VCF Operations

Introduction Day-2 in most infrastructure conversations gets reduced to one word: patching. VCF 9.1 treats it as two separate, ongoing jobs that happen to share a control plane. The first is applying fixes without breaking anything that’s running. The second is proving, continuously, that what’s running still matches what you intended to deploy. Broadcom built genuinely different tooling for each, and conflating them is a good way to think you’re covered on one when you’ve only handled the other. ...

Introduction Managing the lifecycle of a VMware Cloud Foundation environment has historically required coordinated upgrades across multiple products, ESX, vCenter, NSX, and vSAN, with complex compatibility matrices and manual orchestration. VCF 9 changes this experience by moving lifecycle management into VCF Operations: the SDDC Manager UI is deprecated, and its LCM workflows now live in VCF Operations Fleet Management, giving you a single place to plan and orchestrate upgrades across every domain. ...

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. ...