Broadcom’s $69 billion acquisition of virtualization pioneer
VMware in late 2023 sent ripples through the tech industry that unsurprisingly
focused on the skyrocketing price increases of as much as 300 percent to more
than 1,000 percent and a sharp turn away from perpetual licenses to
subscription-based licensing sent customers – many of them smaller or midsize
companies – looking for a safe harbor elsewhere.
And there were plenty of competitors, from Nutanix to Red
Hat to Hewlett
Packard Enterprise, throwing out pitches and programs to entice those
organizations to see them as their landing spot. It drew a lot of headlines,
and rightfully so. Changes were happening quickly at a stalwart of the modern
datacenter.
Through the noise, Broadcom and VMware executives steadily beat
the drum of their strategy to establish
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) as the foundation for what VMware would be
going forward, a more streamlined company that would focus on what they saw as
the future – enterprise workloads gravitating to the private cloud, making the
transition from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and
other public cloud platforms.
The general availability of VCF 9 last year was the latest
step in that direction.
At the VMware Explore 2024 event, Broadcom president and
chief executive officer Hock Tan told
attendees that their company executives had been enthralled with the public
cloud and steered their businesses in that direction.
“Because of this, I say to you, you all are suffering from
PTSD,” Tan said. “It’s very simple: the future of the enterprise – your
enterprises – is private cloud. It’s about staying on-prem and in control.”
Earlier this month, Krish Prasad, senior vice president and
general manager of Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation Division, wrote about the
billions of dollars being directed to building AI datacenters and manufactures
adopting expensive technologies like high-bandwidth memory for GPUs, and said
that industry has reached the point where companies can’t keep throwing money
to address the accelerating demand for AI infrastructure.
“Within the VMware Cloud Foundation business in Broadcom, we
believe the answer to a hardware crisis like this isn’t more hardware – it’s
building a modern private cloud based on smarter software,” Prasad wrote.
VMware this week is in Amsterdam, at the KubeCon
Europe 2026 show, with executives bringing with them a message for ongoing support
for Kubernetes and the open source world. It’s a message that dates back to
the early days of VMware, according to Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of
product marketing for the VCF Division.
“Contributing and supporting open source project has been
the heritage since our VMware days and it continues to be in the DNA as part of
Broadcom,” Shenoy told journalists in a briefing before the KubeCon show
opened. “This is very critical for us and Broadcom is really excited and proud
to be among the top five long-term contributors to the Kubernetes community.
Open source is a big part of our identity. We are not only the consumers of
this project but active contributors to the project to help simplify Kubernetes
operations, increase resiliency, enhance security, etc.”
What VMware is talking about at the conference is aimed at
continuing to expand the Kubernetes features throughout its offerings,
continuing to contribute projects to the open source community, and building
more pathways for developers and platform engineering teams to access tools
from ecosystem partners.
Shenoy stressed the benefits of adopting VCF with the latest
iteration of VMware’s vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) Kubernetes runtime –
version 3.6, which was released in February – as the antidote to increasingly
complex cloud infrastructures and the growing numbers of AI and other advanced
workloads.
VKS includes a range of Cloud Native Computing Foundation
(CNCF) open source services, such as Pinniped (authentication), Antrea
(networking), and Velero (backup and restore), as well as other services for
AI, VMs, GitOps, and data, supporting both VM and container workloads.
“We’ve also now built in multi-cluster management, which
simplifies operation across multi-tenant environments and provides lifecycle
management, policy enforcement, and governance, which is very crucial for
organizations to scale Kubernetes across multiple different line of businesses,
multiple teams, or multiple clouds,” Shenoy said, adding that this supports a
range of users, from BI administrators to platform engineers to lines of
business and developers.
VKS 3.6 supports Kubernetes 1.35, the latest version, allows
for organizations to integrate Container Network Interface (CNI) plugins to
expand their networking options while staying consistent with support and
lifecycle.
VMware also is expanding OS choices in VKS cluster nodes by
bringing in support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9, joining Photon OS 5,
Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, and Windows Server 2022 as supported operating systems
for VKS cluster nodes. Other new third-party offerings supported in VKS 3.6
include F5’s Big-IP Container Ingress Services, Kong’s API Gateway, and Tigera
Calico Enterprise.
In addition, the vendor is contributing the Velero project
to the CNCF’s Sandbox. Velero is a Kubernetes-native tool for backing up,
restoring, and migrating Kubernetes clusters and applications that protects
cluster-level resources and persistent data, ensuring users have disaster
recovery and workload portability capabilities.
“Velero is very critical for organizations because
Kubernetes, by default, doesn’t provide built-in cluster level backup or
recovery,” Shenoy said. “Using Velero helps organizations to protect their
stateful applications and data, recover very quickly from outages or failures,
as well as move workloads across different Kubernetes clusters or workload
environment.”
VMware also is pushing its AVI load balancer as an
alternative to the open source NGINX, a popular Ingress load balancer that the
Kubernetes community in November 2025 announced would be retired, effective
this month. Shoney said Avi is “more than just a replacement for this NGINX
controller. It’s an architectural upgrade. It is natively supported now with VKS
on VCF deployments with native integration.” VMware is offering a conversion
kit to make it easier for organizations to transition to Avi.
The focus of VMware’s efforts to ensure enterprises have a
Kubernetes-based option to the increasing infrastructure and technology
complexity, disconnected tools and teams, security and compliance issues, and
accelerating development of AI.
“With AI is evolving really rapidly literally
every few weeks, it’s difficult to find and retain talent with expertise in
Kubernetes, AI, DevOps and cloud development and deployment,” he said. “With
distributed applications [and] faster release cycle, these platform engineers
need to maintain a secure and compliant environment, which is more and more
critical and complex than ever before. We also see that tools problem becoming
a pain point. Different teams adopt different tools for similar problems, and
that results not only in operational inefficiency, but also in overlaps and
poor integrated solutions. This is where we believe VKS truly helps IT
organizations, by providing them the perfect choice for deploying and running
their modern applications.”
