Why (Broadcom thinks) VCF is the best platform for your modern workloads

AI-generated portrait of Duncan Epping (taken from photo on Yellow Bricks website)

Duncan Epping and Jad El-Zein recently did a podcast (here) based on Jad's July 2025 blog post (here). The content puts forward an argument for VCF in the new world.

A brief summary, courtesy of one of Virtified's army of junior researchbots, follows.

Listen and/or read at your own choice.

1. They discuss VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 as an integrated infrastructure platform for hybrid workloads, combining Virtual Machines (VMs) and Kubernetes containers on a single virtualisation stack

2. The content explains the Supervisor and VM Service, which expose VMs and Kubernetes clusters through a common declarative Application Programming Interface (API), namespaces, and projects. This enables shared networking, security, and automation constructs

3. The authors describe NSX-based networking—including Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) constructs, load balancing, distributed firewalls, and Source/Destination Network Address Translation (SNAT/DNAT)—and vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) as transparent, policy-driven services for cloud-native workloads

4. The discussion details VCF Automation and VCF Operations as the control layer for multi-tenancy, blueprints, GitOps (e.g., Argo CD, Harbor), cluster lifecycle (VMware Kurbernetes State Manager (VKSM), formerly Tanzu Mission Control), and full-stack observability

5. The authors advocate for running Kubernetes on hypervisors rather than bare metal, citing two decades of VMware performance, availability features such as vMotion and High Availability (HA), and alignment with the virtualised model of public clouds

Virtified will share its opinion on the material separately (focusing on the broader aspects of items 1 and 5).

Footnotes:

1. Virtified is 100% independent and does not do 'cash for comment'. Never. The purpose for sharing the article aligns with our belief that not all value comes purely from analyst opinion.

2. The referenced article provides technical insight into recent initiatives in and around VCF, including the ideal of VMs and containers living happily together (something we once called container-VM convergence). In this regard, the following is provided purely for informational value (and, thankfully, is largely marketing-free).

3. Anyone who knows the technical side of VMware probably knows Duncan Epping as a person of integrity; he is someone with a long history of involvement with the platform and ecosystem. Virtified was not aware of Jad El-Zein before now...but he seems similar.