‘With AI demand skyrocketing—the hardware, the server prices, the DRAM prices have all gone through the roof, and there is a hardware supply crisis going on. … The things that we have done in VCF are certainly helping customers in that regard,’ says Krish Prasad, head of Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation division.
The hardware supply chain crisis around servers, memory and other IT infrastructure—along with soaring prices—can be solved with VMware Cloud Foundation thanks to innovation like server virtualization and advanced memory tiering, said VMware’s Krish Prasad.
“With AI demand skyrocketing—the hardware, the server prices, the DRAM prices have all gone through the roof, and there is a hardware supply crisis going on,” Prasad, head of Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation division, told CRN.
“There’s a big area of concern about, ‘How can we do more with less?’” he said. “Meaning, ‘How can I optimize what I have and extract more value from it before I start spending more money on adding more servers or more memory?’ The things that we have done in VCF are certainly helping customers in that regard.”
VMware’s VCF private cloud platform includes NVMe Memory Tiering technology that allows ESX hosts to use NVMe devices as a secondary memory tier alongside traditional DRAM.
[Related: VMware Price Hike Fears Are ‘Settling Down’ In AI Era For Clients, Partners Say]
VMware’s memory tiering capabilities allow clients to extend effective memory pools by pairing DRAM with NVMe memory, while also using extended vSAN deduplication and compression to help reduce storage costs without bringing in new hardware, Prasad said.
VMware Memory Tiering Can Cut DRAM Costs By 50 Percent
Prasad said VCF is the answer to DRAM prices going “through the roof.”
“What memory tiering allows you to do is to cut the DRAM by roughly, let’s say 40 percent to 50 percent, and you can tier it with NVMe storage, which is much cheaper without sacrificing the performance of the applications that you run,” Prasad said. “So this is a huge cost reduction for customers.”
He said the technology is helping VMware and channel partners win new customers and boost sales.
“Customers are jumping all over it and deploying it and converting their existing servers to memory-tiered servers to deal with the skyrocketing cost of DRAMs,” Prasad said.
SHI International Seeing VCF ‘Success’
SHI International is one of the world’s top solution providers and VMware global partners.
SHI, which ranked No. 12 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500, is witnessing customer success with VCF as the hardware supply chain and pricing issues become a long-term focus for clients.
“With VMware, we’ve seen a lot of success with customers saying, ‘How do you use technology features like NVMe tiering to maybe free up existing infrastructure in a better way so I can deploy some new workloads without stretching the budget,” said Ryan Sheehan, senior vice president of Advanced Solutions at Somerset, N.J.-based SHI.
“We’re seeing a lot of that from customers,” he said.
At the beginning of the supply chain crisis, Sheehan said SHI was telling customers to not “panic buy.”
“With the supply chain issue with the rising cost of hardware, rising costs of DRAM, a lot of customers made a rushed push to some public cloud workloads to test out AI,” he said. “And now they’re realizing the tokenomics costs. Now the CFOs and AI stakeholders involved are like, ‘How do we do this better?’
“Customers can’t wait two or three years. Let’s figure out the infrastructure that your workload sits on, and how you can actually get it, and deploy it in a reasonable time inside your budget cycle,” Sheehan said. “It’s a tricky one, but we’re navigating it well with customers.”
Overall, VMware says its memory tiering can result in up to 4X more available memory per host; 2X better VM consolidation; up to 30 percent improved CPU efficiency; and up to 40 percent lower TCO.
VCF Virtualization Prowess Helps With Server Costs
In addition to VCF’s memory tiering, Prasad said VMware’s longtime success with being the virtualization market leader is coming into play.
“When you’re thinking of doing more with less in context of servers, you try to virtualize the servers because virtualization is all about doing more with a server by virtualizing,” he said.
“So you are seeing customers now look at silos in their environments where they have some bare-metal silos existing. They are trying to bring that into the virtualization umbrella so they can extract more value from those servers,” Prasad said.
Overall, he said VCF is seeing huge momentum in the market because organizations want to bring more AI workloads on-premises due to cost savings and security concerns.
Broadcom’s infrastructure software group—which includes VMware—generated $8.75 billion in revenue during the company’s third fiscal quarter 2026.
This represents a 29 percent growth rate year over year for Broadcom’s VMware software group.
SHI, for its part, said its global scalability and tight partnership with VMware is winning customer mindshare.
“We’ve been 100 percent all in on VMware private cloud to run your AI workloads for a long time. That is one of the key platforms for us to be able to drive customers to a more secure, more controlled, more easily managed private cloud,” Sheehan said. “I feel incredibly bullish on SHI’s position in the market.”
