VMware Cloud Foundation is getting a major update for AI workloads.

Broadcom is updating VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) to add native S3 object storage to vSAN, an automated starting point for private AI clouds, a set of security measures, and VMware vSphere Express for smaller environments.

Prashanth Shenoy, Broadcom's CMO and VP Product Marketing, opens a blog post by saying: "IT infrastructure and operations leaders are at a tipping point that is driven by AI considerations, such as rising AI infrastructure costs, the new AI-accelerated security landscape, and the rapid advance of agentic AI workloads. This is forcing a fundamental rethink of the infrastructure where AI workloads should run, how to secure all workloads, and how to do all of that while meeting increasingly complex compliance and resiliency requirements."

He argues that "organizations need a cost-effective, secure, and governed path to enterprise AI and better defenses against AI-driven security threats." Broadcom is therefore developing its VCF product portfolio with the following additions:

**AI Infrastructure Quickstart** delivers an automated Day 0 deployment experience that helps customers get started with a Private AI Cloud. It accelerates AI workload readiness by automating foundational infrastructure and software setup through a streamlined vCenter plugin. By handling vCenter cluster deployment, Supervisor configuration, and VKS cluster provisioning, it substantially reduces Day 0 complexity.

**vSAN Native S3-compatible Object Storage** brings native object storage capabilities to VCF, including for AI projects, cloud-native applications, and backup and recovery workloads. It will offer self-service provisioning through vSphere Supervisor or VCF Automation.

**VCF infrastructure configuration management and compliance** provides automation and enforcement of VCF infrastructure components as part of VCF Operations. This enables customers to strengthen the security posture of components such as VMware vCenter and VCF Storage by shifting from reactive to proactive compliance management, and includes configuration drift detection and remediation. Administrators can continuously monitor VCF component settings against industry benchmarks, including the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standard and the VCF Security Baseline.

**Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) policy-based connectivity** enables platform engineers to create shared services, define workload isolation and security policies, and apply them consistently across environments. Developers consume network resources through a self-service model without waiting for manual approvals. This accelerates application delivery while maintaining governance and security guardrails.

**Disaster recovery** is a new native feature in VCF and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF). It delivers enterprise-scale recovery with orchestration across thousands of workloads, helping organizations protect critical workloads and recover from unplanned downtime.

**VMware Live Recovery** provides disaster and cyber recovery capabilities for VMware workloads and is natively integrated with VCF. It includes a secure clean room to accelerate recovery through rapid iterations and enterprise-scale orchestration, and offers cost savings from streamlined operations, more efficient use of infrastructure, and the consolidation of multiple tools.

**VMware Compliance and Configuration Management** provides compliance and configuration management for VM and container workloads. It includes continuous compliance enforcement with automated remediation, helping organizations maintain secure settings at scale against benchmarks such as those from the Center for Internet Security (CIS), the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), or a customer's own custom standards.

**VMware vSphere Express** delivers core compute virtualization capabilities, with a simplified experience, for customers with up to 128 cores across all environments. It includes:

- **ESX Standard**

- **vCenter Standard**

- **vSphere Distributed Switch**, with centralized network management and monitoring

- **vMotion**, providing live migration of running virtual machines with improved migration speed and efficiency

- **High Availability (HA)**, providing automated restart of failed virtual machines

- **vCenter Quick Patch**, offering low-impact, rapid patch management to maximize uptime

- **Zero-Trust Security**, with built-in TPM 2.0 and vTPM 2.0 support

Whether this will stem the flood of smaller VMware customers to Nutanix and Proxmox is open to question. Too little, too late will be the response from customers who have already migrated. Nutanix also appears to be moving faster than Broadcom in adding agentic and other AI capabilities to its software.

**Availability**

VMware Live Recovery, VMware Compliance and Configuration Management, and VMware vSphere Express are available now.

The next VCF release, estimated to reach general availability in Q1 FY27, is expected to include AI Infrastructure Quickstart, vSAN Native S3-compatible Object Storage, VCF infrastructure configuration management and compliance, Virtual Private Cloud, and Disaster Recovery.

**Bootnotes**

For customers in countries in the European Economic Area, vSphere Standard v8 and vSphere Enterprise Plus v8 will remain available for sale until October 31, 2027. They will include Extended Support in any active subscriptions to those offerings until the earlier of the applicable subscription end date or October 31, 2028.

Broadcom's open-source VM API project has been accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox, marking a step toward a vendor-neutral Kubernetes API for managing virtual machines. Broadcom is also co-chairing a new Kubernetes Workload Conformance Working Group to help establish consistent standards across platforms. The company additionally announced more than 20 newly validated partner solutions for VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS).