VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 has been released

The wait is over — as June 17th, VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is generally available. In a nutshell, the goal of VCF 9.0 is to bring the public cloud experience to on-premises as a unified private cloud platform. Thus, it focusses on:

Modern infrastructure
- Software defined
- Automated
- Simpler Operations
- Extendable
Unified cloud experience
- Self-service
- All applications
- Private AI
Security and resilience
- Prevention
- Compliance
- Faster recovery

Let’s have a quick look on what’s new with this major release.

Table of Contents

What’s new in VCF architecture

In VCF 9.0 architecture, several new concepts have been introduced.

A VCF private cloud is the top level of management and consumption for the underlying SDDC resources. It contains one or more VCF fleets:

A VCF fleet is managed by a single set of fleet-level management compontents. A VCF fleet consists of:

1x VCF Operations
1x VCF Automation
1+ VCF instances

A VCF instance delivers the resources such as compute, storage, networking. It consists of a management domain and one or more workload domains.

What’s new in VCF installation

In VCF installation, a new installer has been introduced. Cloud Builder is gone, VCF or a VCF fleet is now deployed or expanded through the VCF Installer. You can easily deploy two different Deployment models using the Installer wizard:

Simple: 1 NSX Manager node, 1 VCF Operations, 1 VCF Automation nodenode,
High Availability: 3 NSX Manager nodes, 3 VCF Operations nodes, 3 VCF Automation nodes

The following changes have been made to the component structure:

VCF 5.x	VCF 9.0
VMware Cloud Builder	VCF Installer
SDDC Manager	SDDC Manager (seems to be there only for backwards compatibility). Functionality moved to VCF Operations
Aria Operations	VCF Operations
vIDM	VCF Identity Broker

What’s new in VCF licensing

In VCF 9.0 the licensing model has been simplified and centralized through VCF Operations.

VCF 5.x	VCF 9.0
License key	License file
License per component	Single license for all components
Does not require usage data	Requires usage data
No central visibility or control	Central consumption visibility and control
Manual reactivation on renewal	Automated reactivation on renewal
Major version specific	No more licenses upgrades or downgrades
Managed in Broadcom Support Portal	Manged in VCF Business Services console
60 day evaluation period	90 day evaluation period
Per host licensing	Per vCenter licensing

What’s new in compute, storage, networking

VCF 9.0 provides several enhancements on the Compute layer:

Memory optimization with NVMe
Increased uptime for AI/ML workloads
- Performance improvements from 10 Gbps to 60 Gbps
- Stun time decreased to less than 1 s for 8 GB vGPU profile
Mixed vendor clusters
- Assign additional images manually or automatically
- Multiple hardware support managers per cluster image
- Create up to four additional images per cluster image
- Support multiple server models in a single cluster image
Virtualized hardware improvements, e.g. up to 960 vCPU
Decoupling of Supervisor updates from vCenter
- Update the Supervisor control plane independently of vCenter Server
Live patching enhancements
- Live Patch is extended to VMkernel, user-space, and NSX components
- ESXi service restarts are required but they are nondisruptive
- Fast suspend-resume remediates VMs
- No evacuation is required

VCF 9.0 provides the following storage enhancements

Network traffic separation for vSAN storage clusters
- vSAN cluster traffic is isolated from vSphere clusters that access the datastore on the vSAN storage cluster
- Dedicated VMkernel interfaces for
  - vSAN cluster traffic
  - vSphere Client clusters mounting vSAN storage cluster datastore
Enhanced scalability with vSAN file services
Enhanced flexibility, uptime, and operational tasks for stretched clusters
- Support for vSAN storage clusters and new site maintenance and site takeover capabilities

VCF 9.0 networking enhancements include:

Clear role definition that allows self-service networking in VPCs
vCenter UI workflow for deploying NSX edges
High performance switching called Enhanced Data Path (EDP) is enabled by default. It provides a 50-70% increase in performance for both bandwidth and packets per second

What’s new in VCF Operations

VCF Operations has been enhanced by several features that work towards its classical operations focus and the new fleet management. The VCF fleet management incorporates capabilities from both SDDC Manager and Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager:

Identity and access
Certificate management
Password management
Tag management
Configuration drift
Lifecycle management

Fleet management in VCF Operations looks as depicted below:

What’s new in VCF Automation

VCF Automation in VCF 9 (VCFA) has been largely rebuilt, it supersedes both Aria Automation and VMware Cloud Director (VCD), as it uses the multi-tenancy constructs of VCD such as organizations. Tenants can be managed via the provider part of VCFA. The below screenshot shows the landing page of the provider management:

The landing page of a tenant organization looks as follows:

Just to name a few of the concepts: Network tenancy is handled via NSX projects, compute tenancy is realized through Supervisor namespaces. Each tenant now can have its own identity provider, which can be OIDC, LDAP or SAML. Inside a tenant organization, an organization admin can create Projects and can assign users or groups to them.

Useful links

Finally, a collection of further documentation for VCF 9.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.0.0: Download | Patches | Documentation
VMware vSphere 9.0.0.0: Documentation
VMware vSAN 9.0.0.0: Documentation
VMware NSX 9.0.0.0: Documentation
VMware Cloud Foundation Operations HCX 9.0.0.0: Documentation
VMware Tools 13.0.0: Release Notes
VMware Remote Console 13.0.0.0: Release Notes
VMware Cloud Foundation Operations for Integrations 9.0: Documentation