VMware Cloud Foundation Products

What’s New in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

As of today, VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is generally available.

For years, digital transformation was framed as a binary choice: move fast in the public cloud or retain control on-prem — often at the cost of agility, mounting complexity, and technical debt. That tradeoff no longer makes sense.

Modern workloads, especially AI and data-intensive applications, are forcing a new reality. Petabyte-scale datasets can’t just be shuffled between regions. Regulatory mandates increasingly require critical workloads to remain within sovereign borders. And the sticker and cost shock of “pay-as-you-go” cloud models is catching up with finance teams across industries.

With VCF 9.0, we’re redefining what a modern private cloud can be — combining the speed and flexibility of the cloud experience with the performance, governance, and cost control enterprises need on-prem.

When done right, a private cloud:

  • Treats servers, storage, and networks as fluid software pools of resources;
  • Gives developers self-service APIs instead of ticket queues.
  • Runs VMs, containers, and emerging AI services side-by-side as first class citizens.
  • Extends consistently from core to edge to sovereign facilities without policy sprawl
  • Bakes in audit-ready security and offers compliance guardrails that follow the workload no matter where it runs

We first pulled back the curtain on VCF 9.0 at VMware Explore last year, then spent the months since putting it through real-world beta trials and deployment design workshops with many of our customers. The result is a release that is the next major leap forward on VMware’s private-cloud journey – with 25 years since the invention of the hypervisor, VMware Cloud Foundation stands on the shoulders of a long history of innovation at VMware.

The Fundamental Shift in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

Every major version of Cloud Foundation has pushed automation farther up the stack. Version 9.0 draws a clear line in the sand: private-cloud operations and private-cloud consumption are now the central part of the product while operating on top of our core innovation that our customers have learned to love and rely on.

At the heart of this release is a unification of context. Whether you are troubleshooting a capacity warning, onboarding a new tenant, or publishing an infrastructure template for CI/CD, you work from the same policy model, the same API surface, and the same lifecycle engine. That consistency trims learning curves for operators, removes friction for developers, and—crucially—reduces the points of failure that appear when separate tools drift out of sync.

  • One Interface to Private Cloud Operations – Fleet-wide health, patching, and compliance from one console, so operational decisions rely on a common view of truth.
  • One Interface for a Cloud Consumption Experience – Developers hit one endpoint for IaC—Terraform providers, REST APIs, or VCF Automation blueprints—without the need to juggle add-ons.
  • Run VMs and Containers/K8s – Run bare-metal-fast VMs and fully-managed Kubernetes side-by-side. Integrated Argo CD and native CI/CD hooks push container code from repo to production with no external scaffolding.
  • Sovereign and Secure as a Platform – Data-residency tags, geo-fencing policies, and automated certificate rotation can now be a part of every cluster spec. Sovereign doesn’t just mean on premises, it means the ability to deploy with guardrails, to understand where the data lives to be able to control it, to protect it and ensure that every cluster is constantly compliant with sovereign rules.
  • Embedded Cost Control – Chargeback, showback, cost management and predictability dashboards turn resource consumption into invoice-ready numbers for each tenant or business unit. This is not simply showback – this is the ability for business leaders to budget, constraint, contract and expand infrastructure based on cost insights that are based directly on the existing deployment and correlated with consumption.

This evolution in VMware Cloud Foundation isn’t just a step forward — it’s a redefinition of what a modern private cloud platform can be. VCF 9.0 introduces critical advancements across deployment, operations, performance, and security, all built to meet the real-world demands of enterprise environments. The result is a platform that not only simplifies infrastructure management but also creates space for innovation, faster execution, and stronger governance.

What’s New in VCF 9.0: Platform Advancements That Deliver Real Outcomes

VCF 9.0 brings a set of foundational innovations that accelerate time to value, streamline day-to-day operations, and help organizations scale with confidence. From the new Operations Console to advancements in data protection, automation, and performance optimization, each feature is designed to address today’s infrastructure challenges — and prepare you for what comes next.

Until now we’ve focused on the broad platform changes that define VCF 9.0. Let’s step a level deeper. In the next few section we’ll look at two sets of updates:

  1. Core platform innovations that keep building on the strong foundation of VCF such as improving performance, data protection, and resource efficiency.
  2. Outcome-driven features that apply those advances to day-to-day operations, grouped under Modern Infrastructure, Unified Cloud Experience, and Secure & Resilient.

Innovation in the Core

The total amount of new features in the core far exceeds what we have on this slide. But let’s talk about some of the most important ones for a moment:

  • Advanced NVMe Memory Tiering – High-frequency trading engines, in-memory analytics, and JVM-heavy apps all hit the same wall: DRAM is expensive and finite. VCF 9.0 lets you extend the memory pool with NVMe—treating fast flash as a second, lower-cost tier. Compute-intensive workloads keep their working sets close to the CPU while cold pages move to NVMe, freeing DRAM for what truly needs it. You squeeze more VMs or containers per host without committing more budget to your hardware provider.
  • vSAN Global Deduplication – Flash remains the cost driver in most private clouds. Global block-level dedupe now spans clusters, not just disks, carving out duplicate data once and sharing the savings everywhere else. You protect and serve larger datasets on the same flash footprint—and you do it without the performance penalties typical of post-process dedupe engines.
  • Enhanced Data Paths – Latency is the tax you pay on east-west chatty workloads—especially AI pipelines and micro-service meshes. New kernel optimisations and optional DPU offload flatten that tax. Packets stay on-host longer, traversing fewer switch hops, which means inference jobs finish faster and API response times stay predictable even as cluster density climbs. In many cases, it’s the difference between needing a spine-leaf refresh this year or next.

But it’s not just about features. VCF 9.0 and its core are incredibly well fit for your efficiency and cost reduction objectives. Check out these fantastic stats when you start deploying your infrastructure on 9.0:

Modern Infrastructure Features

With VCF9.0 being more about a centralized, single-interface experience, one of the first changes you’ll notice is in the way you interact with your environment.

VCF Operations is your home base for day-to-day troubleshooting, deployments and overall diagnostics. It ties into all our beloved core features but it also makes things like Fleet Management – from upgrades to patching to certificate rotation incredibly easy. 

Now let’s briefly cover some of these Modern Infrastructure features:

  • VCF Installer – Day-0 deployment of the full stack—in hours, not weeks. 
  • Easy Tenant Deployment & Management – Wizard-driven workload domains and tenant policy templates.
  • Performant Fleet Management – Roll out patches to thousands of hosts with predictive pre-checks and phased blast-radius controls. Certificate management, configuration drift, live patching, single sign-on. All in one place.
  • Enhanced Diagnostic Routines – AI-assisted log correlation pinpoints root causes before tickets escalate.
  • Cost / Chargeback / Showback – Real-time cost meters expose resource spend to each line of business.

Unified Cloud Experience

If infrastructure modernization is all about infrastructure that is “easy to work with”, modern, performant and incredibly scalable, unified cloud experience focuses on giving you that public cloud experience with all the guardrails and comforts of a private cloud deployment. And again, we wanted to bring you a single pane of glass experience when it comes to automation.

Unified cloud experience is for cloud admins and for developers alike. Cloud and IT admins can both set up infrastructure consumption but also make it easier to execute day-to-day tasks – such as configuring new VMs or setting up a single Kubernetes pod. Developers however, can take advantage of an easy-to-use interface where they can get the services they need with all the relevant dependencies. This saves time and friction, while delivering for the business.

Whether it’s a Self-Service Catalog experience that you’re looking to build to curate for your business customers, or simply IaC, VCF Automation is at the heart of it. Leverage blueprints to create, duplicate, and consistently deploy and consume infrastructure resources and start speaking a common language with your developers.

  • VCF Automation Consumption Experience – One open API (plus Terraform / GitOps) handles every provision request, carrying policy and cost tags with it—self-service speed, zero governance drift.
  • Simplified Cloud Networking & VPC Consumption – Workload teams declare a VPC in code; routing, load balancing, and security spin up automatically—no fabric deep-dive, no ticket queue.
  • Out-of-the-Box Self-Service Catalog,IaC, and VKS cluster management – Pre-built blueprints for DBs, AI stacks, and K8s clusters launch in minutes; teams tweak variables, hit deploy, and inherit audit-ready consistency.

Secure, Sovereign and Resilient

Security is top of mind for a lot of customers, especially as threats are becoming increasingly harder to track, stop or sometimes even prevent. The security chains are becoming longer, and easier to break.

So now more than ever, you need a strong security play that starts with your core platform, and all the way towards your applications, your endpoints and edge.

Let’s go through these features:

  • Security Operations Dashboard: A single console overlays live attack-surface maps with real-time compliance scores, giving SecOps one place to spot vulnerabilities, prioritise patches, and verify remediation before an audit does.
  • Configuration Compliance & Monitoring – Always-on scans compare runtime settings against CIS, NIST, and custom baselines, flagging drift the moment it appears and—where policy allows—auto-correcting it, so audits become reviews rather than fire drills.
  • Identity & Certificate Management – Platform-wide identity federation plus hands-free certificate issuance and rotation eliminate manual trust upkeep, preventing the midnight scramble over expired certs and ensuring frictionless SSO across every workload domain.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 redefines private cloud with faster deployment, built-in automation, and a unified cloud experience on-prem. Security and resiliency are integrated at every layer, while core innovations like NVMe tiering and global deduplication boost efficiency at scale. It’s the foundation enterprises need to run modern workloads with control, performance, and cost transparency.

This overview shows how VCF 9.0 advances the platform at both the engine-room and user-experience levels. If you’d like to drill further into the details, these additional blogs unpack each technology area that makes VCF the flagship platform that it is:

Advanced Services

Other Reads

Read them in any order—or dive straight into the hands-on lab to see VCF 9.0 in action. As always, feedback from the customers and partners  shape our R&D investment, so let us know what resonates and what you’d like to see next.

Also, 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.\

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Sabina Anja

Sabina Anja, Senior Technology Product Lead for VMware Cloud Foundation, is on a mission to drive enterprise change and innovate infrastructure solutions. With over two decades in tech, she co-founded…

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