VCF 9: Top Innovations and Updates

VCF 9 is GA! 🚀 This version has been in development for quite some time. It represents a new vision of Broadcom for VMware Cloud Foundation as a product and brings public cloud experience to your on-premises datacenter.

A great deal of testing has been done internally to ensure that it meets the industry standards. For me personally, it was a great experience to be part of the internal Alpha Program test team. I’ve tested number of development cycles and here are my favourite innovations and updates that come with VCF 9 in no particular order. 🙂

Deployment

VCF 9 Installer Appliance

• The new VCF Installer replaces the previous VCF Cloud Builder and comes as a light weight OVA (~2GB).
• Provides an out-of-box option to configure an Online or Offline (for dark sites) binaries depot.
• Deploys a new VCF Fleet or expands an existing VCF Fleet.
  • Note: The concept of VCF Fleet is new to VCF 9. I’ll create a separate blog or video about it.
• Next to a new VCF environment, VCF Installer is also capable to deploy a VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) environment.
• Provides option to convert an existing vSphere environment into VCF.
• Implements a full-stack deployment that consists of compute, storage, networking, operations, and automation.
• Wizard driven deployment meaning that the VCF bring-up Excel file is no longer used. However, JSON files can also be provided as a deployment method.

Management

• Mixed vendor clusters. You can assign up to 4 additional ESXi images per cluster which would make something like hardware refresh much easier when you need to replace the hosts.
• Cluster-wide deduplication in vSAN ESA.
• vSAN Stretched Cluster site-wide maintenance mode. You can now put one site in a maintenance mode giving you ability to do some maintenance for example.

Operation

• Enhanced Linked Mode is gone. New Single Sign-On method with the new VMware Identity Broker (vIDB):
  • Can be run embedded on the vCenter Server or as external appliance cluster that supports multiple VCF instances.
  • Automatic configuration for other components as NSX, Operations, and Automation.
  • Privileges are set for each VCF component based on the user or group membership.
• From the platform lifecycle perspective, upgrades to version 9 are in-place without any migration or conversion.
• Password and Certificate management has been moved to VCF Operations. You will now get an alert when a password or certificate is about to expire.
• Certificates as well as passwords can now be automatically renewed and in regard to the certificates, you can now manage ESXi host certificates through VCF Operations.

Networking

• Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) introduced in NSX 4.2 are now implemented across the platform. Includes clear role definitions (Enterprise Admin, Project Admin, and PVC Admin) that allows you do create self-service networking. VPCs can now be configured directly on the vCenter Server and VCF Automation.

• New Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Model consisting of the following new network objects:
  • Transit Gateway:
    • Similar to T0/T1 Gateway
    • Provides connectivity within a NSX project
    • Provides external network connection to outside world
  • VPC Gateway:
    • Not shown in the NSX UI.
    • Provides an uplink to the Transit Gateway
    • Connects subnets that are used by the VMs.

• New VM connectivity options through Transit Gateway:
  • Centralised model suitable for environments where you need full-scale of NSX services like DHCP, NAT, L3 Services etc. This is basically a full deployment with an edge cluster with two or more NSX edges.
  • Distributed model suitable for environments where you need more streamlined network configuration with limited NSX services.
• NSX Edges can now be deployed from vCenter Server using a deployment workflow. The deployment GUI will guide you through all required parameters and a graphical representation of the deployment is generated and updated in the GUI real time.

Migration

• Automatic migration planning between VCF Operations for Networks and HCX which basically means that if you have VCF Operations for Networks installed and configured, you can automatically sync it with HCX.
• NSX Global Segments and NSX VLANs are now supported in HCX Migration.
• Starting with HCX 9.0 the HCX Manager appliance will be unified. This means that there will be only one OVA/OVF to download (no more Cloud Connector or Cloud Manager binaries). The new unified HCX Manager will assume its role based on the site-pair direction.
• The flowing features are now completely deprecated in HCX 9.0:
  • WAN Optimization
  • V2T Migrations
  • HCX Disaster Recovery
  • HCX Plug-in for vCenter Server

These are the release highlights that I personally find most interesting. There are of course a lot more! Check out the Release Notes and see out all what’s new in VCF 9.

Cheers!

– Marek.Z