As I write this, we are now almost 2.5 years post acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. In that time many things have changed. The partner program has shrunk and shrunk again. The portfolio is much smaller as non-core product lines such as VDI (now Omnissa) and Carbon Black have been divested. However, none of these changes have been as impactful as integrating all remaining capabilities into the evolved VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
While VCF is not a new product, its new packaging represents a significant shift in how enterprises design and manage IT infrastructure. Previously, users could select components like vCenter, Aria, and NSX individually. Under the post-acquisition model, Broadcom bundles these components together into a unified platform.
Looking ahead to version 9.1, multi-tenancy will be natively integrated through VCF Automation. Cloud Director previously facilitated this feature. This change streamlines the architecture into a mostly single deployment model. The platform is designed to scale effortlessly from a small five-host SMB environment to the largest cloud service providers.
To understand why this shift has happened, you have to understand the vision Broadcom has for the VMware portion of the company. Broadcom wants to create a hybrid cloud platform to rival hyperscaler platforms like AWS and Microsoft Azure. This unified vision aims to meet modern business needs for compute, storage, and application deployment.
In this post let’s take a look at what it means to be truly cloud native, then to how VMware Cloud Foundation positions Broadcom to fit that model, and finally what comes next for the platform.
The Building Blocks of Cloud Native
I know, I know, cloud native is just another one of those terms you’ve mentally put into the dustbin of marketing hype. In previous years, I’ve seen people use it as shorthand for everything from “running in hyperscaler cloud using one or more named capabilities” to “refactor applications to be completely container-based microservices.” In a more modern context, we can think of cloud-native infrastructure as an environment that supports a specific set of highly efficient characteristics.
Loosely coupled services
A cloud-native environment allows all of its services to be as tightly integrated or separated as needed for the application. This flexibility ensures that developers and IT administrators can build customized solutions without being locked into rigid architectural constraints.
Varied infrastructure
This characteristic is not a debate between VMware and Hyper V. Instead, varied infrastructure means the platform can support virtual machines, containers, and serverless applications simultaneously. Your IT team can deploy the right format for the right workload.
Zero trust security
By default, virtually every virtual machine or service you deploy in a cloud-native environment has no capability to talk to any other service. It cannot communicate outside of the local subnet without explicit permission. In older network designs, we referred to this concept as microsegmentation. It remains a critical component of robust cybersecurity.
Highly available systems
The infrastructure of all services is natively resilient to hardware failures and maintenance windows. Cloud-native platforms ensure continuous operation without downtime, which is essential for mission-critical applications.
Central management and distributed deployment
Enterprise IT requires the ability to deploy workloads to various locations, including on-premises environments, while managing them through a centralized user interface. This centralization includes both graphical and programmatic management. It also requires central identity and access management to govern users, groups, and security policies efficiently.
How VCF 9 fits into the cloud-native model
What makes up VMware Cloud Foundation as it exists in this latest release? When we review the core building blocks of cloud-native infrastructure, we can clearly see how VCF positions Broadcom to fit that model.
Delivering loosely coupled architecture
While the core services within VCF 9 are tightly intertwined, they create a platform upon which individual workloads, services, and tenants can be deployed in a loosely coupled manner. For example, at a top level, you might have a VCF Fleet, which is equivalent to a cloud provider’s region. That fleet is broken down into multiple VCF instances that align to availability zones. Within that instance might be multiple vSphere clusters to allow for infinite scale-out capabilities. Finally, IT teams can create tenants in the form of projects, namespaces, and virtual private clouds.
Supporting varied infrastructure
Modern vSphere has always been capable of supporting containers through VMware Integrated Containers and Tanzu. VMware Cloud Foundation 9 makes this capability a first-class citizen right beside virtual machines. Through the use of vSAN Storage Clusters, VCF also has the capability to deliver storage-only services. This allows enterprises to provide network file systems and object storage services for various tenants.
Enforcing zero trust security
Traditional vSphere offered NSX capabilities as an optional add-on. The entirety of VCF 9 is built upon the distributed routing and switching capabilities of NSX. This foundation allows for highly scalable networks on top of loosely coupled interconnects to the physical network. When combined with the vDefend capability, the platform provides virtual network interface card level security profiles for any deployed virtual machine or container. Tenant-level walled gardens ensure that workloads cannot bleed over into unauthorized subnets.
Ensuring high availability
High availability has always been a cornerstone of vSphere. VMware Cloud Foundation 9 takes this further by adopting a hyperconverged infrastructure model through its reliance on NSX and vSAN Express Storage Architecture (vSAN ESA). The reference architectures are designed for a wide distribution of workloads managed at the rack level rather than the server level. This approach results in a highly robust system design that prevents future disruptions.
Providing centralized management
In its most basic deployment model, VMware Cloud Foundation utilizes a hardened management domain that contains all the management components for the entire fleet. These services include the VCF Identity Broker, which centralizes your authentication integrations. VCF Operations centralizes the deployment of scale-out infrastructure and monitoring. VCF Automation handles multi-tenancy management and core automation tasks. From this management domain, the entire solution can scale to provide resources at a global level.
Conclusion
In the end, becoming more “cloudy” as a vSphere admin isn’t about abandoning what you know, it’s about consuming it differently. VMware Cloud Foundation 9 gives you the cloud‑native building blocks: loosely coupled services, varied infrastructure, zero trust networking, high availability, and centralized management with distributed deployment. 11:11 Systems is aligning our IaaS and Flexible Cloud Environment roadmap to meet you there. Today, our cloud and infrastructure services already help remove complexity around design, operations, and multi‑site connectivity. As we bring VCF‑based offerings into that portfolio, you’ll be able to adopt VCF 9’s capabilities through the same trusted 11:11 resilient cloud platform, with prescriptive architectures and managed services that let you focus on workloads and outcomes, not on stitching all the pieces together yourself.
