VCF 9 is aiming to close the gap between on-prem and public cloud capabilities by preparing enterprises for AI, containers, multi-tenant clouds, self healing systems and much more. Public Beta is already available and the GA version should be here before the end of 2025!
VCF 9 Public Beta Program link here
Integrated vSAN Global Deduplication
- What’s New: More efficient data deduplication by performing it across clusters.
- Benefit: Maximizes storage capacity and reduces the overall cost of the solution.
- Source: here
Host Profiles are going to include NSX rules
- What’s New: VCF 9 extends host profiles to include NSX configurations.
- Benefit: Ensures consistent network policies, security posture, and NSX state across all vSphere hosts. This automates compliance and reduces configuration drift.
EVC Mixing Different Server Types in One Cluster
- What’s New: Enables Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) across diverse CPU generations within the same cluster.
- Benefit: Simplifies hardware refreshes—mix legacy and new servers, live migrate VMs, and gradually update without downtime.
Unified Cluster Imaging Across Hardware Vendors
- What’s New: Support for heterogeneous hardware within the same cluster image.
- Benefit: Vendor-agnostic hardware images. You will have the ability apply OS/firmware patches and BIOS updates across the different manufactures (Dell, Cisco, HPE, Lenovo) using a single baseline.
Monster VMs Beyond Current Limits
- What’s New: Support for ultra-large VMs (e.g. multi-TB RAM, multiple large vCPUs).
- Benefit: Enables big-data, AI/ML, and in-memory databases to run at scale on-prem, reducing the need to offload them to public clouds. This improvement is mainly focused on Fortune 100 companies with crazy workload requirements.
NSX Enhanced Data Path
- What’s New: High Performance Network Switching
- Benefits: NSX Enhanced Data Path can deliver up to 3× switching performance for data-intensive, low latency workloads.
- Source: here
Sovereign Multi-Tenancy & Fleet Operations
- What’s New: Centralized management and governance for multiple VCF cloud deployments
- Benefit: Operators gain visibility whether managing one or dozens of clusters which is ideal for large enterprises.
- Source: here
Enhanced VCF Import Capabilities
- What’s New: Integrates VMware NSX and various vSAN topologies directly into VCF environments.
- Benefit: Reduces downtime during migration, ensuring seamless integration and future-proofing of existing setups.
- Source: here
Stronger Security with TLS 1.3
- What’s New: VCF components now default to TLS 1.3, which is the most secure transport layer at the moment.
- Benefit: Delivers improved security and compliance, better performance due to fewer handshake round-trips, and future-proofs cryptographic standards.
- Source: here
vSphere Kubernetes Service Enhancements
- What’s New: VCF will include out-of-the-box support for Windows containers, direct network connectivity through VPC, and native OVF support
- Benefits: Enhancing the flexibility and scalability of containerized applications.
- Source: here
Memory Tiering with NVMe
- What’s New: vSphere hosts can use NVMe SSDs as a secondary memory tier, expanding memory capacity beyond DRAM.
- Benefit: Add extra “virtual RAM” at much lower cost. This is ideal for memory-constraint workloads, without costly DRAM upgrades. This feature has been out for quite a while leveraging Optane memory which has been discontinued, but leveraging NVMe SSDs will be now fully integrated and supported within the VCF9 stack.
- Source: here
Longer vSphere Evaluation Mode
- What’s New: VCF9 will extend the evaluation mode to last 90 days, up from the familiar 60-day period in the past.
- Benefits: Longer timeframe to completes hardware migration projects.
- Source: here
Mandatory Compliance Reporting
- What’s New: VCF9 will require a compliance report 180 days from the commencement date of the subscription and every 180 days thereafter.
- Benefits: Every other subscription company is already tracking this information at some level, and this will just simplify the compliance maintenance for all VMware licensing at the end of the day.
- Source: here
Did I miss any others that you are aware of? Please let me know in the comments!
