VMware Explore 2025, held August 25-28 at The Venetian Convention and Expo Center in Las Vegas, delivered deep technical insights and a wave of new capabilities across private cloud, AI-native systems, security, and infrastructure automation. Over 400 sessions, hands-on labs, and expert roundtables offered practitioners the chance to unpack the latest in VMware’s product stack – from Cloud Foundation to data services and advanced compliance tooling. Attending VMware Explore 2025 was a milestone for me — not just because of the technology announcements, the deep technical content, and social networking, but because it was my first time ever attending VMware Explore in Las Vegas.
Category: VMware Page 1 of 12
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 has been released a few weeks ago. It introduces a more cloud-like, scalable, and intent-driven architecture for building and operating private cloud environments. Rather than thinking only in terms of vCenter servers, clusters, and management domains, VCF 9.0 encourages a layered architectural model built around constructs such as Private Cloud, Fleet, and Instance.
This article breaks down those core components and explains how they work together to deliver a modern private cloud platform.
The wait is over — as June 17th, 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.
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.
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