Run Modern, AI, and Traditional Apps Better with vSphere in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

Building private cloud infrastructure is a key priority, but complexity in evolving IT environments often slows progress. Organizations must support legacy applications while adopting modern, containerized workloads, leading to fragmented systems and inefficiencies. At the same time, rising threats, evolving regulations, and the need for consistent compliance across environments put added pressure on IT teams. Limited budgets and a shortage of skilled personnel require smarter use of existing resources, automation, and a focus on reducing total cost of ownership. To overcome these challenges, IT leaders must align infrastructure strategies with business goals through simplification, integration and better security.

vSphere, the industry leading virtualization platform, was created to tackle these challenges head-on, purpose-built to meet the demands of today’s dynamic application landscape. As the enterprise workload engine powering VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), vSphere enables organizations to run both modern, cloud-native apps and traditional, business-critical workloads with consistent performance, availability, and control. New advancements in infrastructure services—such as minimal Day 0 Supervisor configuration, independently upgradable Supervisor, and enhanced VM Service capabilities—make it easier than ever for IT teams to support developers and scale containerized applications alongside virtual machines. For modern workloads like AI/ML, vSphere introduces performance-focused innovations, including Zero Downtime for vGPU vMotion, NVMe Memory Tiering, and Monster VM scale, helping ensure that demanding applications run efficiently and reliably. At the same time, vSphere strengthens security and compliance with features like Live Patching, TLS 1.3, FIPS 140-2 compliance, and Confidential Computing, delivering proactive protection and aligning with industry standards right out of the box.

Today, we are excited to announce the latest updates to vSphere with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 and VMware vSphere Foundation 9.0.

Top Highlights of new capabilities in vSphere

Modernize Compute Infrastructure

Smarter Memory with NVMe Memory Tiering

Big data, video streaming, and e-commerce platforms all demand fast access to large volumes of data—and vSphere rises to the challenge with NVMe Memory Tiering.

With this new feature, you can expand memory capacity on your ESXi hosts by using locally installed NVMe devices as a secondary memory tier. The system intelligently decides where to store VM memory—keeping the most performance-sensitive workloads in fast DRAM while offloading the rest to NVMe. The result? Improved memory efficiency and reduced costs.

This boost in available memory helps balance CPU-to-memory ratios, allowing for more VMs per host, better workload consolidation, and higher CPU utilization—all while cutting down on DRAM costs. In fact, you can see up to 19% fewer cores needed and 20–25% of memory accesses offloaded, translating to real savings of upto 40% for server consolidation.

Simplify Networking with Native VPCs in vCenter

Interconnecting applications just got a whole lot easier. With native support for NSX Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs),built right into vSphere, deep specialization is not required to take advantage of modern, cloud-like flexible networking and security.

Admins can use deep role-based access control to delegate as much or as little of network configuration to application teams, and to have visibility into network topology, address assignments, connected workloads, and more.

Integration between NSX and vSphere Configuration Profiles means that ESX, Virtual Distributed Switch, and NSX configurations are synchronized and managed cluster-wide, eliminating sources of friction, performance and connectivity loss, and saving time.

Other Features:

Smaller Maintenance Windows, Bigger Gains with RDU Enhancements

vSphere makes it easier for admins to stay up-to-date with shorter maintenance windows, enabling faster access to the latest vCenter features and security enhancements. Updates can be applied sooner and with lower risk, helping address vulnerabilities quickly. And if something goes wrong, built-in rollback capabilities allow admins to safely revert to a previous version—keeping operations smooth and stress-free.

Built for the Biggest Workloads: Monster VM and Next-Gen CPU Support

vSphere is built to handle massive workloads with support for AMD Turin/Venice and Intel Sapphire Rapids, scaling up to 960 cores per socket. Monster VMs can now support up to 960 vCPUs, enabling better workload consolidation and power efficiency for demanding apps like SAP HANA.

Power Modern Workloads

With release 9.0, vSphere introduces powerful Kubernetes and Supervisor services enhancements – all designed to simplify operations and boost flexibility for modern apps. For a deeper dive into these Kubernetes features, check out our dedicated blog post below.

Faster Kubernetes Start with Minimal Supervisor Setup

You can now spin up a basic Supervisor cluster with minimal input—perfect for getting started quickly. Over time, you can build on this setup by adding more advanced features like load balancing, control plane scaling, and workload networking as your needs grow.

This change significantly lowers the Day 0 design burden and lets you evolve your deployment at your own pace.

Simpler Operations with Decoupled Supervisor Upgrades

The Supervisor can now be upgraded independently of vSphere or vCenter. This decoupling allows for quicker access to Kubernetes updates without touching your core infrastructure—cutting down on complexity and helping teams move faster.

Accelerate GenAI Workload Mobility with Zero Downtime for vGPU vMotion

Managing AI workloads just got a major upgrade. With vSphere in VCF 9.0, vMotion is now up to 6x faster for GPU-powered workloads—resulting in zero downtime during VM lifecycle events running on GPUs. Thanks to faster GPU memory transmission over high-bandwidth networks and secure, accelerator-backed data transfers (like Intel QAT), you can now migrate AI and inferencing workloads with minimal disruption. It’s a big win for performance, reliability, and production-readiness in GenAI environments.

Other Features:

More Flexibility with VM Service Enhancements

Deploy VMs from ISO: Admins can add ISO files to content libraries, and users can deploy VMs from those files within their namespace—simple and fast.
Easily Resize VMs: No need to redeploy—just switch to a different VM class and adjust CPU/memory as needed.
Advanced Backup/Restore: Use familiar third-party tools (like Veeam or Rubrik) to perform backup and restore operations with VADP-based workflows.

Enable Security and Compliance

Stay Protected and agile with additional enhancements for Live Patching for ESX

Gone are the days of taking hosts offline for security updates. Live Patching, first introduced in 8U3 is now expanded, so you can apply critical ESXi updates without disrupting workloads or putting hosts into maintenance mode.

This feature ensures your infrastructure stays secure with rapid, reliable patching that supports upgrades for key components like NSX, vSAN, and the vmkernel. And if anything goes wrong, built-in contextual help in the UI helps you quickly address the issue or switch to Maintenance Mode if needed.

Figure 5: Live Patching for ESX

Confidential Computing

vSphere has long been a leader in protecting data in transit and at rest, with easy-to-use and easy-to-manage standards-based encryption. vSphere with VCF 9.0 takes a step further, expanding on support for hardware-based confidential computing technologies to protect data while it is in use. Using AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX technologies, vSphere with VCF 9.0 creates Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) that isolate and attest the integrity of workloads, helping to ensure that a workload’s data remains private no matter what happens with other workloads on the platform.

TEEs encrypt data in memory and CPU registers while workloads are running, creating a protected environment with strong boundaries between VMs, and between VMs and the hypervisor. VM memory remains encrypted and unreadable to outside entities, protecting against physical attacks on memory, prevents other VMs from accessing your data, and guarding against threats in shared environments. Organizations can verify that these TEEs are genuine and intact before running sensitive workloads.

This first phase of Broadcom’s Confidential Computing initiative in VCF 9.0 is available via RPQ, providing organizations with enhanced protection for their critical data.

Summary

vSphere in VCF 9.0 delivers a powerful set of enhancements designed to modernize infrastructure, boost performance, and strengthen security across traditional and AI-driven workloads. From NVMe Memory Tiering and Monster VM support to faster vMotion, Kubernetes improvements, and Confidential Computing, this release equips enterprises with the tools to run today’s most demanding applications with greater efficiency and confidence.

Learn more about vSphere at:

***

Ready to get hands-on with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0? Dive into the newest features in a live environment with Hands-on Labs that cover platform fundamentals, automation workflows, operational best practices, and the latest vSphere functionality for VCF 9.0.