Broadcom is officially announcing the General Availability of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0. This significant release will be available starting June 17, 2025.
VCF 9.0 marks a major milestone in our commitment to empower our VMware Cloud Service Providers (VCSPs) with a unified, modern cloud infrastructure platform that is purpose built for today’s enterprise IT demands. VCF 9.0 introduces improved performance, simplified lifecycle management, and deeper integration across the VMware stack enabling you to deliver consistent, scalable, and high-value cloud services to your customers across private and hybrid cloud environments.
What is VMware Cloud Foundation?
VMware Cloud Foundation is a unified private-cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platform, combining the scalability and agility of public cloud with the security and performance of private cloud. It delivers unmatched operational simplicity, increased productivity, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). A key game changer is its enhanced lifecycle and license management, which streamlines operations and simplifies ongoing management.
Why VMware Cloud Foundation for VMware Cloud Service Providers?
VMware Cloud Service Providers (VCSP) delivering VMware Cloud Foundation based managed services empower enterprises to modernize their IT estates while maintaining operational continuity and strategic flexibility. These managed services are more than operational support, they are a force multiplier for customer transformation, allowing IT teams to focus on innovation while trusted experts handle the complexity of multicloud operations, security, compliance, and performance optimization.
When companies require strong, reliable, cloud solutions that also scale and are flexible, VCF is a key technology that organizations can use to establish a solid and reputable private cloud. Together with support from VMware Cloud Service Providers , VCF will redefine cloud operating models and deliver a more secure future by providing customers with the management agility and capacity for growth they need to address the three C challenges at operational scale.
The Sweet Spot of Organizational Success
The optimal use case for VCF for the VCSP is providing fully managed enterprise-level cloud services that offer customers the control and consistency of a private cloud platform and the flexibility and scalability of a public cloud platform. Powered by a consistent VMware infrastructure stack, VCF drives a true cloud operating model for VCSP which is perfectly suited to their customers’ needs of regulated, complex, or legacy workloads. For example, customers that need to maintain data sovereignty and strict compliance or local data jurisdiction, or those wanting to modernize their traditional applications without significant refactoring.
VCF enables VCSPs to create secure, hardware based multitenant environments with policy-based control and simplified life cycle management via the VMware Cloud Foundation Operations. Leveraging its native automation and its standardized operational framework across compute, storage, and networking, VCF is a natural fit for sovereign cloud use cases to public sector customers, hybrid cloud extensions for enterprises, Private AI for Modern apps use cases, etc.
Together, VCF along with the advanced services like Private AI, Disaster Recovery, Advanced Security, Load Balancing, Container Operations, Data Services and Workload automation elevate the functionality of private clouds, enabling organizations to excel in today’s digital landscape.
VCSPs already using VMware Cloud Foundation
VMware Cloud Foundation is already a material contributor to VCSP recurring revenue streams and underpins their sustained double-digit growth in managed-services business. By collapsing compute, storage, networking, security and lifecycle automation into a single subscription stack and enabling customer license portability across on-premises, sovereign and hyperscale endpoints VCF lets providers bring new services to market faster, deepen customer engagement with self-service and AI-ready data offerings, and run leaner operations through higher staff productivity and infrastructure utilization. As enterprises standardize on hybrid-cloud models, VCSP that align their portfolios to VCF gain a strategic control point for capturing emerging sovereign, compliance-sensitive and AI workloads while sustaining premium margins and predictable growth.
Key Benefits for VMware Cloud Service Providers:
With multi-tenant service delivery capabilities, VCF 9.0 empowers providers to efficiently support multiple customers on a shared infrastructure, significantly boosting scalability and resource optimization. This flexibility enables VCSP to offer a diverse array of cloud models, customized to align with each customer’s unique requirements.
By leveraging standardized deployments, VCSP ensures consistent, repeatable, and simplified setups that minimize complexity. VCF enhances this by providing a flexible, integrated platform that enables VCSP to build and deliver differentiated services, for example, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), and Kubernetes-based modern application platforms, tailored to specific customer needs. This opens up new monetization opportunities and allows providers to stand out in a competitive market.
Additionally, VCF prioritizes operational efficiency by providing comprehensive visibility into global performance, cost metrics, and system health, along with capabilities for chargeback, optimizing resources, and managing the full lifecycle.
These features enhance performance and reduce costs, enabling providers to achieve greater ROI while maintaining exceptional service delivery for their customers.
Why VMware Cloud Foundation is a Smart Investment for Your Business
Key benefits experienced by customers based on partner interviews. It shows a 60% increase in productivity for IT management staff based on one partner interview, reflecting improved operational efficiency. Additionally, customers saw a 45% boost in infrastructure utilization on average, based on two partner interviews, indicating better resource use and capacity planning. There was 31% savings on infrastructure on average compared to the customer’s prior solution, based on three partner interviews showcasing the platform’s cost-effectiveness. These outcomes underline the value of optimized cloud solutions in enhancing performance and reducing overhead.
Key Benefits for the VCSP Customers
VCSP led managed services are a critical entry point for account expansion and wallet share growth. Managed Services allow our VCSP partners to embed VCF based technologies deeper into customer environments while delivering value-added services that drive stickiness and annuity revenue. Some of core key benefits are:
- Bridge Skill and Resource Gaps: VCSP provides immediate access to VMware-certified talent and architectural expertise, reducing dependency on scarce internal resources.
- Optimize Cloud Infrastructure: Providers deliver highly tailored services across public, private, and hybrid environments, as well as in most cases delivering a higher rate of consolidation, whilst sustaining performance, SLAs and the ability to monitor energy consumption
- License Portability: Through VCSP, customers gain the flexibility to leverage existing VMware licenses, including those under subscription and term-based models, across multiple environments. This portability protects prior investments, accelerates onboarding into managed services, and reduces the friction associated with re-licensing or dual consumption models.
- Enhanced Security and Compliance for Regulated Clouds: VCSP are uniquely positioned to support verticals with high compliance demands, including healthcare, financial services, and government, by offering specialized regional controls, data sovereignty, and zero-trust operational practices. This offloads risk and cost while enabling faster audits and compliance reporting.
- Modern Public Cloud like Experience: VCF delivers a modern public cloud-like experience by combining automated infrastructure management, self-service capabilities, and seamless scalability. It enables organizations to run workloads with cloud agility while maintaining control and consistency across private and hybrid environments.
What’s New in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0?
VCF 9.0 introduces a host of new enhancements and innovations, with one of the most impactful being the unified user experience. This update brings a public cloud like experience to private cloud environments by seamlessly integrating previously siloed VMware products into a single, cohesive solution. The result is greater control, streamlined operations, and more efficient access to the full range of platform capabilities.
Notably, while many VCSPs have developed their self-service interfaces, VCF 9.0 presents an opportunity to evaluate whether to replace these custom portals or integrate them with the new, unified VCF UI, which offers a more consistent and modern user experience across the board.
Beyond the unified platform experience, VCF 9.0 delivers a host of powerful enhancements across networking, storage, and performance each designed to meet the demands of modern cloud environments.
- On the networking front, we’ve introduced faster, optimized data paths that significantly reduce latency and lower CPU overhead translating into smoother and more efficient operations and optimized application response.
- From a storage perspective, vSAN now features Global Deduplication, improving space efficiency and driving down the cost per TiB of storage.
- This release also sets a new benchmark in performance, delivering near bare-metalefficiency for Private AI workloads. Additionally, we’ve made major strides in GPU workload mobility, with enhanced vMotion for GPU-enabled VMs, now supporting near-zero downtime migrations.
- Another standout improvement is in NVMe memory tiering, which now leverages greater intelligence to boost performance while helping reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).
- Streamlined lifecycle and license management significantly enhances operational efficiency.
- VCF offers native multi-tenancy, allowing secure isolation of resources, users, and workloads within a shared infrastructure. This built-in capability enables service providers and enterprises to support multiple tenants efficiently while maintaining strong access controls and operational independence.
And this is just the beginning; each service within VCF 9.0 brings its own unique set of enhancements and capabilities, making this one of the most comprehensive and performance driven releases to date.
To explore the latest features, enhancements, and capabilities introduced in VCF 9.0, we encourage you to read our VCF 9.0: What’s New in VCF Automation blog post that covers most of the new features in this release.
VCF 9.0: The Opportunity Ahead for VCSP
With the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, the approach for VCSP naturally evolves, offering new opportunities that will require thoughtful planning. This release introduces a distinct model that calls for VCSPs to view adoption through a slightly different lens.
For now, VCSP are encouraged to continue supporting their existing customer environments without disruption, while also preparing for a parallel greenfield deployment of the new VCF platform. This approach enables providers to familiarize themselves with the updated platform architecture, features, and service delivery model gaining hands-on experience with VCF 9.0 in its fully integrated form.
Through this parallel deployment, VCSP can begin onboarding new customers and offer the new VCF-based services and add-ons, expanding their portfolio with enhanced capabilities and performance benefits.
Broadcom is actively working on a comprehensive and structured migration plan, which will provide clear guidance and best practices for transitioning existing customer workloads to the new VCF-based private cloud environment over time. This phased approach ensures continuity for current operations while paving the way for long-term modernization and service growth.
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