In-Depth
Broadcom VMware Explore 2025 Day Two: Keynote
On the first day of VMware Explore, I attended a few sessions and events. I wrote about these here. The second day of the event is when VMware presents its keynote and makes major announcements about its products and the company's direction.
In this article, I will discuss the themes and announcements that they made today during their keynote speeches.
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Keynote
The keynote began at 9:00 a.m. sharp. It was titled "Shaping the Future of Private Cloud and AI Innovation."
Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom, opened the session by emphasizing that private cloud infrastructure represents the future of IT.
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He asserted that VMware will play a central role in this evolution through its integration of compute, network, and storage capabilities. Additionally, he highlighted how VCF 9 (VMware Cloud Foundation) eliminates operational silos by unifying these resources, positioning VCF as the foundational platform for the next generation of IT solutions.
He emphasized that the industry is experiencing tremendous momentum, primarily driven by the cloud reset, which is fueled mainly by AI, as well as concerns over costs and privacy issues. This signifies a shift back toward private cloud solutions. He then went on to explain that the core objective for VMware is to bring the world of IT and developers together, reduce friction, and provide a seamless experience, especially in the world of Gen AI.
He discussed how VMware's private cloud solution, VCF, enables private AI as a service, as well as for highly regulated industries, and can provide cyber compliance at scale. This addresses the growing need for secure, controlled, and scalable AI deployments, particularly in sensitive sectors.
He said that VCF 9.0 was a "culmination of over a million hours of engineering work" and "over 8,000 IP patents," establishing it as the "modern private cloud in the world." And that "Nine out of 10 Fortune companies now run VCF," and "more than 100 million core licenses have been sold since VMware became part of Broadcom," showing significant customer adoption of this technology.
He finished his talk by stating that VCF 9.0 unifies VM and containerized applications, including AI workloads, on a single platform, "drastically reduces their cost" and provides critical developer and platform engineering services, and supports secure, scalable multi-tenancy. It offers deployment flexibility across on-prem, edge, managed, or sovereign cloud environments.
Paul Turner, vice president, VCF Products, Broadcom, was up next. He emphasized that vSphere, which has been around for approximately 20 years, is ubiquitous and has transformed the IT landscape; however, it is merely a foundational element for the next step in IT: the private cloud, which will power the next generation of data centers.
He brought Jeremy Wright, director of IT at Grenell Mutual, on stage to discuss how his small IT team chose vSAN over discrete storage, as it was projected to save his organization $1 million.
Paul then discussed the next generation of VCF and the new features in VCF 9.
He first announced that native S3 object storage will be part of vSAN. This means that vSAN now supports a full spectrum of data types: file, block, and object. This will present a single, unified storage layer with a simplified workflow.
He went on to announce VMware's new strategic alliance with Canonical that will integrate the number one cloud OS, Ubuntu, with VCF.
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This will give "enterprise-grade chiseled Ubuntu containers" directly to VCF. This will be a bespoke version of Ubuntu that is optimized for VCF, stripped down for efficiency, and tailored for AI and GPU-enabled workloads. This version of Ubuntu will be more secure by reducing its attack surface and consuming less disk space.
Sabina Anja, senior technology product lead at Broadcom, took the stage and demoed building and deploying a secure cloud-native application on VCF. She stressed how VCF enables developer autonomy.
Chris Wolf, global head of AI & advanced services at Broadcom, took the stage to discuss Private AI as a Service. He stressed that AI is now mainstream in IT, with “more than 70% of the enterprises planning to run AI models on private cloud" due to "cost, privacy, and compliance requirements." He also stated that VCF can address GPU underutilization, as "More than 80% of organizations are seeing GPU capacity and utilization being less than 35% in a shared model," which VCF can help to resolve.
He announced that Private AI now is natively provided as part of VCF. Previously, private AI foundation with Nvidia was a separate advanced service.
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Now, all VCF customers (existing and new) will have private AI services as part of their VCF subscription.
He claimed that their testing showed that virtualized GPUs can provide 99% of bare-metal performance, with the added benefit of vMotion, DRS, and smart workload placement.
He ended up by announcing support for latest Blackwell GPUs (B200) and RTX Pro 600, along with ConnectX-7 NIC and BlueField-3 DPUs for multi-node AI model training (leveraging GPU Direct RDMA/Storage) and VMware's partnership with AMD to leverage AMD enterprise AI software and the AMD Instinct MI 350 series GPU for fine-tuning LLMs, RAG workflows, and inference within data centers.
Tasha Drew, director of product engineering, AI & Advanced Services at Broadcom, took the stage for a brief tour of private AI services. And announced VCF Advanced cyber compliance offering based on their SALT product.
Paul again took the stage one last time to discuss the rise and threats of cyber-attacks, what VCF is doing to mitigate them, and how VCF is a secure foundation to resist these attacks.
Paul wrapped up the keynote by sharing that 25 years ago, people thought server virtualization was crazy, but it redefined IT, and now VMware is redefining the private cloud with VCF.
Great vExperts Swag
After the general session, I headed over to the VMUG (VMware User Group) community lounge to pick up a nifty bomber jacket, available to vExperts, which the VMware Communities Team, the Broadcom VCF Business Unit, and our Broadcom partner, NetApp, sponsored. Many thanks to these organizations for the gift, but more for supporting the vExpert program!
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While I was there, I had the opportunity to catch up with fellow vExperts and VMUG community members. If you are involved with VMware and not a VMUG member, you should seriously consider joining this great organization and attending their meetups.
Final Thoughts on Day Two
During the keynote, VMware presented a compelling case for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 as the leading private cloud solution, addressing contemporary IT challenges with a focus on developer enablement, operational unification, and advanced security. The new announcements regarding Private AI as a Service and Cyber Resilient Data demonstrate VMware's forward-looking strategy. The strong customer testimonials highlighted the tangible benefits and strategic impact of VCF 9.0 across diverse organizations.
Ultimately, Broadcom positions VCF 9.0 not just as a product but as a foundational platform for the next era of data center architecture, a market that it aims to capture.
It is minor, but I do have to commend VMware on their discipline in starting and ending the keynote on time.
During the final day of Explore, I will attend a few more sessions and briefings, as well as the closing party.
About the Author
Tom Fenton has a wealth of hands-on IT experience gained over the past 30 years in a variety of technologies, with the past 20 years focusing on virtualization and storage. He previously worked as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He also previously worked at VMware in Staff and Senior level positions. He has also worked as a Senior Validation Engineer with The Taneja Group, where he headed the Validation Service Lab and was instrumental in starting up its vSphere Virtual Volumes practice. He's on X @vDoppler.