Our cousins over in VMware announced the most recent version of VMware Cloud Foundation, 9.1, yesterday. We all call this “VCF.” It’s at the center of Broadcom’s strategy to be the private cloud stack for large enterprises. You know: banks, governments, large retailers, manufactures, et. al.
Our layer, the Tanzu Platform, sits a-top VCF like any PaaS would sit a-top IaaS.
Recently, the VCF people have been putting a lot of effort into private cloud AI. You can think of that as “local AI” if you prefer. From the last three surveys they’ve done, you can see a steady interest in running private AI:
Kubernetes, memory, and AI
If you’re a full private cloud stack, there’s a lot going on each release, so here’s three interesting things:
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VKS now scales to 500 Kubernetes clusters per Supervisor. That’s a platform-of-platforms number. If you’re running a multi-tenant Kubernetes service, 500 clusters per supervisor is meaningful for compliance boundaries, and AI workload placement. Real enterprise-grade stuff. Also, for some platform-y related things like packaging and deploying containers, managing them, etc. see this post.
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Memory tiering and storage dedup go after the DRAM problem head-on. Enhanced NVMe memory tiering keeps hot pages in DRAM and pushes cold pages to NVMe, with vSAN global deduplication and stronger compression behind it. They say this is up to 40% lower TCO.
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Native MCP support, with governance, in VCF Private AI Services. VCF 9.1 ships Model Context Protocol support with pre-built, governed connectors to Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, ServiceNow, GitHub, Slack, Postgres, and the rest. That matters because it’s the difference between “we host an LLM” and “the LLM can actually do work against our internal systems.” There’s also support for Google Docs, metrics, and more.
More Details
Here’s a round-up of posts from VCF:
- Broadcom Announces VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1, Enabling Secure and Cost-Effective Infrastructure for Production AI - press release, 2026-05-05.
- VCF 9.1: The Secure, Cost-Effective Private Cloud Platform for Production AI - top-line framing post.
- Announcing VCF 9.1: Modern Private Cloud Built for Efficiency and Resilience - the formal launch post; efficiency, app delivery, cyber resilience as the three pillars.
- Streamline, Simplify and Protect all your AI workloads with VCF 9.1 - AI workload management and protection.
- AI with VCF 9.1 on AMD GPUs: Build with open frameworks and simplify management, at a lower TCO - AMD GPU support alongside NVIDIA.
- How Broadcom Is Helping Enterprises Win the AI Security Sprint - frontier-model research on AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery; pairs with the 9.1 security messaging.
- Modernizing Infrastructure Economics with VMware vSphere Foundation 9.1 - vSphere Foundation 9.1 against DRAM volatility and the “maintenance tax”.
- Scale Smarter, Save More: Redefining Infrastructure Economics with VMware vSphere in VCF 9.1 - the TCO / hardware-scarcity cut.
- Deploy Modern Apps Faster, Scale Smarter, and Lower Your TCO with VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service in VCF 9.1 - VKS as the on-VCF Kubernetes story; up to 500 clusters per Supervisor.
- Simplify Workload Connectivity and Enhance Network Scale and Performance with VCF 9.1 - VPC model evolution and scale.
- Announcing VMware Cloud Foundation Edge 9.1: A Scalable, Autonomous Edge Platform - hundreds-to-thousands of distributed sites under central control.
- Accelerate, Streamline, and Control Your Self-Service Private Cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 - VCF Automation, with stats from a March 2026 customer survey on VCF 9.0.