Architecture

Introduction Every VCF Instance starts with a management domain – it’s the first workload domain deployed, and it never stops being special. This post breaks down exactly what components live inside a management domain per Broadcom’s official documentation, why the very first one in a fleet carries extra weight, and the shared-vs-dedicated NSX tradeoff that shows up in almost every design conversation. What Every VCF Domain Contains Per the VCF Taxonomy documentation, any VCF domain – management or workload – is built from the same base components: one vCenter instance, one or more vSphere clusters with vSphere HA and DRS enabled, at least one vSphere Distributed Switch per cluster plus NSX segments for workload traffic, a dedicated or shared NSX Manager instance, optional NSX Edge or Virtual Network Appliance clusters added after domain creation, and one or more shared storage allocations. ...

Introduction Once you’ve internalized “one Fleet across every site,” the next question is practical: how do you actually design that fleet across a headquarters site, a DR site, and edge or sovereign-cloud locations? This post breaks down the core VCF Instance/Fleet constructs and the four fleet deployment designs Broadcom documents for VCF 9.1, and maps them to the multi-site patterns operators actually build. The Three Constructs, Revisited Broadcom’s VCF Taxonomy defines three nested constructs worth keeping straight: ...

Introduction VMware Cloud Foundation 9 collapses what used to be three separate consoles into one control plane. If you’re coming from a 5.x background, this is arguably the single biggest mental model shift in the release: you stop thinking “one SDDC Manager per site” and start thinking “one Fleet across every site.” This post breaks down what Fleet actually is, which components feed into it, and how the pieces map to Broadcom’s official architecture documentation. ...

Overview VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9) represents a significant evolution in how Broadcom delivers its software-defined data center stack. Released on June 17, 2025, VCF 9 unifies ESX 9.0, vCenter 9.0, NSX 9.0, and vSAN under a single platform version. In this post, we explore the core architectural changes that differentiate VCF 9 from its predecessors and understand why these changes matter for enterprise deployments. VCF 9 Architecture Overview The diagram below shows the high-level architecture of a VCF 9 environment, spanning the management domain and workload domains with all core components: ...