Announcing support for VCF 9.0 and 9.1 on Amazon EVS

We’re excited to share that VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 and 9.1 are now available on Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS), giving you complete control over your VCF installation. Our focus with Amazon EVS is to give you the flexibility to deploy and configure VCF to fit your needs, using the tools, operational processes, and skills you have today.

The VCF 9 experience on Amazon EVS

With VCF 9.x, we’re decoupling the provisioning of AWS infrastructure from the VCF software. Amazon EVS deploys EC2 metal instances running ESX 9.x into your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and connects them to the private VLANs that serve as the underlay for your VCF deployment. From there, you download and deploy Broadcom’s VCF Installer and complete the VCF installation using Broadcom’s native workflow.

Deploying VCF 9.x in evaluation mode

As part of enabling VCF 9.x, Amazon EVS now supports VCF evaluation mode. You can create your EVS environment and begin deploying VCF without providing license keys up front. That gives you room to stand up the environment, validate your design, and test the implementation before applying your subscription and starting workload migrations. You remain responsible for maintaining the appropriate VCF subscription coverage when you move beyond evaluation mode.

Solutions for EVS GitHub repository

To make the end-to-end deployment easier, we’re launching a new Solutions for EVS GitHub repository with examples, templates, and infrastructure as code artifacts to help you get started. Going forward, we’ll expand this repository to include additional reference architectures, new bare metal instance and storage configurations, and native AWS service integrations. If you use infrastructure as code tools such as AWS CloudFormation or HashiCorp Terraform, you can use these artifacts as a foundation for automating the path from AWS infrastructure to a running VCF environment.

Connecting VCF using EVS Connectors

Once VCF is installed and the VCF management appliances are reachable, you’ll connect the VCF deployment to the Amazon EVS control plane using EVS connectors, which we first introduced with the Windows Server licensing capability  in April 2026. A connector is a persistent, authenticated link from EVS to your VCF management appliances, using credentials stored in AWS Secrets Manager. This connection is how EVS stays aware of your deployment, allowing it to monitor the environment state, enable Windows licensing entitlements, and report license usage without sitting in the operational path of your VCF software.

The fast path to the cloud

For many customers, Amazon EVS is one of the fastest ways to move to the cloud, especially when facing time-sensitive constraints such as data center contract expirations or infrastructure refresh cycles. Customers like Aeroméxico tell us the biggest win is how quickly and easily they’re able to migrate VMware workloads to AWS. By deploying, configuring, and operating VCF just as you would on premises, you’re able to simplify and accelerate large-scale migrations by minimizing the architectural differences between your source and destination environments.

The combination of speed and control is what this release is all about. VCF 9.x on Amazon EVS gives you the ability to run the latest VMware Cloud Foundation software the way you do today, but with the scale and reliability of AWS global infrastructure. If your organization uses VMware, we want Amazon EVS to be the best place in the world to run your VMware-based workloads.

Learn more about Amazon EVS on the product detail page and user guide.