Broadcom has outlined a set of additions to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), including native S3-compatible object storage for vSAN, an automated setup path for private AI environments and expanded security and compliance tools. The company also introduced VMware vSphere Express, a simplified virtualization offering aimed at environments with up to 128 cores.
The announcements address several infrastructure tasks associated with deploying AI workloads, while also covering recovery, networking and configuration management. Broadcom CMO and VP of Product Marketing Prashanth Shenoy said organizations are reassessing where AI workloads should run and how to manage security, costs, compliance and resilience. The product changes are intended to provide capabilities for those requirements within Broadcom’s VMware portfolio.
Automating private AI infrastructure
AI Infrastructure Quickstart is designed to automate initial setup for a private AI cloud. Delivered through a vCenter plugin, it handles foundational steps that include deploying a vCenter cluster, configuring Supervisor and provisioning VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS) clusters. Broadcom says this approach is intended to reduce the manual work involved in preparing infrastructure for AI workloads.
The planned vSAN Native S3-compatible Object Storage feature will add object storage directly to VCF. Broadcom identifies AI projects, cloud-native applications and backup and recovery as potential workloads. Users are expected to be able to provision the service through vSphere Supervisor or VCF Automation, giving administrators a self-service route to make storage available.
These capabilities are among the features expected in the next VCF release, which Broadcom estimates will reach general availability in the first quarter of its fiscal 2027. The timing is an estimate rather than a confirmed general-availability date.
Configuration, network policy and recovery
VCF infrastructure configuration management and compliance is also planned for that release. It is intended to automate and enforce configuration of VCF infrastructure components, including VMware vCenter and VCF Storage. The functionality includes monitoring settings against benchmarks, detecting configuration drift and supporting remediation. Broadcom cites Payment Card Industry requirements and the VCF Security Baseline as examples of reference standards.
A related but distinct offering, VMware Compliance and Configuration Management, covers virtual machine and container workloads. Broadcom says it provides continuous compliance enforcement and automated remediation against industry benchmarks, including standards from the Center for Internet Security and the Defense Information Systems Agency, as well as customer-defined benchmarks. Unlike the infrastructure configuration feature, this workload-focused product is available now.
Virtual Private Cloud policy-based connectivity is another planned VCF feature. It is designed to let platform engineers establish shared services, workload isolation and security policies that can be applied consistently. Developers would consume network resources through self-service rather than waiting for manual approvals, while remaining within the defined governance controls.
Broadcom also described disaster recovery as a native feature for both VCF and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF). It is designed to orchestrate recovery across thousands of workloads following unplanned downtime. VMware Live Recovery, available now, provides disaster and cyber recovery capabilities for VMware workloads and is natively integrated with VCF. Broadcom highlights a secure clean room for recovery testing and orchestration at enterprise scale, alongside the potential to consolidate tools and use infrastructure more efficiently.
vSphere Express and availability
VMware vSphere Express targets customers needing core compute virtualization in environments of up to 128 cores across all environments. Its included components are ESX Standard, vCenter Standard and vSphere Distributed Switch, with centralized network management and monitoring. It also includes vMotion for live virtual-machine migration, High Availability for automatic restarts of failed virtual machines, and vCenter Quick Patch for rapid, low-impact patching. Broadcom lists support for TPM 2.0 and virtual TPM 2.0 as built-in zero-trust security capabilities.
VMware Live Recovery, VMware Compliance and Configuration Management, and vSphere Express are available now. AI Infrastructure Quickstart, vSAN Native S3-compatible Object Storage, VCF infrastructure configuration management and compliance, Virtual Private Cloud and native Disaster Recovery are slated for the next VCF release, estimated for general availability in Q1FY27.
The narrower vSphere Express package comes as smaller VMware customers have been weighing alternatives such as Nutanix and Proxmox. The announcements alone do not indicate whether the simplified offering will change those customers’ decisions. Broadcom also noted that vSphere Standard v8 and vSphere Enterprise Plus v8 will remain available for sale to customers in the European Economic Area through October 31, 2027. Active subscriptions to those offerings include Extended Support until the earlier of the subscription end date or October 31, 2028.
Separately, Broadcom said its open-source VM API project has been accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Sandbox. The project is intended to advance a vendor-neutral Kubernetes API for virtual-machine management. Broadcom is also co-chairing a Kubernetes Workload Conformance Working Group and announced more than 20 newly validated partner solutions for VKS.
