VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) is a robust compute and storage virtualization platform. It simplifies workflows, improves operational efficiency, and provides a solid foundation for your virtualized workloads.
The ever-evolving IT ecosystem demands increased agility, lower TCO, support for AI, container-based applications, edge security, and data sovereignty. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is the platform that builds upon VVF’s strengths to meet these demands.
Upgrading from VVF to VCF unlocks powerful benefits that streamline operations, bolster security, increase developer productivity, and deliver a public cloud experience on-premises.
What is VMware Cloud Foundation?
A unified private cloud platform, VCF combines the scale and agility of a public cloud with the security and performance of a private cloud, while delivering increased productivity and lower TCO.
VCF streamlines enterprise operations by providing a unified platform that automates the management of compute, storage, networking, and security, increasing efficiency, scalability, and agility across the environment. With automated infrastructure and intelligent operations, organizations can manage, track environment trends and forecast expansion needs.
It also accelerates innovation through delivery of a self-service IaaS platform that offers a modern cloud interface to run VMs, container-based applications, and AI workloads. With built-in security and resiliency, VCF helps safeguard your business, ensure business continuity, and free up teams to focus on innovation and critical business initiatives.
From an HCI Platform to Complete Private Cloud
VVF provides an excellent starting point for an HCI platform. However, the complete integration of the infrastructure is built into VCF. Starting with integrated networking, full-stack automation, and visibility needed to build, operate, and consume a private cloud. The upgrade path is an evolution, not a replacement. Let’s compare the features included in each platform:
Five Benefits of Upgrading to VCF
Upgrading to VCF provides tangible advantages that address business and technical challenges.
1. Greater Operational Efficiency
One of the most time-consuming tasks for IT is lifecycle management. Manually patching and updating an IT environment is a lengthy and complex process. It also introduces significant risks, such as leaving systems exposed to attack, creating software version inconsistency, and causing accidental service outages.
VCF’s Fleet Management feature solves this problem by automating full-stack lifecycle management. This dramatically simplifies the update process, reduces risk, and can cut operational overhead by up to 60%, as per a VMware Cloud Foundation TCO study in 2025.
Beyond updates, managing infrastructure in separate silos creates operational blind spots. When performance issues arise, IT teams spend valuable hours troubleshooting and trying to correlate data across disparate systems.
VCF’s unified cloud management provides end-to-end visibility across your entire environment. This enables teams to spot anomalies and resolve issues before they escalate. Furthermore, it automates critical but error-prone tasks like certificate and password management—tasks that remain a top cause of outages for organizations.
2. Storage Economics: A Better Way to Manage Ever-Growing Data
Storage growth is persistent. The data storage market is expected to grow 17.2% globally from 2024-2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. The 0.25 TiB/core of vSAN included with VVF can be exhausted quickly sooner than you think. VCF addresses this challenge proactively. It fundamentally improves your storage economics by including a full 1 TiB/core of vSAN capacity, four times the entitlement of VVF, built directly into the platform.
3. Application Unification in a Single Platform
Supporting traditional VMs, modern container-based applications, and private AI workloads on separate platforms creates silos. This fragmentation drives up costs (licenses for third-party platforms, like Kubernetes) and creates operational inconsistencies (integration and management of multiple platforms). These factors contribute to skills gaps and slower development cycles.
VCF eliminates this fragmentation by delivering a unified platform for VMs, container-based applications, and AI workloads. It includes integrated networking, automation, and additional security features. This eliminates the need for separate licensing of a third-party Kubernetes platform, delivering a 52% lower TCO over three years compared to running a standalone container platform, as per as per IDC’s white paper The Business Value of VMware Cloud Foundation. Developers gain self-service catalogs for rapid deployment, while IT maintains consistent governance and security for all types of applications. For AI, VCF provides operational consistency with the rest of your VM and Kubernetes deployments, allowing you to manage high-performance, GPU-accelerated workloads using the same tools and processes.
4. Stronger Security Posture
VCF strengthens the environment’s security posture with a multi-layered defense, providing comprehensive visibility and protection against security breaches.
It begins with a unified security dashboard, delivering complete visibility across your private cloud. This integrated view simplifies security operations, enabling earlier threat detection and preventing critical alerts from being missed. This single control pane also aids in policy enforcement, compliance, and workload isolation.
vDefend Distributed Firewall and Intrusion Detection fortifies the environment by providing comprehensive zero-trust security as an add-on. This detects, isolates, and contains lateral threats. The risk isn’t just an initial breach, but an attacker’s ability to move undetected within your network to find high-value targets. vDefend protects against these east-west incursions with micro-segmentation and a distributed firewall, preventing threats from spreading.
Last but not least, VCF provides the complete stack to build your own sovereign cloud. This includes sovereign cloud controls that ensure compliance, with support for geographic residency and local-only access. This ensures data and applications remain within specific geographical and regulatory boundaries, meeting strict compliance requirements.
Security is no longer something you integrate; it’s a core part of your infrastructure.
5. Cloud Portability
Managing divergent IT stacks across on-premises and public cloud environments inflates costs, complicates compliance, and requires additional skill sets, which leads to operational inconsistency. This lack of consistency makes true cloud portability challenging.
VCF solves this by providing a consistent infrastructure and operating model that spans your private cloud and major public cloud partners. This “one stack, one operation, one skill set” approach dramatically simplifies moving and managing workloads across environments. VCF also includes license portability, allowing you to “pay once and run anywhere”. Workloads can move between the data center and the cloud to optimize for cost, performance, or data residency without refactoring applications or paying for new licenses. This freedom to decide on application placement based on your business needs provides the ultimate control and flexibility to manage the environment.
Beyond the Core Benefits
VCF provides a true private cloud experience. It provides a truly full-stack solution, breaking down the traditional silos of compute, storage, and networking allowing automation and management of the entire infrastructure as a unified full-stack. Allowing developers to have self-service cloud capabilities significantly improves development and go to market speed. VCF includes comprehensive support from Broadcom, including access to instructor-led trainings and lab entitlements, ensuring your team has the resources needed for success
A Forward Vision
Envision an environment where all infrastructure functions work together to boost productivity, increase flexibility, reduce risk, enhance developers’ experience and GTM speed while complying with the highest levels of security and compliance protocols. That is VCF. The first true modern private cloud platform.
Embrace the vision. Contact your Broadcom representative or partner to discover how VMware Cloud Foundation can transform your infrastructure into a powerhouse of efficiency, security, and innovation.
