It may not have the cachet of the public cloud (the digital transformation Ted talk trifecta of APIs, containers, cloud doesn’t usually have “private” highlighted in it) – and you don’t see many CIOs proudly touting their “journey” to the private cloud, but it is, in one shape or form, a major component of most large IT estates and AI is boosting its attractiveness. 

VMware is looking to nail the private cloud experience with its new Virtual Cloud Platform (VCF 9) suite. Never mind the bad press and high-profile exits from its software: VCF 9, which treats virtual machines and containers as equals and unifies their management in a shiny new pair of  interfaces (“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” boasts Broadcom proudly), is something of fresh start for Broadcom it believes.

The company claims it’s slashed server and storage TCO by 38% and 34% respectively (“internal Broadcom engineering estimates or test results” it says, with no clarification of what this was measured against precisely) and has made some genuinely meaningful changes to its core proposition.

Taken GA this week, VCF 9 brings together VMware’s vSphere, NSX, vSAN, Aria Automation, Aria Operations, and SDDC Manager as an integrated suite with a streamlined user experience via two portals; VCF Operations – for Cloud Admins and VCF Automation – for private cloud Consumers. 

The core changes it wanted to highlight included:

  • 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.”

That’s the sales pitch from Broadcom this week.

Notably, VCF 9 also uses a single licence key that is generated by Broadcom. VCF Operations handles licence assignment. Broadcom, looking to be a more friendly partner, says that if customers exceed their licensed entitlement, additional hosts are given a 90-day evaluation licence, giving time to either get more cores or decommission other hosts.

AI inference in the cloud can get wildly expensive and many organisations simply won’t expose their data there. Broadcom is touting VCF 9’s ability to support virtualised workloads in this space (over bare metal ones) via virtualized NVIDIA GPUs “to simplify management of AI-accelerated data centers and enable efficient application development and execution for demanding AI and ML workloads” as it put it in an earlier blog here. 

“Broadcom partnered with NVIDIA, Supermicro, and Dell to showcase virtualization’s benefits (for example, intelligent pooling and sharing AI infrastructure), achieving impressive MLPerf Inference v5.0 results. We demonstrated near bare-metal performance across diverse AI domains—computer vision, medical imaging, and natural language processing—using a 6-billion parameter GPT-J language model. We also achieved outstanding results with the Mixtral-8x7B 56-billion parameter large language model (LLM),” as the company put it back in April this year.

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Broadcom’s rubbed no shortage of partners up the wrong way since buying VMware for $69 billion back in 2023. The likes of Vegas resort Treasure Island (which jumped ship for Nutanix) and Toshiba (ditto) have been public about that, and licence changes to how it handles containerised workload hosting have sent French manufacturing heavyweight Michelin into the open arms of open-source Kubernetes.

Can VCF 9 be the fresh start it really needs? Many will like what they see here. But the past two years’ highly aggressive audits and insertion of a recent mandatory compliance reporting clause into the license agreements for VCF and VMware vSphere Foundation have rattled some. (Customers will be obliged to share a license usage report with the vendor every 180 days or face losing functionality from the software essentially.)

That’s not wildly unusual for providers. But many will be weighing up their options cautiously before committing. Can VCF 9 bring them back onside?

Watch this space. 

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