Engineering the Next Generation of VMware Cloud Foundation

The private cloud is entering a new era. The workloads our infrastructure must serve have shifted from traditional applications only to also include distributed systems, data-intensive analytics, and AI-driven models that demand unprecedented agility and scale. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) has always been about giving customers a single, integrated platform to build and operate their private cloud with consistency. But the requirements are evolving—and so must the platform.

And VMware Cloud Foundation isn’t just adapting to enterprise transformation – it’s leading it. VCFis the engine driving how modern businesses reimagine their infrastructure, applications, and data strategies. Each new innovation isn’t a reaction to where the industry is going—it sets the pace for what’s possible in the private cloud – whether it’s in a central datacenter, edge or in the hyperscaler environment. 

VCF 9.0 set the benchmark for the modern private cloud:

• Sovereign by Design – Data residency tags, geo-fencing, and automated certificate rotation to embed compliance into the platform.
• Operational Simplicity – New installer, unified fleet management, and streamlined lifecycle operations reduce deployment and maintenance overhead.
• Modern App Platform – vSphere Kubernetes Service and VM Service deliver VMs and containers side by side with GitOps-driven automation.
• Performance & Efficiency – NVMe memory tiering and global vSAN deduplication boost scale and flash efficiency at lower cost.
• Cost Transparency – Built-in showback/chargeback with predictive modeling turns infrastructure consumption into clear financial insight.

Missed it? What’s New In VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

VMware Cloud Foundation – The Platform For What’s Next

VCF 9.0 was just the beginning of that journey. We’re here to solve the next set of challenges that the world of IT needs to overcome. The friction between developers and IT, adopting Private AI and making AI workloads easy to consume on private cloud, and ensuring that end-to-end data resilience isn’t just about firewalls are three of our big initiatives post VCF 9.0

Infrastructure at the Speed of the Developer

Traditional infrastructure delivery has been built around IT’s timelines, demands and engineering standards, not the developer’s needs. While automation has advanced, most enterprises still face long provisioning cycles, manual ticket-based processes, and fragmented toolchains. Developers move quickly in the cloud-native world, but on-premises infrastructure often becomes the bottleneck. It’s the reason why so many of them chose the public cloud.

This mismatch creates friction: developers circumvent IT with shadow cloud usage, leading to security gaps, compliance risks, and inconsistent performance. Meanwhile, IT loses control and visibility. The result is inefficiency and frustration on both sides.

In our engineering journey, we’re building infrastructure that aligns directly with the way developers build and deploy software:

• Built-In Data Services: Developers need data services at their fingertips. With VCF’s Database-as-a-Service capabilities, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL can be provisioned in minutes, with lifecycle managed by policy. vSAN’s native S3 object storage extends that model, offering cloud-compatible storage natively integrated into the platform.
• GitOps-Driven App Delivery: By integrating ArgoCD with VCF, developers can push to Git and have applications and infrastructure deploy automatically. Policy-driven guardrails ensure IT maintains control without slowing down delivery. This means consistency across clusters, environments, and tenants—without manual intervention.
• Service Mesh with Istio: Modern applications depend on secure, observable communication between microservices. VCF integrates Istio to give developers deep observability and security without additional configuration, ensuring traffic is encrypted, visible, and controllable.
• Multi-Tenant Infrastructure and Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Automation: Enterprises increasingly operate across multiple clusters and availability zones. VCF’s automation ensures developers can deploy anywhere while IT enforces compliance and operational standards globally.

What does this mean for cloud admins and businesses?

• Engineering infrastructure at the speed of the developer is about more than convenience. It’s about alignment: elevating the private cloud experience to  a cloud native one while retaining enterprise-grade governance.

• For developers, it means fewer roadblocks, faster time to innovation, and autonomy to deliver value. For IT, it means infrastructure that remains secure, compliant, and cost-effective—without becoming a gatekeeper. This dual outcome is only possible because VCF unifies infrastructure and developer workflows into one platform.

Private AI as a Service

AI has moved from experimentation to production. Enterprises are no longer asking if they should invest in AI; the question is how to run it responsibly and at scale. Public cloud services provide convenience but raise concerns over data privacy, sovereignty, cost predictability, and compliance with regulatory requirements.

Running AI workloads on-premises addresses these concerns, but until now, it has required stitching together GPU resources, specialized frameworks, and bespoke deployment pipelines. The complexity of building and maintaining that stack has slowed enterprise adoption. Cloud and IT admins alike could afford to ignore the AI workloads problem.

We’re making VCF an AI-native platform, with infrastructure and services engineered specifically for modern AI workloads:

• GPU Optimization – New GPU vMotion with DRS, GPU Reservations, and multi-accelerator model runtime ensure GPUs are placed optimally and allocated predictably, avoiding wasted capacity and delivering better ROI.
• Extreme Networking for AI – Leveraging high-speed fabrics with NVIDIA ConnectX-7 and BlueField-3 DPUs, VCF ensures distributed training jobs and multi-node inference scale without bottlenecks.
• VCF Intelligent Assist – AI-powered platform insights help administrators plan, optimize, and secure their infrastructure for AI workloads automatically.
• AI Services for Developers – Pre-integrated services such as an OpenAI-compatible API, Agentic AI via Model Context Protocol, and multi-tenant model-as-a-service accelerate developer productivity while keeping enterprise guardrails in place.

Near Bare-Metal Performance – AI workloads run with virtualized efficiency close to raw hardware, preserving the performance that training and inference demand, without needing to give up the operational, scaling, and utilization benefits of virtualization.

Why this matters for IT Admins and Businesses:

AI is no longer an add-on—it’s becoming the foundation of modern enterprise applications and research. By making Private AI a native capability of VCF, and extending it with NVIDIA and AMD partnerships, we put AI at the core of the private cloud. This integration removes complexity, unifies infrastructure, and ensures enterprises can run AI with the performance, flexibility, sovereignty, and security they demand—on their own terms.

Taking It Further with VCF Advanced Cyber Compliance

VCF Advanced Cyber Compliance strengthens VMware Cloud Foundation with automated compliance enforcement, ransomware recovery, and enhanced incident response. It continuously monitors and remediates compliance across workloads and VCF, backed by managed, secure data engine images for audit-ready operations at scale.

For resilience, it adds automated malware detection, clean-room recovery with network isolation, and streamlined backup/restore workflows. Secure-by-design container images, advanced compute defenses, and proactive patching further reduce risk—ensuring enterprises stay compliant, resilient, and ready against evolving threats.

Why this matters for IT Admins and business leaders

Enterprises need more than snapshots and audits; they need a platform that treats compliance, security, and resilience as continuous, integrated outcomes. VCF ensures data is not only available and performant but also trustworthy, auditable, and recoverable in the face of sophisticated cyber threats.

The Path Forward

With VCF 9.0 we redefined the private cloud: sovereign by design, operationally simple, financially transparent, and ready for modern workloads. But the journey doesn’t stop there. Engineering the next generation of VCF means raising the bar across three critical fronts:

• Infrastructure at the Speed of the Developer – giving developers autonomy with guardrails while IT maintains enterprise control.
• Private AI as a Service – embedding AI as a first-class workload, with performance, flexibility, and ecosystem breadth to run it on enterprise terms.
• Cyber-Resilient Data – ensuring security, compliance, and resilience are continuous outcomes of the platform, with the option to take them even further.

Together, these pillars ensure that VMware Cloud Foundation doesn’t just keep pace with enterprise transformation—it drives it. By unifying developer velocity, AI innovation, and cyber-resilient trust, VCF delivers a platform where CIOs and CISOs share a common foundation: one that enables innovation at scale, protects the organization’s most valuable assets, and positions the private cloud as the engine of business transformation.