Broadcom dropped the first update on VMware’s halo Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform one year after its 9.0 release, an update that company executive Prashanth Shenoy said had customers thinking it was worthy of being a “major release” though it’s really just tagged as dot-improvement.

Shenoy, who is VP of marketing for Broadcom’s VCF division, explained during a press briefing that the VCF 9.1 release includes “three big areas of focus.” These are helping customers address the current hardware supply chain challenge, helping customers scale their AI-related projects, and helping customers increase infrastructure resiliency.

That first challenge is through an update to VCF’s non-volatile memory express (NVMe) price tiering, which now includes what Shenoy said was “reboot-free enablement, so the customers don't need to bring their host down and you can do this active memory tiering without any disruption.”

VCF 9.1 also has software-based memory tiering that eliminates the need for rate controllers, which improves availability, resiliency, and visibility into memory tiering.

These updates build on the initial tiering launch from last June, and continues Broadcom’s premise that VCF provides a software-driven “systems approach” to surviving the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) crunch.

“We believe this enhanced NVMe memory tiering and the capabilities that we introduced will allow organizations to confidently reduce their DRAM dependency, improve the performance of the workload, reduce the overall server cost and [total cost of ownership], and drive faster application delivery,” Shenoy said.

There are also new deduplication and compression technologies that run alongside data at rest encryption providing for more efficient storage use without an impact on performance. This includes global deduplication being generally available, a more efficient compression algorithm, and pull-based orchestration and provisioning for servers in edge environments.

AI updates and resiliency

AI-related VCF 9.1 updates revolve around application delivery and resiliency.

For application delivery, the latest update provides for a unified platform to manage inference workloads, agentic applications, containerized services, and virtual machines (VMs) through a single infrastructure layer. This allows for greater use of VMware’s Kubernetes Service (VKS) to run these applications, can support mixed compute environments, visibility across those different environments, the ability to reuse templates across environments.

Shenoy explained that this includes the ability to bring container and VM management directly into its vSphere user interface.

“For this single application, or a very lightweight workload, for a dev-test environment, etc., you can now have a container deployment with the right speed [and] security without the operational overhead of running a full Kubernetes cluster,” Shenoy said. “The net result is real flexibility on the same platform, whether you want to run VMs, whether you want to run a single container, or whether you want to run a full-fledged Kubernetes cluster at scale depending on what the workload requirement is.”

Resiliency-focused updates include automated on-premises ransomware recovery, continuous compliance enforcement, broader zero downtime live patching that now includes trusted platform module (TPM) support, zero-trust lateral security to now include Kubernetes AI workloads, and more automation support for self-service security management.

Updates, uptake, and alternatives

Despite Shenoy’s proclamation that customers viewed the VCF 9.1 update worthy of a “major” release, it actually aligns with Broadcom’s previously announced alteration to the VCF platform release cadence. That change moved from having a “major” release every two years with “minor” updates every six months to a new model of releasing those major updates every three years with minor updates every nine months.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has stated that more than 90% of VMware’s 10,000 largest customers have signed up for the VCF platform and controversial subscription licensing plan, a rate that Tan later clarified was only in terms of license sold and not actual VCF deployments. Despite that qualifier, Tan noted that acceptance was enough that Broadcom could be more particular in how it targets VMware’s remaining customer base.

“Beyond the largest 10,000, are we seeing a lot of success? We are seeing some,” Tan told an audience at last year’s VMware Explore event, adding that Broadcom sees two reasons why it does not expect as much success with that next tranche.

“One is the value, the TCO [total cost of ownership] as they call it, that comes from [VCF] will be much less, but more importantly is the skill sets that’s needed to not just deploy – that they can get, services and ourselves that can help them – but to keep operating might not be something that they can take on,” Tan explained. “This is an area we’re still learning and be interesting to see.”

Tan added that “while VMware has 300,000 customers, we see the top 10,000 as being people where it makes a lot of sense, derive a lot of value in deploying private cloud using VCF. We now are looking at whether the next 20, 30,000 mid-sized companies see the same way. Stay tuned. I'll let you know.”

That boast comes as rivals continue to target potentially disgruntled VCF customers.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami recently said the vendor plans to target more than half of its rival’s remaining base.

Ramaswami during a press briefing at the vendor’s recent .NEXT event said that VMware’s overall customer sentiment remains dour following its acquisition by Broadcom and subsequent changes to VMware’s go-to-market approach.

“I think there's no doubt that the customer sentiment continues to be negative about Broadcom,” Ramaswami said. “There's no doubt about it, and increasingly negative.”

That sentiment has allowed Nutanix to bolster its customer base. Ramaswami said the vendor has “about 30,000 customers," numbers bolstered by the hundreds of disgruntled VMware customers Nutanix has been attracting each quarter – and an amount that topped more than 1,000 customers added during Nutanix’s most recent fiscal quater – “and we expect that to continue,” Ramaswami added.

Ramaswami noted during that most recent earnings call that those most recent VMware churners represented “our strongest quarterly new logo additions in eight years.” Ramaswami later noted that “most of the logos came from our typical VMware migrations on to the HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) platform.”