78% Untapped Potential: Why VMware vSAN Deserves a Place on Every VCF Agenda

Recent market analyses highlight the strategic importance of this opportunity: Although VMware vSAN is VMware Cloud Foundation’s preferred storage platform, approximately 78% of storage resources in existing VCF environments are still not running on vSAN. At the same time, VCF customers already benefit from integrated vSAN entitlements of 1 TiB per core, creating significant untapped value and modernization potential. In addition, more than 7 million processor cores and over 214,000 VxRail hosts worldwide are expected to face refresh, migration, or modernization decisions in the coming years. For VMware by Broadcom partners, this represents substantial opportunities for modernization, consolidation, migration, and upgrade projects.

According to industry analyses, organizations can achieve up to 39% lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to traditional storage arrays. This enables enterprises to modernize their storage strategy while maintaining the flexibility, performance, and security required for enterprise-class storage environments.

Industry analyses highlight potential savings of approximately 34–39% in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to traditional storage arrays. In addition, organizations benefit from simplified operations and faster provisioning of new resources.

Additional Business Advantages

• Reduced operating costs through simplified management
• Utilization of standardized hardware with certified vSAN ReadyNodes
• Elimination of proprietary hardware dependencies
• Integrated deduplication and compression for improved storage efficiency
• Protection of existing investments through flexible scaling options

For VMware by Broadcom partners, this creates valuable opportunities to engage customers in storage refresh, capacity expansion, and private cloud modernization initiatives.

Key Customer Benefits

• Greater hardware flexibility through a broad ecosystem of certified vendors
• More choice and purchasing flexibility for future infrastructure investments
• Reduced dependency on proprietary hardware platforms
• Continued access to proven and trusted vSAN capabilities
• Improved cost efficiency when expanding and modernizing private cloud environments

For VMware by Broadcom partners, this creates significant opportunities to support customers with hardware refresh, infrastructure modernization, and cloud transformation initiatives.

Compared to traditional storage architectures, VMware vSAN delivers a fully software-defined approach to storage. Organizations can leverage existing industry-standard x86 hardware more efficiently while reducing reliance on complex, proprietary storage systems. Through the tight integration of compute, storage, and networking within VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1, customers benefit from a unified operating platform that reduces administrative overhead, eliminates silos, and significantly increases IT agility.

A key competitive advantage of VMware vSAN lies in its native integration across the VMware ecosystem. Capabilities such as high availability, disaster recovery, lifecycle management, automation, and security are tightly integrated without requiring additional point solutions. This reduces complexity, accelerates deployment timelines, and ensures a consistent operating model across the entire infrastructure stack.

From a business perspective, VMware vSAN also delivers compelling advantages. Many organizations have already invested heavily in VMware technologies and can modernize their storage environments within VMware Cloud Foundation far more easily than undertaking a complete migration to alternative hypervisor or HCI platforms. This approach reduces migration risks, minimizes operational disruptions, and protects existing investments.

At the same time, VMware vSAN is evolving into a strategic platform for modern workloads. Whether supporting traditional enterprise applications, cloud-native workloads powered by VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS), edge deployments, or future AI-driven initiatives, VMware vSAN provides the scalability and flexibility required for next-generation private cloud environments.

For VMware by Broadcom partners, this creates significant growth opportunities. Many VMware Cloud Foundation customers are not yet fully utilizing vSAN, resulting in substantial modernization potential within existing environments. This opens the door to storage refresh projects, infrastructure consolidation initiatives, and broader private cloud transformation engagements.

Beyond infrastructure modernization, VMware vSAN frequently serves as the entry point for broader VMware Cloud Foundation conversations. Additional opportunities arise through complementary solutions such as VMware vDefend for modern security architectures and VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS) for cloud-native applications. This enables partners to position themselves as trusted advisors for end-to-end private cloud and digital transformation strategies while driving larger project scopes, increased services revenue, and stronger long-term customer relationships within the VMware by Broadcom ecosystem.