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.”