Broadcom unveiled the latest iteration of its VMware division’s halo Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform with an increased performance focus that bolsters Broadcom’s private cloud ambitions.

Unsurprisingly, the new VCF 9.0 update includes the usual flood of “enhancements” expected from any big release from a Broadcom-sized vendor. Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product marketing at Broadcom, stated that the latest update includes more than 100 enhanced or newly built features and functionality, and ran through various numbered lists of those updates. The main throughline of those updates and enhancements is in making the deployment, management, and operations of multicloud environments easier for enterprise customers, especially those that favor private cloud.

Shenoy explained that Broadcom’s own research showed growing enterprise interest in continuing to use private cloud or in repatriating workloads back from past public cloud deployments. This was due to concerns over trust and security; access, performance, and predictability to feed generative AI workloads; and cost transparency.

One notable private cloud feature update is more uniform support for enterprise applications that run as virtual machines (VMs) or in containers. Shenoy noted this is done by integrating infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) natively into VCF.

“When a customer purchases VCF, they get to have all of these infrastructure services to run their containerized workloads, and that is pretty important because a lot of new workloads that we are seeing in the industry for private cloud are containerized workloads,” Shenoy explained.

Broadcom touts cost transparency

Shenoy repeatedly pointed to VCF 9.0 having “cost transparency and cost control” for IT teams, “so they can know what is the utilization, what is the resource allocation, and how much is it costing for the entire organization to run that. So that level of granular cost control and cost transparency provides that cost predictability that they're looking toward.”

This, obviously, points toward broader cost issues that have grown increasingly important for VMware users post-Broadcom’s acquisition. Arguments have been made on both sides about the cost direction of VMware services in the shadow of Broadcom’s licensing changes.

Some analysts have claimed customers are reporting a significant spike in what they are having to pay for those VMware services. Forrester Research noted in a report that “one VMware client shared that they’re experiencing a 500% price increase based on their current use of VMware products and how it maps to the new licensing and packaging.”

Broadcom, on the other hand, has claimed the opposite.

Shenoy, during a press briefing last year tied to the previous VCF update, spent considerable time attempting to counter some “of the FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] and noise in the market saying, ‘hey, when we became part of Broadcom we increased the prices and we really cut down on the offers.’”

Shenoy said that on the first accusation, “nothing can be further from the truth.”

“We cut the price by half for our VMware Cloud Foundation subscription offer,” Shenoy explained, adding that the price has dropped from $700 per core, per year, to $350 per core, per year, as part of the new subscription offering.

“What we did was move completely from a perpetual CPU-based model that we had in the previous world to a core-based subscription pricing model,” Shenoy stated of the FUD-inducing move.

VCF as a revenue driver

Despite the pricing drama, Broadcom continues to convert legacy VMware customers to the new pricing and licensing scheme.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan during the vendor’s most recent earnings call claimed more than 87% of VMware’s 10,000 largest customers had signed up for the new subscription pricing model by the end of its fiscal second quarter of 2025. That growth was a substantial gain over the approximately 70% conversion rate it reported at the end of the previous quarter.

Tan added that the renewal process would likely take several more quarters as it works through contracts signed just before Broadcom closed on the VMware acquisition in late 2023.

“Most of our VMware contracts are typically three years, and that was what VMware did before we acquired them, and that's pretty much what we continue to do. Three is very traditional,” Tan said. “Based on that, the renewals, we’re like two-thirds of the way … through the renewals, so we probably have at least another year-plus, maybe a year-and-a-half to go.”

Analysts have noted that some legacy VMware customers have deep platform integrations that make it difficult to move, and that some have signed up for Broadcom’s new license and pricing models in an attempt to gain more time to figure out if a move is worthwhile.

Tan’s timeline aligns with what rivals are seeing in the market as they scramble to steal customers looking to shift away from VMware.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami had previously stated many legacy VMware customers signed up for new contracts ahead of the Broadcom closing due to concerns over pricing and license structures that eventually came to fruition. Despite the delay, Nutanix has managed to steal hundreds of disgruntled VMware customers.

And thousands more could be available.

Equity research firm William Blair in a recent Nutanix report mentioned that market research firms were predicting up to 30% of VMware’s installed base of more than 400,000 customers “will eventually switch away from VMware.”

VCF 9.0 availability

Broadcom remains unfazed by this challenge, with the VCF 9.0 updates its latest salvo in countering discontent.

Shenoy noted that the latest update is available today for all customers that have purchased a VCF subscription, and that it was working “with all of our critical OEMs to build co-engineered solution on their platform with VCF 9.0, and we expect that to be ready within months.” It’s also available through the vendor’s value added resellers (VARs) and distributors, a group that has been through some significant changes to their distribution options.

Broadcom also worked with approximately 30 communication service providers (CSPs) through a beta period to test VCF 9.0 for single tenant-hosted private cloud services, with a multi-tenant offering expected to be available as part of a future release. Hyperscalers are also included in the update, with each working through their own deployment and support roadmaps.