Author: Adrian Page 1 of 13

The wait is over — as of today, VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is generally available. In a nutshell, the goal of VCF 9.0 is to bring the public cloud experience to on-premises as a unified private cloud platform. Thus, it focusses on:

• Modern infrastructure
  • Software defined
  • Automated
  • Simpler Operations
  • Extendable
• Unified cloud experience
  • Self-service
  • All applications
  • Private AI
• Security and resilience
  • Prevention
  • Compliance
  • Faster recovery

Let’s have a quick Look on what’s new with this major release.

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In this lab, I’ll show you how to request a deployment from a catalog item. This catalog item has a custom form with an Aria Orchestrator action to dynamically populate drop down menu values based on a value provided by another drop down value.

To do so, you make a POST request with a project ID that has a cloud template version released to the project. The request body includes the ID of the catalog item from which you are requesting the deployment, and the version of the released cloud template.

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On April 23 2025, Broadcom deactivated the previous URLs to their public repositories from which the binaries for VCF, vCenter, ESX, and vSAN File Services can be downloaded. The new URLs now must contain customer-specific code. This particularly affects the automatic download of patches.

Broadcom announced two fundamental changes to the way VMware updates are available. First, they will now only be available at dl.broadcom.com, instead of depot.vmware.com, hostupdate.vmware.com, or vapp-updates.vmware.com as before.

Administrators must therefore ensure that the vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) or VMware Update Manager (VUM), for example, have access to the new address at broadcom.com and, if necessary, enable it in the firewall. Conversely, the previous URLs no longer have any function and can be blocked.

Second, each customer will receive a unique URL in the future – downloading from the public repositories via a general address will no longer be possible. Companies will receive the corresponding token from the Broadcom support portal.

The new URLs then follow this pattern:

https://dl.broadcom.com/<Your_Download_Token>/PROD/COMP/ESX_HOST/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

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On April 10, 2025 an important change in the licensing model was introduced: the minimum number of cores ordered increased from 16 to 72, both for new licenses and for renewals.

Important: This only applies in Americas and APJ region, not in EMEA.

In EMEA, the new policy has been withdrawn and only the existing 16 core rule applies.

Rules:

• All core-based products are sold with a 16-core per CPU minimum.
• If you have an existing contract, you can add capacity in any quantity.
• For each core-based product you must place an new order or renew an existing order for at least 72 cores.

Example:

• Customer has 48 cores and wants a new contract, they need to buy 72 cores.
• Customer has already a contract with 16 cores, they need to buy 48 cores as capacity.