Broadcom has unveiled the latest update to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), which it says offers a secure and cost-effective infrastructure platform for production artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. Broadcom said VCF 9.1 delivers an AI and Kubernetes native private cloud platform with integrated security and mixed compute infrastructure support across AMD, Intel and Nvidia.
The company is positioning VCF as the platform to run enterprise AI in private clouds. Half of organisations (56%) that responded to a recent Broadcom poll said they are running or planning to run production inferencing in a private cloud.
“As more enterprises turn to AI for driving competitive advantage, they face three critical challenges: data and IP privacy concerns, surging infrastructure costs, and their readiness for the world of agentic AI,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice-president and general manager of the VMware Cloud Foundation division at Broadcom.
“VCF 9.1 is a single unified platform that addresses all three and delivers one of the most advanced infrastructures for private AI. We enable zero-trust security for AI, reduce costs through intelligent infrastructure optimisation and hardware choice, and provide the flexibility to run both agentic workflows and accelerated inferencing on the same platform,” added Prasad.
The Broadcom survey also found that 62% of IT leaders are “very” or “extremely” concerned about generative AI infrastructure costs, while 36% said AI is driving new requirements for data protection, privacy, security controls and risk management.
The company, which has made significant changes to VMware licensing since it acquired the company in 2022, claims the new version will help customers reduce their server hardware total cost of ownership by as much as 40%. Broadcom has come under scrutiny as a result of its strategy to move from perpetually licensed software to a VCF subscription bundle, which has seen VMware costs increase dramatically for some customers.
Tackling hardware cost is something that VMware server virtualisation has always been able to do, by reducing the need to deploy one physical server per enterprise application and thereby enabling organisations to consolidate their server estate, and Broadcom now appears to be pivoting to a position where it is now looking to demonstrate the value of the VCF subscription charge.
The new version includes vSphere Topology-aware scheduling, which Broadcom said utilises chip-aware logic to optimise non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA) placement and reduce page-migration costs. What this means, according to Broadcom, is that with vSphere Topology-aware scheduling, even the most resource-intensive applications maintain peak responsiveness. Complementing this is Parallel Processing of DRS vMotion, which Broadcom said removes sequential bottlenecks during cluster balancing. It achieves this by allowing multiple migrations to occur simultaneously.
“VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 is engineered to address these market pressures: a private cloud platform designed to run production AI at the lowest cost per workload, under enterprise sovereignty, without compromising security or delivery velocity,” Sabina Anja, chief technologist for VMware Cloud Foundation at Broadcom, wrote in a blog post.
Broadcom said vSphere in VCF 9.1 represents a fundamental shift in infrastructure economics. Along with maximising existing hardware through NVMe memory tiering, it also claims to lower operational overhead by supporting fast patching and elastic provisioning, eliminating performance bottlenecks through intelligent offloading, and maintaining continuous operations through live patching. Broadcom claims these enhancements enable organisations to transform infrastructure from a cost centre into a strategic advantage.