Broadcom Inc. is contributing an open-source project for managing virtual machines with Kubernetes to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, part of an effort to simplify operations across increasingly diverse enterprise computing environments.

The company announced today that its VM application programming interface project has been accepted into the CNCF Sandbox, the entry point for early-stage cloud-native projects. VM API  provides a vendor-neutral framework for provisioning and managing virtual machines using the same APIs that Kubernetes employs to orchestrate modular and portable software containers.

Broadcom also announced an initiative to standardize application behavior across Kubernetes distributions and expanded support for third-party software on VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service.

The announcements, made at KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City, reflect the growing need for infrastructure that can support traditional applications alongside modern containerized and artificial intelligence workloads.

Although Kubernetes has become the dominant platform for container orchestration, virtual machines remain central to enterprise computing. A Linux Foundation survey of 492 practitioners scheduled to be released today found that VMs account for 53% of production applications, with most respondents expecting that proportion to remain stable. Among organizations expanding their VM deployments, 34% cited AI and agentic workloads as contributing factors.

Broadcom’s VM API project addresses the operational complexity of managing VMs and containers separately. It uses Kubernetes’ declarative management model to create and manage virtual machines across different infrastructure providers while preserving capabilities such as hardware isolation and specialized input/output performance.

“We want to do the same thing now for virtual machines,” said Prashanth Shenoy, Broadcom’s chief marketing officer and vice president of marketing for cloud platform, infrastructure and solutions, referring to Kubernetes’ existing Cluster API initiative.

The goal is to provide consistent management across environments without requiring organizations to abandon their existing virtualization investments.

“Ultimately, our goal is to make virtual machines first-class citizens of a Kubernetes environment without sacrificing what makes them distinct and valuable for our customers,” Shenoy said.

The project could also simplify operations for administrators accustomed to working with Kubernetes rather than maintaining separate management tools for virtualized and containerized infrastructure.

Consistent operations

Broadcom’s second initiative addresses a different interoperability problem: inconsistent application behavior across Kubernetes distributions.

The company is co-chairing a newly established Workload Conformance Working Group to develop common expectations for how applications operate across Kubernetes environments.

Existing conformance programs verify that Kubernetes distributions support standard APIs, but that doesn’t guarantee applications will behave identically across platforms. Differences in infrastructure capabilities, configuration and operational practices can introduce incompatibilities.

“Just because two Kubernetes environments are conformant doesn’t necessarily mean that the application will behave consistently across both,” Shenoy said.

The proposed workload conformance standard would help software vendors reduce the need to certify applications separately for individual Kubernetes distributions while giving enterprises greater confidence in application portability.

Broadcom also announced more than 20 newly validated partner solutions for VKS, the Kubernetes runtime integrated into VMware Cloud Foundation.

The validations span observability, security, data management, AI, application delivery, networking and storage. They are intended to help organizations deploy Kubernetes workloads using familiar third-party tools without requiring extensive integration or changes to existing operational practices.

Broadcom said its broader VKS ecosystem now includes more than 90 independent software vendors participating in testing and validation.

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