It’s a pivotal time for companies running VMware. Enterprises are racing to modernize operations, improve infrastructure efficiency, and prepare for a future that spans private and public clouds. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is increasingly serving as a foundational platform for organizations building consistent operations across data center and cloud—bringing together compute, storage, networking, and management into a unified stack.
At Pure Storage, we’re helping customers meet that challenge—whether they’re modernizing the data center, extending to the cloud, or rethinking disaster recovery altogether.
This week at VMware Explore 2025, we’re announcing two new innovations—and amplifying two important ones—that make it even easier to run, manage, and optimize VMware workloads across environments. From tighter integration with VMware vSphere, to smarter insights for VCF 9, to enhanced recovery options with Pure Protect™ //DRaaS, and our recently announced support for Pure Cloud Block Store™ with Amazon EVS, these updates help IT leaders reduce risk, accelerate transformation, and unlock more value from their existing infrastructure.
It’s all part of our vision to help you build an Enterprise Data Cloud—one that replaces traditional storage with a unified, intelligent model for automated, policy-driven data management across every environment.
Simplifying VMware Operations with New Pure Fusion Integration
If you’re managing VMware environments, you know the challenge: Provisioning and managing external storage in vSphere often means juggling multiple systems, tickets, and manual handoffs. That slows teams down and adds complexity—especially when you’re trying to operate with cloud-like speed.
We’re building on our existing vSphere plugin with a significant enhancement, available later this fall, that brings Pure Fusion™ capabilities directly into VMware environments—making storage management, provisioning, and automation radically simpler.
With this new capability, VMware administrators will be able to:
- Manage fleets of Pure Storage arrays from within the vSphere client using Pure Fusion, rather than on an array-by-array basis. This includes registering fleets with the plugin, adding and updating host groups within the fleet, and mapping array-level authentication to individual vSphere users.
- Provision workloads using Pure Fusion presets, enabling enhanced array features and policy-based provisioning at the workload level—for more consistent and automated storage deployment.
It’s a powerful combination: the familiar VMware tools your team already knows, paired with the Pure Storage intelligent control plane—working together to streamline workflows and eliminate operational friction.
This integration is a key step in extending Pure Fusion intelligent orchestration to virtualized environments, giving you the flexibility of cloud with the performance and resilience of on-prem infrastructure.
And it’s just the beginning—this capability lays the foundation for deeper VMware and Pure Fusion alignment as we continue to expand policy-driven automation and orchestration across hybrid cloud.
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 Now Supported—Enhanced by Pure1
As organizations look to scale and modernize their VMware environments, VCF 9 provides a powerful foundation for managing virtual machines and containerized workloads across private and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Now, with official support for VCF 9 on Pure Storage, customers can take advantage of enterprise-grade performance and resilience, paired with the analytics and insight of Pure1®.
Pure1, our cloud-based AIOps and observability platform, brings actionable intelligence to VCF 9 environments, making it easier to optimize resources, plan ahead, and reduce operational overhead. That intelligence shows up in a few critical ways:
- Deep visibility into VM-to-volume relationships: Understand exactly how virtual workloads are consuming storage—no more blind spots.
- License optimization: Identify underutilized resources and reclaim capacity to make the most of your VMware licensing investment.
- Predictive planning tools: Get ahead of capacity needs, performance trends, and growth patterns with intelligent forecasting.
- Simplified troubleshooting: Surface anomalies, bottlenecks, and configuration issues before they impact performance.
- Smarter scaling: Align storage provisioning and resource planning with actual workload demands, not guesswork.
- Improved storage efficiency with NFS UNMAP: Automatically reclaim unused space from deleted files in NFS datastores, reducing manual cleanup and maximizing capacity utilization.
With Pure1, you gain visibility that turns VCF from a complex infrastructure stack into a strategic platform for operational efficiency.
Whether you’re consolidating workloads, migrating to hybrid cloud, or simplifying operations, Pure1 brings all these capabilities together into a unified platform. From instant VM troubleshooting and predictive capacity planning to automated resource optimization and proactive issue prevention—Pure1 gives you complete visibility and control over your VMware environment.
Combined with VCF 9, Pure1 transforms storage from an operational challenge into a strategic advantage.
Seamless Hybrid Cloud for VMware—Powered by Pure Storage
As more organizations extend their VMware environments to the cloud, ensuring consistent performance and data services becomes critical. That’s why we recently announced Pure Cloud Block Store support for Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS), combining the best of Pure Storage enterprise-class storage with VMware on AWS.
With Pure Cloud Block Store for Amazon EVS, you can run VMware workloads in AWS while maintaining the same levels of efficiency, resilience, and simplicity you rely on in your on-prem environment. And for organizations leveraging Azure VMware Solution (AVS), Pure Storage continues to expand cloud optionality—including our Azure Native Service for AVS, currently in preview, which streamlines storage and VM migrations workflows for hybrid environments.
This gives your VMware cloud strategy a boost in three key ways:
- Consistent storage experience across on-prem and cloud
- Enterprise data services including always-on availability, data reduction, and instant snapshots, now in AWS
- Streamlined hybrid operations without needing to refactor apps or change how you manage VMware
It’s a powerful way to extend your VMware strategy into the cloud, backed by the same Pure Storage infrastructure your team already knows and trusts.
Resilient VM Recovery with Pure Protect //DRaaS
Disaster recovery is no longer just about keeping the lights on—it’s about ensuring business continuity in the face of outages, ransomware, and operational failures. And in a world where VMware environments increasingly span on-prem and cloud, resilience has to follow. That’s why we’ve expanded support for Pure Protect //DRaaS, giving VMware customers a simpler, more cloud-ready way to protect, orchestrate, and recover workloads across hybrid environments.
Pure Protect now supports both VMware-to-VMware and VMware-to-AWS recovery scenarios, giving organizations flexible recovery options across hybrid cloud.
With this latest update, VMware users have:
- Flexible recovery options: Protect and recover VMs across on-prem and cloud with automated orchestration and policy-driven protection workflows.
- Built-in planning tools: Use self-service DR assessments in Pure1 to estimate recovery time, cost, and overall readiness—no spreadsheets required.
- Resilience for modern threats: Support both traditional disaster recovery and cyber recovery use cases, including ransomware protection.
If you’re recovering to either a secondary data center or the cloud, Pure Protect delivers resilient hybrid cloud recovery—without the overhead of complex DR infrastructure or manual processes.
Hybrid Cloud That Works the Way You Do
Whether it’s simplifying provisioning with vSphere, optimizing operations in VCF, extending workloads into AWS or Azure with Pure Cloud Block Store, or ensuring recovery with Pure Protect, these updates make hybrid cloud easier to execute—and more valuable to your business. They’re a clear reflection of how we’re helping you build an Enterprise Data Cloud: one that unifies data services across environments with automation, intelligence, and policy-based control at its core.
If you’re a VMware admin looking for operational ease, a cloud architect optimizing for scale, or a business leader focused on cost and agility, Pure Storage and VMware together deliver the hybrid experience you’ve been waiting for.
Manage your data, not your storage.
A Fresh Approach to Storage
The Enterprise Data Cloud transforms storage into a unified, virtualized cloud of data, governed by an intelligent control plane.
