VCF 9 Management Domain Anatomy: What Actually Runs Inside
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. ...