VMware Explore 2025: Latest news and insights

VMware Explore 2025 kicked off on Aug. 25 in Las Vegas. VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 took center stage, with Broadcom sharing plans to make VCF an AI-native platform by including features such as GPU monitoring, model runtime and agent builder as part of the unified offering. New security enhancements for VMware vDefend and VMware Avi products were also launched.

Leading up to the show, Broadcom has been making moves to placate enterprises that are unhappy with its VMware licensing overhaul and struggling with upgrade fatigue. Broadcom announced plans to shift from aggressive two-year major release cycles to a more measured three-year cadence, and it’s extending support for VCF 9.0 to six years instead of the previous five. Meanwhile, Broadcom is still wrangling in the courts with disgruntled entities.

Read on for all the news from VMware Explore 2025. We’ll continue to update this page with event news, product updates, and reactions from enterprise customers and industry analysts.

Broadcom’s VMware strategy pays off financially, but customers not as keen as Wall Street

Sept. 9, 2025: To many attendees at this year’s VMware Explore conference, turnout felt smaller, there were fewer sessions than last year, and there were markedly fewer vendors on the exhibit floor. But while the mood among VMware Explore attendees was dour, Wall Street seems to be celebrating Broadcom’s moves. According to an earnings report released Sept. 4, Broadcom’s net revenues jumped sharply in 2024, marking the fastest increase in the company’s history.

Broadcom touts AI-native VMware, but gains aren’t revolutionary

Sept. 9, 2025: Broadcom’s VMware has taken on the AI mantle, declaring that the VMware Cloud Foundation platform is now “AI native.” The AI features are now a core part of the platform, instead of add-ons requiring additional payment, and VCF’s AI feature set continues to expand, keeping pace with industry trends. In the big picture, however, Broadcom didn’t set the world ablaze with the announcements at its VMware Explore conference. They were all the obvious next steps for the company and do not move the needle forward on AI technology.

VMware Avi load balancer gains AI integration and post-quantum security

Sept. 8, 2025: The role of load balancing is growing in the genAI era. Broadcom announced significant enhancements coming to VMware Avi release 31.1.1. The update introduces plug-and-play integration with VCF 9.0 private cloud, AI-powered operational capabilities, and post-quantum cryptography support. These developments reflect the platform’s evolution from a traditional load balancer into a comprehensive application services platform.

Broadcom CEO urges cloud-to-on-prem repatriation

Sept. 8, 2025: “Most of you continue to be weighed down by your infrastructure, and you’re afraid to move forward,” Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said in his conference keynote. “So how do you let go of your IT past so you can build for the future? Well, I can tell you for sure the answer is not to run straight to public cloud, as you did five, ten years ago. If you’re going to do cloud, do it right. Embrace VCF 9.0 and stay on prem.”

Running the numbers on VCF: How one midsize enterprise is making it work

Sept. 2, 2025: Broadcom’s shift to all-in-one, perpetual licenses for VMware Cloud Foundation has infuriated customers and priced out some companies, but 750-employee Grinnell Mutual has managed to save money on the new platform. “I had followed the acquisition very closely and heard what people had been saying about pricing,” Jeremy Wright, director of IT infrastructure at the insurance company, told Network World. Wright could see how some larger companies might benefit from the new structure, but it wasn’t clear how a small company like Grinnell would be affected. When he dug into the numbers, Wright discovered that Grinnell would actually come out ahead – substantially ahead.

Broadcom tackles agentic AI security challenges

Aug. 26, 2025: At the VMware Explore conference today in Las Vegas, Broadcom announced new security enhancements for its VMware vDefend and VMware Avi products, which are part of the VMware Cloud Foundation Cyber Compliance Advanced Services. Upgrades include more security for agentic workflows, including model context protocol (MCP) servers, and support for post-quantum encryption, among other improvements.

Broadcom and Canonical expand partnership, promising accelerated innovation

Aug. 26, 2025: Broadcom and Canonical are expanding their partnership, saying they will help customers create container-based and AI applications more quickly and securely, and at lower cost. “Canonical is the number-one Cloud OS provider in the market with the Ubuntu containers, and VMware by Broadcom, with our VCF Foundation, is the number-one private cloud platform,” said Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product marketing, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) division of Broadcom, during a media briefing. “So those two organizations coming together really helps our customers build Kubernetes-based modern applications.” 

Broadcom launches VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence and Tanzu Platform 10.3 to drive agentic AI

Aug. 26, 2025: Broadcom is pushing its new data lakehouse platform as the answer to all an enterprise’s data challenges — or almost. VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence will enable users to curate incoming data across many different environments with its data ingestion, streaming, and pipeline engine, the company said its VMware Explore conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

VMware Explore 2025 preview: Customers are looking for VCF value

August 19, 2025: Despite grumbling by customers, as well as legal action against Broadcom on a number of fronts, there’s no indication that Broadcom CEO Hock Tan is wavering the least bit from his strategy. Broadcom’s pitch is that VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) enables IT organizations to run a modern, virtualized, high-performance, highly automated, AWS-style cloud in an on-prem environment with all of the benefits that accrue. All customers need to do is take advantage of VCF’s full arsenal of features. And that’s the sole focus of VMware Explore 2025.

VMware Explore 2024

In August 2024, VMware Explore attendees saw an emphasis on private AI and cloud repatriation as key strategies for enterprises. The conference in Las Vegas, the first after Broadcom finalized its acquisition of VMware, highlighted the growing trend of companies bringing workloads back from public clouds to on-premises environments.

Broadcom continued the theme on the European leg of VMware Explore, held Nov. 4-7 in Barcelona, where executives emphasized the company’s flagship private cloud platform, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Broadcom also announced VeloRAIN, a new networking architecture that uses AI/ML to improve the performance and security of distributed AI workloads. Here are the stories from VMware Explore 2024:

Broadcom EMEA CTO talks up private cloud, VCF updates

Nov. 12, 2024: Focus, innovation and investment are key to positioning VMware technology in customer sights, said Joe Baguley, Broadcom’s chief technology officer for EMEA, in an interview with Computerworld Spain at VMware Explore Barcelona. “When it comes to building private clouds, we are the first. There is no one who can offer you a profile as broad and complete as ours.”

VMware VeloRAIN uses AI/ML to improve network performance

Nov. 5, 2024: VMware by Broadcom has unveiled a networking architecture that it says will improve the performance and security of distributed AI workloads. Launched at the VMware Explore conference in Barcelona, Spain, VeloRAIN can detect AI applications using AI and ML, even if the application traffic is encrypted, to enable QoS and QoE for edge AI applications, the company said. It will offer channel estimation intelligence for wireless connections over cellular or satellite to help enable what Broadcom called “fiber-like QoS in the face of dynamically changing network conditions.”

Broadcom launches VMware Tanzu Data Services

Nov. 5, 2024: Broadcom released VMware Tanzu Data Services, a new “advanced service” for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), at VMware Explore Barcelona. According to a release, the new offerings will be delivered through the private cloud and provide built-in data management services.

VMware’s AI query tool could be best for junior threat team members

Nov. 5, 2024: Don’t expect the earth to move when Broadcom’s VMware launches its new AI query tool for the vDefend platform early next year, says an industry analyst. “They seem to be making pragmatic promises,” Fernando Montenegro of Omdia said of the announcement that the AI-powered Intelligent Assist will be available in the first quarter of 2025. It is now in beta trials with customers. “It’s nice that they’re being cautious about it” instead of making wild promises that the genAI assistant will drastically improve security, he said.

Broadcom bolsters VMware Cloud Foundation

Nov. 1, 2024: VMware increased the vSAN capacity in vSphere Foundation by 2.5x to 250 GiB per core, which the company says will offer customers a more powerful hyperconverged infrastructure offering for running virtual machines and containers. 

Broadcom’s vision for VMware highlights private clouds, private AI

Aug. 30, 2024: A year ago, VMware’s big annual VMware Explore conference was all about generative AI – specifically, about companies running AI applications within a hybrid cloud infrastructure. This year, attendees heard more about VMware’s partnership with Nvidia to deliver generative AI models and tools – but in the context of a private cloud.

Broadcom CEO pushes on-prem private clouds

Aug. 29, 2024: In a keynote address at VMware Explore 2024, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan talked up the new version of VMware Cloud Foundation and extolled the future of the enterprise: “private cloud, private AI, your own private data.”

VMware Cloud Foundation gains AI model store, other updates

Aug. 28, 2024: Some companies are looking to third-party AI platforms that don’t lock them into any one particular AI vendor or cloud provider, and VMware – now owned by Broadcom – is one of the leading contenders for the job. Today, at the annual VMware Explore conference, Broadcom sweetened the deal, announcing support for a new model store for the VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia add-on to its VMware Cloud Foundation 9 platform.

With Project Cypress, VMware brings generative AI to cyberdefense

Aug. 27, 2024: At the VMware Explore conference this week, VMware announced the addition of a generative AI tool, called Project Cypress, to its own vDefend cybersecurity platform. “Security teams get overwhelmed with a large number of threat campaigns and false alarms,” says Umesh Mahajan, vice president and general manager for application networking and security at Broadcom. “Project Cypress, via a natural language interface, helps triage and investigate high-risk threat campaigns faster, explains a particular threat campaign with additional context needed for the security team to quickly take appropriate actions, recommends remediation options, and can enforce the remediation option selected by the security team via vDefend’s threat prevention capabilities.”

VMware upgrades software-defined edge for AI workloads

Aug. 27, 2024: VMware has added connectivity options and traffic-management capabilities to its software-defined edge products to better support generative AI workloads. Edge computing will play a “pivotal role” in the deployment of AI applications, according to IDC, which expects spending on edge computing to reach $232 billion in 2024, an increase of 15.4% over 2023.

Customer concerns loom as VMware Explore event approaches

Aug. 19, 2024: Enterprise customers have questions about VMware’s future direction, licensing changes, and product roadmap following Broadcom’s takeover. Customers want to continue to see innovation across the VMware portfolio, says one analyst. They also want to see Broadcom focus on integration, interface design, and an easier adoption path. 

VMware Explore 2023

Generative AI dominated the news from VMware Explore 2023. Highlights include a private AI platform developed with Nvidia that lets enterprises run generative AI applications on their proprietary data within VMware’s hybrid cloud infrastructure.

VMware Cloud gains faster ransomware recovery, expanded management capabilities

Aug. 22, 2023: Among the announcements at the VMware Explore conference is a new IBM-managed service based on VMware Cloud editions.

VMware NSX+ centralizes cloud networking and security for multicloud environments

Aug. 22, 2023: VMware NSX+ is a new cloud-managed service that enables consistent network operations and centralized security policy creation and enforcement in multicloud environments.

VMware combines SASE and edge management in new orchestration platform

Aug. 22, 2023: News from the VMware Explore conference includes a unified management platform for VMware’s SASE and edge computing stack, along with a new managed private mobile networking service.

VMware, Nvidia team on enterprise-grade AI platform

Aug. 22, 2023: VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia will enable enterprises to customize models and run generative AI applications on their own infrastructure in their data centers, at the edge, and in their clouds.