VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 GA: What’s New and Why It Matters

I’m thrilled to announce that VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is now GA. This major release brings powerful enhancements, a more unified experience, and several innovations designed to meet today’s enterprise needs from modern workloads to security, compliance, and cost control.

Let’s dive into the key changes and what they mean for your infrastructure.

Key Shifts in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

Unified Management Interface

A single interface for managing both on-premises and cloud environments simplifies day-to-day operations and reduces administrative overhead.

Modern and Legacy Workload Support

VCF 9.0 supports both VMs and containerized workloads, offering an optimal platform for AI, cloud-native, and traditional applications.

Built for Sovereignty and Security

Gain full control and sovereignty over your environment with built-in compliance and security capabilities, ideal for regulated industries and sensitive data handling.

Transparent Cost Management

Native showback and chargeback capabilities allow you to:

• Track and monitor usage
• Set and enforce budget policies
• Report costs internally or externally with accuracy

Key Features of VCF 9.0

Advanced NVMe Memory Tiering:

VCF now includes intelligent memory tiering, prioritizing high-speed memory for performance-critical workloads while allocating NVMe memory to lower-priority tasks. This leads to:

• Improved workload performance
• Optimized memory utilization
• Cost savings

Enhanced Data Path

With architectural improvements in the data path:

• Latency is reduced
• CPU load is minimized
• Network efficiency is improved

These enhancements result in smoother performance for data-intensive applications and reduced infrastructure overhead.

vSAN ESA Global Dedup

vSAN Express Storage Architecture now supports global deduplication, building on existing compression and encryption.

Note: Some limitations may apply depending on your deployment configuration in this GA release.

VMware Cloud Foundation Installer Replaces Cloud Builder

The new VCF Installer streamlines deployment:

• Full GUI-based installation
• VCF and VVF support
• Simplified prerequisite checks
• Automated installation of all VCF components

No need to manage individual components separately anymore.

VCF Operation Console

A comprehensive operations dashboard that allows:

• Lifecycle operations
• Deployment and expansion of workloads
• Centralized monitoring
• Certificate and SSO management
• Capacity planning

Virtual Private Cloud Experience

VCF now brings VPC isolation capabilities to private clouds:

• Secure workload segmentation
• Tenant separation with enhanced controls
• Multi-tenancy readiness
• Improved resource utilization and cost savings

Native Multi-Tenancy

VCF 9.0 introduces deeper native support for multi-tenant environments:

• Track and report tenant resource usage
• Allow tenants to reclaim unused resources
• Provide built-in chargeback capabilities
• Lower operational overhead for service providers and IT admins

Cost Control, Showback and Chargeback

VCF now includes integrated financial management tools:

• Track usage and associate costs with users or departments
• Enforce budget policies
• Offer precise cost visibility through showback and chargeback reports

Enhanced Compliance, Security, and Troubleshooting

This release enhances visibility and automation around compliance and security:

• Improved Troubleshooting Tools speed up root cause analysis and recovery by analyzing changes and anomalies
• Security Operations Dashboard uses public CVEs and defined policies to generate alerts
• Infrastructure Configuration Monitoring detects configuration drift, simplifying audits and reducing errors

Upgrade Requirements and Notes

Before upgrading to VCF 9.0, ensure the following prerequisites are met:

• VCF must be at version 5.x to support the upgrade bundle
• vSphere/vSAN/Aria Suite must be on 8.x
• NSX must be at version 4.x

Note: In-place upgrade is supported from VCF 5.x only. VxRail brownfield environments and VMware Cloud Director are not supported in this GA release.

Final Thoughts

VCF 9.0 represents a significant step forward in private cloud evolution, offering modern workload support, robust security and compliance, and intelligent operations, all within a simplified and unified framework.

For organizations seeking agility, sovereignty, and operational efficiency, this release is a compelling reason to upgrade.