When you open VCF Operations, the home page greets you with a world map – and no matter where you are in the world, the map in the VCF Operations dashboard always defaults to showing the United States. For a VCF administrator running an estate in Vienna, Frankfurt, or anywhere outside the US, that can be a quiet little annoyance: the very first thing you see is a map of somewhere your kit isn’t. It is not showing your infrastructure yet; it is just the default view, asking “so where is your kit?” Telling it is a small, cosmetic-but-satisfying task, and it earns its keep the moment you run more than one site: at a glance you see which physical data centers exist and how many cloud accounts hang off each one.

The map is not something you draw on directly. It is rendered from Physical Data Centers – objects you define, each pinned to a real-world location and optionally linked to one or more vCenter / VCF cloud accounts. Add a data center, drop it on the map, and it appears on the home page. That is the whole model.

The actual configuration is a very easy, once you know where it is hidden.

In VCF Operations 9.1, navigate to Operate > Administration > Control Panel > Physical Data Centers.

Under Physical Data Centers click the Add button.

Give the data center a Name – this is the label that appears on the map, so make it recognizable (here, SDDC.LAB DC1). Then place it: use the search box on the map to jump to a city, or zoom and pan manually. Finally click Save.

The data center now appears in the list with its name and the number of associated cloud accounts. We can edit or delete it later from the ellipsis (…) menu on its row.

Head back to Home > VCF Overview. Our data center is now pinned at its coordinates on the world map, sitting alongside the monitoring accounts and inventory summary. Instead of a default view of the United States, the map now shows where our infrastructure actually lives.