimizing packet processing. This makes the platform better suited for high-throughput, low-latency workloads such as large-scale AI training or financial trading applications.
  • Smooth VLAN-to-VPC Transition: Migration tools make it easier for enterprises to adopt VPC-based networking without disrupting existing services.

The networking enhancements not only reduce complexity but also deliver cloud-like flexibility and agility on-premises.

Security, Compliance, and Governance

VCF 9 introduces stronger security and compliance automation, recognizing that enterprise clouds must meet stringent regulatory and operational standards.

  • SecOps Dashboard: A centralized view provides real-time insight into compliance status, vulnerabilities, and security posture across all domains.
  • Continuous Compliance: Automated scans against CIS, NIST, and custom policies ensure that environments remain compliant. Drift from baselines is detected and corrected automatically.
  • Identity and Certificate Management: Federated identity, SSO, and automatic certificate renewal significantly reduce manual administrative effort.

These features make governance more proactive and reduce the risks associated with manual compliance checks.

Cost Visibility and Self-Service Consumption

Cloud economics are brought into the private data center with VCF 9.

  • Cost Dashboards: Native chargeback and showback reporting allows IT to allocate costs fairly to business units or tenants.
  • Predictive Analytics: Built-in tools forecast future resource usage and costs, while identifying underutilized assets for optimization.
  • Blueprint-Based Self-Service: Developers gain access to curated blueprints that let them deploy infrastructure on demand while still adhering to IT governance policies.

This aligns private cloud consumption with the familiar cloud operating model of hyperscalers, improving transparency and user experience.

Advanced Services and AI Integration

VCF 9 goes beyond traditional virtualization to embrace AI and modern data services.

  • Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA: Enterprises can deploy AI infrastructure with GPU-as-a-Service, vGPU reservations, data indexing, and AI agent-building capabilities. This enables secure AI training and inference in a private cloud without exposing data to external providers.
  • Data Services Manager (DSM): Database operations are streamlined with DSM, which provides lifecycle management for workloads such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server. This centralizes data management and ensures consistency across environments.

These capabilities position VCF 9 as a foundation not just for legacy modernization, but also for future innovation.

Summary

VMware Cloud Foundation 9 delivers a modernized, cloud-like private infrastructure platform. It improves deployment, scales workloads more efficiently, strengthens compliance and security, and enables enterprises to embrace advanced AI workloads with confidence.

In short, VCF 9 is designed to:

  1. Simplify operations with a unified lifecycle and automation experience.
  2. Increase efficiency in compute, storage, and networking.
  3. Strengthen governance and compliance with built-in security frameworks.
  4. Deliver cost transparency and self-service capabilities.
  5. Provide a foundation for advanced AI and data workloads.

This makes it a strategic platform for enterprises seeking to balance agility, control, and security in a hybrid cloud world.

Further information sources

Training & Information

Product Documentation

Licensing

Cheers

Dudi

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