Security

Introduction Disaster recovery and ransomware recovery get planned in the same conversation more often than not, same team, same budget line, sometimes the same runbook with a different label on it. Broadcom’s own architecture disagrees with that framing. Operational DR assumes your primary environment is healthy but unreachable or impaired, the priority is RTO, automation, and minimal data loss. Cyber recovery assumes your primary environment is compromised, every action requires forensic isolation, immutability, and an air-gap mentality. Same team can run both. Structurally, they’re not the same discipline, and VCF 9.1’s tooling treats them as genuinely separate. ...

Introduction If Fleet collapsed three consoles into one control plane, the Identity Broker does the same job for authentication. VMware Identity Manager (vIDM) is superseded in VCF 9 by a fleet-native component called the Identity Broker. The new component takes over VCF single sign-on going forward, though Broadcom doesn’t force a rip-and-replace cutover: existing vIDM instances can keep running (still managed via VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.x) as an authentication source for components like VCF Automation while you migrate the rest of the fleet on your own schedule. This post covers what the Identity Broker actually is, the two ways you can deploy it, and what a real migration from vIDM looks like, based on Broadcom’s official 9.1 documentation. ...

Introduction Security is a foundational concern in any private cloud deployment. VMware Cloud Foundation 9 delivers a layered security architecture that spans from the physical network underlay through the workload networking and compute layers, with VCF Operations providing centralized visibility into the security posture of all domains. In this post, we explore the VCF 9 security architecture, focusing on the Distributed Firewall design, VPC-level isolation, the Gateway Firewall default behavior change, and how VCF Operations handles security compliance monitoring. ...