Broadcom expands VMware Cloud Foundation with AI, security, and recovery capabilities
Network World ·
Broadcom this week announced it is expanding its VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) product portfolio with new AI infrastructure, security, and disaster recovery capabilities. The company also introduced a virtualization product designed for customers with small IT environments. Broadcom is positioning VCF as a private cloud platform for running traditional virtual machines, containers, and AI workloads. It is also moving specific security and recovery capabilities previously offered as advanced services directly into VCF. “We’re constantly looking at, is the portfolio in the right place, right size to serve customers of all sizes and needs,” said Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of product marketing for Broadcom’s VCF division , during a press briefing. VMware vSphere Express is a new offering for organizations that need essential virtualization capabilities without the broader featrures of VMware vSphere Foundation or the full VCF private cloud stack. Built on vSphere 9, the Express product supports environments of up to 128 cores and includes vMotion for live VM migration , high availability, distributed switching, rapid patching, and Trusted Platform Module (TPM) security capabilities. Shenoy explained that vSphere Express customers can upgrade to vSphere Foundation or VCF as their infrastructure requirements grow. Broadcom is also targeting the time and cost involved in deploying and managing infrastructure for AI workloads. A new AI Infrastructure Quickstart capability is designed to automate initial AI infrastructure deployment through a single vCenter plug-in. Quickstart combines several configuration tasks, including vSphere Supervisor activation and infrastructure provisioning, into a single workflow. Broadcom said this reduces the manual work required to get AI environments running. “We have consolidated all of that, made a quick start workflow, and streamlined the workflow completely,” Shenoy said. VCF’s multi-tenant model sharing enables multiple business units to access centrally deployed AI models while maintaining separate security controls and data privacy. By sharing model infrastructure rather than deploying separate environments for each business unit, organizations could reduce GPU requirements and associated infrastructure costs, according to Broadcom. The company is also adding vSAN native S3-compatible object storage, which will provide integrated object storage alongside existing block and file services, support AI applications and other workloads. Broadcom is bringing several security, compliance, and disaster recovery capabilities into the core VCF platform. The enhancements include: Site Recovery Manager: Provides disaster recovery orchestration across thousands of workloads to help organizations recover from outages, hardware failures, and other disruptions. Virtual private cloud (VPC) policy-based connectivity: Lets administrators define and enforce workload isolation and security policies while providing developers with self-service access to network resources. Infrastructure configuration management and compliance: Automates configuration monitoring, drift detection, and remediation to help organizations maintain compliance with security benchmarks. Confidential computing: Provides hardware-level encryption for data in use across supported Intel and AMD platforms to protect sensitive workloads. Separately, Broadcom is expanding its advanced services portfolio. VMware HyperArmor adds proactive hypervisor protection, while VMware Live Recovery provides disaster and cyber recovery through secure recovery environments. VMware Compliance and Configuration Management offers continuous compliance monitoring and automated remediation for virtual machine and container workloads. VMware vSphere Express is available immediately. AI Infrastructure Quickstart, vSAN native S3-compatible object storage, Site Recovery Manager capabilities, policy-based connectivity, and infrastructure configuration compliance management are planned for general availability during Broadcom’s first fiscal quarter of 2027. VMware HyperArmor, VMware Live Recovery, and VMware Compliance and Configuration Management are part of Broadcom’s expanded advanced services portfolio, with HyperArmor availability planned for the first fiscal quarter of 2027.