VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 isn’t just a product update; it’s a defining leap forward.
What started as a bundled stack is now a full-spectrum private cloud platform, built for traditional workloads, modern apps, and enterprise AI. With cost-saving innovations, native automation, and built-in AI support, VCF 9.0 sets a new bar for private cloud agility and scale. This is the most significant release in VCF’s history, and here’s why. From Products to Platform: Why It Matters
For years, VMware customers juggled multiple management planes across vSphere, vSAN, NSX, Aria, and Kubernetes tooling. VCF 9.0 eliminates that sprawl by bringing everything into two unified consoles:
Benefit: You save time, reduce human error, and boost team efficiency by managing everything—from deployment to decommission—through a single, cohesive interface.
What’s New in VCF 9.0—and Why It MattersVMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 introduces powerful new features that enhance infrastructure performance, security, and operational efficiency. Here's a breakdown of what’s new and the real-world impact:
0 Comments
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 is a major leap forward for enterprise IT. With modern infrastructure demands, hybrid cloud growth, and the emergence of AI and quantum computing, Red Hat has taken a bold approach with RHEL 10—bringing in container-native workflows, generative AI, enhanced security, and intelligent automation. If you’re a systems engineer, architect, or infrastructure lead, this release deserves your full attention. Here’s what makes RHEL 10 a milestone in the evolution of enterprise Linux. Image Mode Goes GA: Container-Native System ManagementImage Mode, first introduced as a tech preview in RHEL 9.4, is now generally available (GA) in RHEL 10—and it's one of the most impactful changes in how you build and manage Linux systems.
Rather than managing systems through traditional package-by-package installations, Image Mode enables you to define your entire system declaratively using bootc, similar to how you build Docker containers.  The energy at Dell Technologies World 2025 was electric—fitting, considering the opening keynote made one thing unmistakably clear: AI is now the world’s most powerful utility. Dell is not just embracing the AI revolution—they’re enabling it, scaling it, and humanizing it. Held at what Dell calls “Dell Technologies Way”, the keynote welcomed us into a vision of interconnected innovation, where data becomes action and AI becomes accessible to all. Key Themes From the KeynoteAI at the Edge: Real-Time Intelligence, AnywhereDell emphasized that 75% of enterprise data will soon be created and processed outside traditional data centers. This shift makes edge computing—real-time processing at or near the source--essential for delivering low-latency, high-impact AI insights.
From smart cities to retail floors, Dell’s rugged servers and edge-optimized AI PCs are transforming how decisions are made. Lowe’s, for example, is deploying AI-infused micro data centers inside stores to power computer vision and real-time customer assistance. The edge isn’t a buzzword anymore—it’s where AI lives and breathes.  vSphere 8.0 Update 1 is the latest release of this platform, and it comes with a host of new features and capabilities that enhance the efficiency and reliability of IT operations.
One of the key new features is the vSphere Configuration Profiles, which allows you to manage ESXi cluster configurations by specifying a desired host configuration at the cluster level. This means that you can define a set of configuration settings that you want all hosts in a cluster to conform to, such as firewall rules, user accounts, and network settings. You can then automate the scanning of ESXi hosts for compliance to the specified desired configuration and remediate any host that is not compliant. This helps you ensure consistent and secure configurations across your infrastructure. To use vSphere Configuration Profiles, you need to use vSphere Lifecycle Manager images to manage your cluster lifecycle, a vSphere 8.0 Update 1 environment, and either an Enterprise Plus or vSphere+ license. vSphere 8.0 Update 1 also adds support for various technologies such as NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs to server designs from Lenovo and Dell, AMD Genoa CPU-based server designs from Dell, and UPTv2 for NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs. It also removes the requirement that all vGPUs on a physical GPU must be of the same type and allows you to set different vGPU profiles, such as compute, graphics, or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure workload, on one GPU to save cost by higher GPU utilization and reduced workload fragmentation. Another major enhancement in vSphere 8.0 Update 1 is the integration of VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics with vCenter. This self-service diagnostics platform is integrated with the vSphere Client and allows you to detect and remediate issues in your vSphere environment. Additionally, vSphere 8.0 Update 1 introduces VM-level power consumption metrics, which allows vSphere admins to track power consumption at a VM level to support the environmental, social, and governance goals of your organization. vSphere 8.0 Update 1 also adds support for NVSwitch, which enables you to run high-performance computing (HPC) and AI applications such as deep learning, scientific simulations, and big data analytics, which require multiple GPUs working together in parallel. Moreover, vSphere 8.0 Update 1 allows you to use third-party identity security provider Okta to log in simultaneously to vCenter and NSX Manager by using the same token and password. Other enhancements in vSphere 8.0 Update 1 include support for Fault Tolerance of virtual machines that use a virtual TPM (vTPM) module, Quick Boot support for servers with TPM 2.0 chips, vSphere API for Storage Awareness (VASA) version 5 for vSphere Virtual Volumes, sidecar files become regular files in Config-vVol instead of vSphere Virtual Volumes objects, increased default capacity for vSphere Virtual Volumes objects of type Config-vVol, and NVMe over TCP support for vSphere Virtual Volumes. Finally, vSphere 8 Update 1 adds support for NVMe over TCP for vSphere Virtual Volumes. NVMe is a protocol for accessing non-volatile memory, such as solid-state drives (SSDs), over a high-speed interface. With NVMe over TCP, you can use this high-speed protocol to access storage over a standard TCP/IP network, providing faster performance and lower latency than traditional storage protocols like iSCSI or NFS. This can help you improve the performance of your storage-intensive workloads, such as databases or big data analytics. VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 1 is a major upgrade that offers many new features and capabilities that improve the efficiency and reliability of IT operations.  It's that time again, to begin the process, that probably should have been started a while ago, which is upgrading your virtual infrastructure to vSphere 6.7. The end of general support for vSphere 6.0 is March 12, 2020, and if you are on an earlier version of vSphere, then you are currently running an unsupported version of vSphere and may also need to purchase to new hardware to support the latest version. I would like to begin this blog with some of the stated benefits to upgrading your environment. BenefitsThe new vSphere 6.7, vCenter appliance delivers major performance improvements from previous versions. First, vCenter Server has 2x faster performance in operations per second. This means better response times for the daily tasks you perform. There is a 3x reduction in memory usage and also 3x faster operations relating to VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler. If you would like more detail on these improvements, you can find the details in this blog by VMware. New Features and EnhancementsThere are a lot of great new features and enhancements in the latest version of vSphere and if you are still on and older version than vSphere 6, then there are even more that came with vSphere 6.7. Below is a list of new features relating to vSphere 6.7. vSphere Quick Boot vSphere Quick Boot innovation restarts the ESXi hypervisor without rebooting the physical host, skipping time-consuming hardware initialization. Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 vSphere 6.7 adds support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware devices for ESXi hosts and also introduces virtual TPM (vTPM) 2.0 for VMs, significantly enhancing protection and ensuring integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system (OS). This capability helps prevent VMs and hosts from being tampered with. For virtual machines, vTPM 2.0 gives VMs the ability to use enhanced guest OS security features sought by security teams. Encrypted vMotion vSphere 6.7 also improves protection for data in motion by enabling Encrypted vMotion across various vCenter Server instances as well as versions. This makes it easy to securely conduct data center migrations or to move data across a hybrid cloud environment—that is, between on-premises and public cloud—or across geographically distributed data centers. Microsoft Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) vSphere 6.7 introduces support for the entire range of Microsoft virtualization-based security technologies introduced in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. In 2015, Microsoft introduced virtualization-based security (VBS). We have worked very closely with Microsoft to provide support for these features in vSphere 6.7. vSphere Persistent Memory vSphere Persistent Memory, administrators using supported hardware modules such as those available from Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise can leverage them either as super-fast storage with high IOPS or expose them to the guest OS as nonvolatile memory (NVM).  vCenter Server Hybrid Linked Mode
vSphere 6.7 introduces vCenter Server Hybrid Linked Mode, which enables users to have unified visibility and manageability across an on-premises vSphere environment running on one version and a public cloud environment based on the vSphere platform, such as VMware Cloud on AWS, running on a different vSphere version. Per-VM Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) vSphere 6.7 introduces per-VM Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC), a key capability for the hybrid cloud that enables the EVC mode to become an attribute of the VM rather than of the specific processor generation it is booted on in the cluster. Simplification of the architecture One significant change to vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 is a simplification of the architecture and a reversion to running all vCenter Server services on a single instance. With the introduction of vCenter Server with embedded Platform Services Controller instance with Enhanced Linked Mode.  I wrote a blog about this subject before, which can be found here. The information contained in that blog is still relevant to this conversation and walks you through the challenges for traditional three-tier architecture and how the industry, specifically VMware, has addressed those challenges. In this blog, I will be updating the vision that VMware has laid out for the hybrid-cloud, which is comprised of VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud Foundations. To better understand this journey and how we have arrived at this vision of Any Device, Any Application, and Any Cloud, take a look back at the previous blog. Let's begin with an overview of VMware Cloud on AWS. Quick Overview of VMware Cloud on AWS VMware Cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered and integrated cloud offering developed by VMware and AWS. Through this hybrid-cloud service, organizations can deliver a stable and secure solution to migrate and extend their on-premises VMware vSphere-based environments to the AWS cloud running on bare metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure.
VMware Cloud on AWS has several use case buckets that most customers find themselves falling into some overlap. The first of these use cases is for organizations looking to migrate their on-premises vSphere-based workloads and to extend their capacities to the cloud with the data center extension use case. The next, is for organizations looking to modernize their recovery options, new disaster recovery implementations, or organizations looking to replace existing DR infrastructure. The last one that I will mention, is for organizations looking to evacuate their data centers or consolidate data centers through cloud-migrations. This is great for organizations looking at data center refreshes. VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered, sold, and supported by VMware and its partners like Sirius Computer Solutions, a Managed Service Partner. Available in many AWS Regions which can be found here and growing. Through this offering organizations can build their hybrid solutions based on the same underlying infrastructure that runs on VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Cloud Foundations.  Day 1 began with the general session, which was a lot different than the previous year where the VMware Executives laid out their vision for the partner community. This general session was focused more correctly on the audience in attendance.   Back in October of 2016, VMware announced vSphere 6.5. This introduced a lot of changes to their flagship hyper-visor; you can see an earlier blog I wrote about that here. Now it is that time again for a new vSphere to be announced. The announcement of vSphere 6.7 came with a lot of new features and I will go over each of them in this blog. Let's take a look at these new features:
Let's quickly discuss migration paths. The new version supports upgrades and migrations from vSphere 6.0 or 6.5 only and the current supported migration paths to version 6.7 are as follows:
 Day 1 began with the general session, where VMware Executives presented to the partner community and reinforced the importance of the partner as the unsung heroes helping to drive the VMware business and most importantly driving value for their customers.
 vRealize Network Insight or vRNI is the newest addition to the range of products from VMware. vRealize Network Insight integrates with VMware's network virtualization platform, NSX. vRNI delivers intelligent operations for your software defined network environment. vRNI does for your virtualized network what vRealize Operations does for your virtualized environment, but only to the SDN environment. With the help of this product you can optimize network performance and availability with visibility and analytics across virtual and physical networks. Provide planning and recommendations for implementing micro-segmentation security, plus operational views to quickly and confidently manage and scale VMware NSX deployment.
Let's take a step back and discuss, briefly, what VMware NSX is and why you should, as a technologist, care about it. NSX is an innovative approach to solving long-standing network provisioning bottlenecks within the data center, and it allows for the integration of switching, routing and upper-layer services into an integrated application and network orchestration platform. With an overlay solution that may not require hardware upgrades, NSX offers customers a potentially quicker way of taking advantage of SDN capabilities by decoupling the network from hardware into a software abstraction layer allowing the end-user to programmatically create, provision and manage networks. Essentially, NSX is doing for your network what vSphere did for your compute environments and we have typically virtualized the compute and storage with vSAN, so adding network virtualization brings the full vision of SDDC giving you a lot of benefits like single pain of glass to manage your environments within vCenter, which a lot of us are already familiar with. With NSX you gain visibility into your network that you may not have today while allowing for division of duties in a secure manner. NSX technology inception is on the rise and as of today, VMware has over 2,600 customers that have implemented NSX and over 50% increase in license bookings. |
RSS Feed