“Cloud isn’t a postcode, it’s a way of working.”
— a line that stuck with me while reading Broadcom’s launch notes and Sabina Anja’s blog post on
VCF 9.0
A few years ago we all sprinted into the public cloud, wallets open and hopes high. Fast-forward to 2025 and the pendulum is swinging back: AI workloads are thirsty, data sovereignty rules are brutal, and the CFO is side-eyeing our monthly hyperscale bill. Enter VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, Broadcom’s bid to give on-prem the same swagger as the big public clouds, minus the sticker shock.
| What’s New? | Why it matters to humans (not just servers) |
|---|---|
| New Operations Console | One tab, not twelve. Fleet-wide health, patching, and compliance without juggling plug-ins. My Saturday mornings just opened up. |
| Everything-as-Code API | Terraform, REST or good old YAML all hit the same endpoint. Devs stop filing tickets; ops folk stop being Slack-bots. |
| VMs, K8s and AI side-by-side | No “choose your rabbit hole” moment. Migrate at your pace, run GPT fine-tuning next to Oracle, and keep the auditors calm. |
| NVMe Memory Tiering + vSAN Global Dedup | Stretch DRAM with flash and squeeze duplicates across clusters. Translation: do more with the hardware you already paid for. |
| Built-in cost & charge-back dashboards | The first time finance asks “what did that GPU lab cost?” you’ll have a graph instead of a guess. |
William Lam crowdsourced nearly 50 homelab builds already running ESXi 9.0 and published a live dashboard you can filter by NIC, HBA, even GPU. Before you panic buy new parts, give it a look, and maybe add your rig to the sheet.