VCF Operations 9 with vSphere 8

There is no need to wait to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Operation 9 if you are running vSphere 8. It is optional with version 8, but required for version 9 so you might as well deploy it now if you are entitled to it through your subscription. VCF Operations provides many benefits to vSphere environments such as...

• AI-Assisted Diagnostics: Features enhanced "Diagnostic Findings" to proactively identify misconfigurations and risks before they cause downtime.

• NVMe Memory Tiering Visibility: Monitoring vSphere 8’s NVMe-based memory tiering, helping admins optimize DRAM vs. NVMe cost/performance ratios.

• Direct Support Integration: Enables administrators to generate log bundles and attach them directly to Broadcom Support cases from within the Operations console.

• Unified License Management: Unified license key management for the VCF subscription model, synchronizing entitlements across vCenter and ESXi 8.x hosts.

• Sustainable Infrastructure Metrics: Advanced reporting on power consumption and carbon footprint, mapped to specific vSphere clusters and workloads to meet green-IT initiatives.

This article outlines the deployment and configuration steps for deploying VCF Operations 9 in a vSphere 8 environment. 

Upgrading a Minimal Installation of VCF 9.0.1 to 9.0.2

Smaller environments running VCF 9 might have a subset of the VCF components/appliances deployed. This minimizes the virtual infrastructure management footprint and resource consumption. For example, a three-host environment might have VCF Operations 9 + vCenter 9 + ESX 9. The downside to these types of deployments is you lose some of the VCF functionality such as fleet management. This begs the question, "How do I update the components I have?" You can upgrade version 9 components such as VCF Operations, vCenter, and ESX similar how you upgraded version 8.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Minimal Deployment

UPDATE: Consider deploying VCF 9.1. It is the latest version of VCF that includes new features and functionality, as well as, the latest bug fixes and security updates. This blog article discusses upgrading from vSphere 8 to a minimal installation of VCF 9.1: Upgrade from vSphere 8 to a VCF 9.1 Minimal Deployment

VCF 9 Installer Validation Found Less Than Two Uplinks For The DVS

Installing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 in a lab often means using less than ideal hardware configurations. In my case, I have ASUS Intel NUCs that have only one physical NIC for an uplink. Recommendations dictate you should have at least two for redundancy and the VCF Installer checks this. If you have less than two uplinks, VCF Installer will block the deployment. There is a way around this and it is simple.

Cross vCenter vMotion with Different Distributed Switch Versions

Cross vCenter vMotion enables live VM migrations from one vCenter environment to another. This prevents downtime when migrating between these two separate environments. An example use case is moving workloads from a vCenter 8U3 environment to a new VCF (vCenter) 9 deployment. However, by default, vMotion does not allow live migration of VMs across different virtual distributed switch (VDS) versions. There is a workaround.