VMware Explore 2025: 10 Biggest Product Launches And Innovations

From a new private AI as-a-service and AI assistant inside VMware Cloud Foundation, to VMware’s new Tanzu Data Intelligence platform and cybersecurity enhancements, here’s the 10 biggest product launches at VMware Explore 2025 today that you need to know about.

Thousands of VMware customers, developers and partners flocked to VMware Explore 2025 today in Las Vegas as the Broadcom company unleashed a slew of new products and innovation.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) was front and center on Tuesday with many of the most important announcements—including a new private AI as-a-service, cybersecurity enhancements and a new AI assistant—created to elevate VCF 9 even further.

Outside of VCF, some of the biggest products unveiled include a new modern data lakehouse platform, Tanzu Data Intelligence, as well as Tanzu Platform version 10.3 with major enhancements around AI model quota capabilities and security.

On the cybersecurity front, VMware launched a new Cyber Compliance Advanced Service for VCF, a revamped Avi Load Balancer, native vSAN S3 Object Storage and new innovations for vDefend for private cloud.

[Related: WWT EVP On VMware VCF ‘AI Factory In A Box’ And Broadcom Relationship]

As of August, nine of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies have adopted VCF, with customers worldwide having licensed more than 100 million cores of VCF.

“It’s undeniable that customers are resetting their cloud strategies and building out their private clouds to support better developer velocity with IT control, and more cost-efficient AI deployments. To support the next wave of AI innovation, Broadcom is making private AI a standard part of the modern private cloud,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom, in a statement.

“With VMware Cloud Foundation, infrastructure and cloud operators get the cost and operational benefits of virtualization for AI workloads without sacrificing performance,” Prasad said. “Developers get access to native AI services delivered directly from the private cloud platform for a frictionless experience.”

CRN is attending VMware Explore in Las Vegas this week to provide in-depth coverage of VMware’s flagship event in North America.

Here’s a breakdown of the 10 biggest product launches at VMware Explore today that every channel partner, IT professional and VMware customer needs to know.

VMware Private AI Services For VCF

VMware private AI aervices will become a standard component of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, making VCF an AI native platform.

VFC customers will be entitled to VMware private AI services as part of their VCF 9.0 subscription, beginning in Broadcom’s first quarter fiscal year 2026.

These native AI services, such as GPU Monitoring, Model Store, Model Runtime, Agent Builder, Vector Database, and Data Indexing/Retrieval, enhance privacy and security, simplify infrastructure, and streamline model deployment.

With private AI now core to VCF, enterprises will get one unified platform for their AI and non-AI workloads without an additional purchase. “To support the next wave of AI innovation, Broadcom is making private AI a standard part of the modern private cloud,” said Prasad.

VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence

VMware launched its new Tanzu Data Intelligence offering, which is a data lakehouse platform that provides low-latency access to multimodal data at scale to drive faster and more secure analytics, applications and agentic AI.

The new data lakehouse platform integrates ingestion, processing, querying, and AI enablement into a single solution built for complex and regulated organizations.

At the core of Tanzu Data Intelligence is an enterprise-grade data lakehouse architecture, purpose-built to handle diverse and large-scale workloads with flexibility and governance.

It provides unified access to diverse data across environments—whether structured, unstructured, native or federated—scaling from terabytes to petabytes in volume with millisecond latency and massive concurrency across data, users, and APIs, the company said.

The platform has multiple use cases such as agentic and smart applications, decision support, model training and tuning, and data science. It also offers native vector search at scale, enabling SQL queries and semantic similarity search across vectorized data.

Tanzu Data Intelligence integrates with VMware’s Tanzu Platform, helping application and AI teams gain access to low latency and real-time data to build AI applications.

VCF Cyber Compliance Advanced Service

In one of its biggest security unveilings, VMware unveiled its new Cyber Compliance Advanced Service for VCF that integrates technologies spanning policy management, infrastructure security and cyber resilience.

The new service offers integrated compliance operations with VCF SaltStack capabilities, accessible directly from the VCF Operations console. VMware said it will provide real-time application and full-stack infrastructure monitoring and auto-remediation.

End-to-end compliance operations can be fully automated, streamlining policy management and accelerating audit-readiness.

The Cyber Compliance Advanced Service will enable fully automated cyber and disaster recovery to isolated, on-premises VCF clean rooms.

The integrated push-button VM network isolation will enable rapid recovery from ransomware and IT disruptions such as power outages, natural disasters, and hardware failures.

Secure restore operations are powered by end-to-end cyber recovery workflows with integrated validation tools that identify and help clean both fileless and file-based strains of malware.

Lastly, the Cyber Compliance Advanced Service will include secure computing to bolster protection at the core of the infrastructure to improve cyber-risk posture. Customers will have access to premium compliance and risk management services to help meet stringent regulatory requirements.

VCF New Model Innovations

VFC customers will get access to new AI model innovations.

This includes a new multi-accelerator Model Runtime capability that lets customers flexibly deploy AI models across a range of hardware—including AMD and Nvidia GPUs—without the need to refactor AI applications, optimizing infrastructure utilization.

Additionally, new Model Context Protocol (MCP) Support for VCF will provide governance and security for MCP, integrating AI services with diverse tools.

This new MCP support gives customers a standardized method to integrate AI assistants with internal content repositories and external tools such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, ServiceNow, GitHub, Slack and PostgreSQL without building and maintaining custom connectors.

Lastly, new AI innovations for VCF include Multi-tenant Models-as-a-Service.

VMware said this new model service enables significant TCO and power savings by allowing the secure sharing of AI models between tenants or separate lines of business in their namespaces while maintaining full data privacy and isolation for each tenant.

VMware Tanzu Platform 10.3

VMware’s new Tanzu Platform 10.3 is aimed to accelerate the safe development and integration of GenAI capabilities into both new and existing enterprise applications.

The Tanzu Platform is a pre-engineered AI application development platform with built-in best practices, configurations, and optimization.

The new Tanzu Platform 10.3 provides platform engineers with greater operational control, visibility and out-of-the-box observability dashboards. The new advancements include new capabilities and use cases such as fleet management, security and service health visibility across apps and platform, and AI middleware for delivering enterprise-ready AI solutions.

Other new enhancements with Tanzu Platform 10.3 include new AI model quota capabilities and architectural updates for broader integration via webhooks to give platform teams greater control, security, and cost management—promoting compliant and responsible AI practices for private and public AI models.

Additionally, the platform includes a new vulnerability insights dashboard in Tanzu Hub that provides security transparency by visualizing risk exposure for applications and platform components, enabling faster triaging and remediation of security vulnerabilities.

The Tanzu Hub now includes integrated data services observability with out-of-the-box dashboards, while the new 10.3 version also includes a new service publishing in the Tanzu Platform Marketplace that enables app developers to offer their applications as services.

AI Starter Kit For Tanzu

At Explore, VMware launched an AI Starter Kit for Tanzu Platform.

The kit is aimed at helping platform teams build AI applications faster.

It includes tooling and custom code for automated standup of Tanzu Platform services for AI as well as ‘How-to-Guides’ to walk application teams through how to set up small foundations and deploy their first AI application.

VMware said organizations that have the Tanzu Platform today—including those with earlier versions—can quickly evaluate AI capabilities without undergoing a full platform upgrade thanks to the new starter kit.

Revamped VMware vDefend

VMware vDefend is a cybersecurity solution for private clouds, specifically designed to protect application workloads within VCF environments.

At Explore today, VMware unveiled some major improvements to the vDefend, including Zero Trust lateral security specifically for agentic AI workloads running on VMware Cloud Foundation. This new capability addresses the new attack surface created by AI workloads by securing communication paths and access controls with a Zero rust model.

vDefend also have new automation workflows that will fast-track multi-stage segmentation for private cloud workloads, securing foundational services first, then progressively applying granular application-level protection.

A new firewall rule analysis will optimize distributed firewall rules by identifying redundancies and misconfigurations, allowing lean and efficient security policies.

The revamped vDefend also has a new Network Detection and Response (NDR) sensor to provide data center-wide threat visibility. It can be deployed into existing monitoring fabrics to collect traffic from all data center workloads and network devices.

Lastly, vDefend will now include advanced capabilities for fileless malware detection, directly targeting stealthy in-memory attacks that leverage PowerShell, VBScript, and Jscript. By integrating with the Antimalware Scan Interface for Windows workloads, VMware said vDefend inspects and intercepts malicious scripts before execution.

VCF Intelligent Assist

VMware is doubling down on the AI assistant market by launching its new VMware Cloud Foundation Intelligent Assist.

The VCF Intelligent Assist is an AI-driven support assistant that will help diagnose and resolve issues faster by quickly accessing Broadcom's knowledge base for solutions, significantly reducing downtime.

The new assistant aims to offer flexibility which can be used on-premises or cloud-hosted language models.

VMware Revamps Avi Load Balancer

VMware’s Avi Load Balancer with VCF enables customers to deploy layered threat defense to help protect workloads against web-level attacks.

At Explore today, VMware announced new Avi Load Balancer innovations for private clouds including a built-in Web Application Firewall (WAF) assessment tool.

The WAF tool will let customers quickly assess security posture for web-centric attacks and generate a report. This allows VCF administrators to enable Avi WAF protection progressively across VCF applications, starting with high-risk areas.

Also, Avi has a new mutual authentication for TLS [transport layer security] capability that will support cryptographic authentication for both client and server connections, further enhancing security for Kubernetes application traffic.

Lastly, VMware’s Avi Load Balancer is introducing a tech preview of securing Model Context Protocol (MCP) traffic with WAF while providing MCP session persistence and authorization to help reduce the new attack surface.

Native vSAN S3 Object Storage

One new developer-focused innovation launched at Explore includes native vSAN S3 Object Storage.

VMware vSAN now natively supports an S3-compatible object storage interface, allowing for the storing and retrieval of unstructured data directly on vSAN with no proprietary hardware or third-party license required.

The goal is to enable developers to establish unified storage policies for block, file and object storage, reducing the need to manage additional storage infrastructure, while boosting developer productivity with multi-tenant, self-service access.

Customers will be able to accelerate application and service velocity with native S3 access.

VMware said native vSAN S3 Object Storage provides IT teams complete visibility, governance and control.