--- title: SOLUTION OVERVIEW url: https://www.vmware.com/docs/vmware-cloud-foundation-9-1-solution-brief --- # SOLUTION OVERVIEW ## What’s New in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 Most Cost-Effective, Secure Platform for Production AI Today's IT infrastructure needs have evolved significantly, driven by the demands for greater scalability, security, and agility in response to the fast-paced and complex nature of modern business environments. The rigid, siloed nature of traditional infrastructure is ill-suited to the dynamic, fast-paced demands of the modern enterprise, presenting multiple challenges that limit the ability to cost effectively address these critical business requirements. To remain competitive in this digital-first era, businesses require a modern infrastructure solution that seamlessly integrates and orchestrates modern cloud infrastructure into a cohesive, efficient, and scalable platform. Core requirements include the ability to support traditional and container-based workloads in a self-service manner with complete automation and orchestration. To address these needs, many organizations went all-in on the public cloud but rapidly realized there are significant challenges with these solutions. As native public cloud services scale to meet the needs of the business, operating costs dramatically increased and were very difficult to predict and control. While public cloud delivers agility and flexibility, unpredictable costs such as variable data transfer, egress charges, and hidden service fees make long-term financial planning difficult. Security concerns also emerged as a major issue, due to the shared infrastructure and associated vulnerabilities making regulatory compliance and stringent data protection rules very complex to manage. That’s exactly where Private Cloud comes into the picture. A modern private cloud platform offers the best of both worlds - delivering the scale, flexibility, and agility of a public cloud - with enhanced security, control, resilience, and governance of on-premises infrastructure, to meet the needs of each organization. As industry moves rapidly toward a Generative AI future, delivering secure, modern infrastructure is no longer optional. Modern enterprises must deliver advanced services while improving resource utilization and lowering costs, all while hardening privacy and cybersecurity to meet increasingly stringent regulatory compliance requirements. Private cloud platforms have evolved to support a cloud operating model that spans on-premises, edge, and public cloud with consistency and uniformity. ## VMware Cloud Foundation VMware Cloud Foundation is a unified private-cloud platform with integrated enterprise-class compute, storage, networking, Kubernetes, management, and security, resulting in increased productivity and lower total cost of ownership. ### Advanced Services VMware Cloud Foundation offers a comprehensive suite of advanced services designed to extend the core capabilities of the platform and address diverse business needs. - Advanced Cyber Compliance - Advanced Security - Load Balancing - Application Services - Data Services - Network Observability - Business Operations - Identity Security A modern private cloud platform can deliver agility and flexibility to organizations to build and deliver services on any cloud endpoint but also offer the mobility and security to migrate apps as the business dictates. It is, of course, required that the enterprise deploy the appropriate security and governance mechanisms to ensure that all regulatory compliance requirements are met across this hybrid cloud environment. A powerful element of modern private cloud is the ability to build standardized, predictable policies through powerful automation layers. These policies ensure secure infrastructure is deployed uniformly across the environment. Orchestration further simplifies operations and streamlines processes, lowering operational costs. It also enables teams to proactively remediate potential threats to the organization. ## VMware Cloud Foundation - A Modern Private Cloud Platform VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is the industry’s first unified private cloud platform that combines the scale and agility of public cloud with security, resilience, and performance of private cloud, delivering increased productivity and lower total cost of ownership. VCF accelerates customers' digital innovation with faster infrastructure modernization, a unified cloud experience, and stronger cyber resilience and platform security. A Unified Platform for All Applications and Environments VMware Cloud Foundation delivers a consistent private cloud experience across ANY Environment - whether it's a customer managed data center, edge location, or any cloud endpoint. VCF supports both traditional as well as modern workloads such as containers, VMs, AI/ML workloads and brings modern applications to the market faster with self-service IaaS consumption experience for the application teams. ## What’s New in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 makes it easier than ever for customers to deliver efficient infrastructure and operations at scale, high-performing applications, and cyber resilience with secure data. Let’s look at the key features and capabilities of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1. ### Efficient Infrastructure & Operations at Scale VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 modernizes infrastructure economics and operations by delivering higher workload density, thus requiring fewer physical resources, while enabling efficient scale across larger fleets and distributed edge environments. Customers can reduce TCO while preserving enterprise-grade performance, resilience, and automation. **Driving Cost Optimizations** - **Enhanced NVMe Memory Tiering** NVMe Memory Tiering now adds built-in software mirroring and eliminates dependency on hardware RAID, reducing server total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 40%. VCF Operations provides recommendations and health insights to guide optimal tiering decisions, while reboot-free enablement ensures zero disruption during activation. - **Advanced Storage Deduplication & Compression** Next-generation compression combined with global deduplication significantly reduces storage footprint for compressible workloads. This delivers industry-leading data efficiency and can lower total cost of ownership by up to 39% compared to external traditional storage arrays. - **Topology Aware Scheduling** Optimizes workload placement using NUMA-aware intelligence and fairness models to maximize CPU utilization. This eliminates inefficiencies and can deliver performance improvement for modern, high-core workloads. **Scaling Infrastructure & Operations** - **Real-Time Operational Observability** Integrated observability across compute and networking provides end-to-end visibility within a single dashboard. Real-time insights across ESX, NSX, and networking components enable faster troubleshooting and significantly reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). - **Increased vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) Scale and Performance** Supports up to 500 VKS clusters per Supervisor, delivering more than 2.6x improvement in scalability and flexibility. This enables enterprises to confidently run large-scale, production-grade Kubernetes environments. - **vSphere Elastic Provisioning (ZTP)** Automates and parallelizes ESX host deployment, eliminating manual provisioning bottlenecks. This ensures consistent, rapid scaling and simplifies infrastructure expansion in growing private cloud environments. - **Expanded Fleet and Upgrade Scale** Re-engineered Supervisor architecture removes scaling bottlenecks. VCF 9.1 doubles host capacity to 5000 and increases parallel upgrades from 64 to 256 clusters, enabling faster, more efficient lifecycle operations with reduced maintenance windows. ### Fast and Reliable Application Delivery VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 unifies VM, Kubernetes, and AI workload management on a single platform with native object storage. This enables developer self-service while platform engineers maintain enterprise governance and full-stack visibility. This unified approach accelerates application delivery and eliminates the operational complexity of managing fragmented, multi-vendor toolchains. **Platform Services for Modern and AI Applications** - **Faster VKS and VM Deployment** Linked-clone technology dramatically reduces VKS cluster deployment times by up to 69% for new clusters and up to 75% for upgrades, enabling up to 5x faster environment provisioning. - **Simplified Container-as-a-Service** vSphere Pods provide a lightweight, easy to use container runtime without requiring full Kubernetes management. Developers can quickly run containers, generate Kubernetes-compatible YAML, and choose the right runtime (VMs, Pods, or full VKS clusters) based on workload needs. - **Native Object Storage (S3-Compatible)** Integrated vSAN object storage provides multi-tenant, S3-compatible buckets within the same platform used for block and file storage. This enables developer self-service while simplifying operations, reducing tooling sprawl, and eliminating additional licensing costs. - **Tanzu Marketplace Integration** Through Tanzu Platform 10.4, VCF enables developers to discover and provision Tanzu-supported services for VKS clusters, providing a curated, self-service experience through a governed marketplace. ### Continuous Operations and Delivery - **AI Workload Observability and Insights** Built-in observability dashboards provide deep visibility into AI model and agent performance, tracking critical metrics such as active agents, token throughput, and cache utilization. This granular data enables rapid troubleshooting and the continuous optimization of AI workloads for peak efficiency. - **Live App Stack Formation (Blueprint Based Deployment)** Capture and standardize multi-tier application environments, including compute, networking, and storage into reusable blueprints. Deploy consistent, production-ready environments on demand, reducing configuration drift and accelerating delivery across development, testing, and production stages. - **SQL Server DBaaS** VMware Data Services Manager now supports fully managed SQL Server DBaaS. It simplifies provisioning, scaling, backup, and governance through automation and self-service. This reduces operational complexity while enabling faster, standardized, and enterprise-ready database deployments. ### Cyber Resilience & Data Security VCF 9.1 delivers compliant, sovereign cyber recovery and end-to-end platform security. This protects critical workloads while preserving jurisdictional control by securing operations from the hypervisor to the agent level. VMware vDefend prevents lateral attacks and reduces operational complexity without the need for bolt-on tools or platform sprawl. **Cyber Resilience and Recovery** - **vSAN for Recovery** Any-to-vSAN replication protects all VCF workloads, regardless of their primary storage, by replicating them into a vSAN-powered cyber recovery environment. This provides a consistent, high-performance recovery path while reducing costs through a unified private cloud operating model. - **Accelerated Encrypted vMotion with Intel QAT** Hardware offload of encryption significantly reduces CPU overhead (up to ~ 70%), enabling faster migrations, improved application performance during moves, and greater compute efficiency for production workloads. - **On-Prem Ransomware Recovery** Advanced Cyber Compliance (ACC) provides guided, end-to-end cyber recovery using isolated clean rooms, AI-powered malware detection, intelligent restore point selection and centralized management for cyber and disaster recovery operations at scale. - **Continuous Compliance Enforcement** Advanced Cyber Compliance (ACC) continuously monitors environments for drift and automatically remediates deviations from security baselines. Centralized visibility and policy enforcement accelerates audit readiness while strengthening the overall security posture at enterprise scale. **End-to-End Platform and AI Security** - **Live Patching for TPM Workloads** Live patching support for TPM-enabled hosts (covering the vast majority of modern infrastructure) allows organizations to apply updates without VM evacuation or downtime, improving uptime and operational continuity across nearly 80% of patching scenarios. - **Self Service Lateral Security** With VMware vDefend, self-service lateral security provides unified tagging and pre-defined security profiles, allowing platform engineers to delegate firewall configurations to tenants while maintaining enterprise governance. - **Automated Load Balancing** VMware Avi delivers automated, integrated load balancing and Kubernetes ingress. With zero-touch deployment and lifecycle management, teams can accelerate application delivery while improving performance, resilience, and operational efficiency across the VCF stack. ### Open and Extensible Ecosystem VCF 9.1 will continue to expand through a growing ecosystem of partner integrations, enabling organizations to build on a consistent foundation using the tools and services that best fit their operational model. - Networking ecosystem integrations with platforms such as Arista, Cisco, and SONiC will provide greater flexibility in how customers connect and extend their environments. - Advancing AI with AMD Instinct GPUs will introduce Enhanced DirectPath I/O for MI350 Series GPUs, enabling AI workload virtualization with live patching, high availability, and dynamic resource scaling while reducing operational overhead and lowering total cost of ownership for AI-driven environments. - Security ecosystem integrations, including CrowdStrike EDR for ransomware recovery workflows, will embed endpoint validation directly into the recovery process. Recovered workloads can be scanned in isolated clean room environments before returning to production, reducing reinfection risk and accelerating safe recovery using existing security tools. These integrations give organizations the flexibility to extend VCF using purpose-fit tools while maintaining a consistent platform foundation. ## Helpful Resources For VMware Cloud Foundation product page, please visit: [here] For VMware Cloud Foundation Edge, please visit: [here] For VMware Cloud Foundation feature comparison, please visit: [here] For Private Cloud Modernization Program, please visit: [here] Join the Cloud Foundation Community: [here] Contact us: [here]