Best Practices for Adopting & Deploying VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 introduces significant architectural enhancements that impact how modern private clouds are built and managed. This session provides some of the real-world upgrade pathways for both existing VCF 5.x users and the broader base of non-VCF customers looking to adopt the platform. From greenfield deployments to brownfield upgrades, Broadcom’s Jared Burns walks through the best practices, key considerations, and deployment strategies that align with diverse IT environments and business needs. This session is designed for IT professionals, cloud architects, and decision-makers who want to understand VCF 9’s transformative architecture and gain actionable insights into a smooth upgrade.

Jared Burns of Broadcom highlights the new VCF 9 architecture centered around the concept of a “VCF Cloud Foundation Fleet.” This fleet consists of one instance along with operations and automation that run across it. The fleet enables centralized management across multiple VCF instances, and multiple VCF fleets can be grouped into a VMware Cloud Foundation and Private Cloud. Key design considerations include centralized operations management, initial deployment based on the VCF fleet deployment basic design, and flexibility with multiple clusters within a single domain. Four deployment designs are presented: Basic, Site High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and a combined HA/DR approach, with the Basic design serving as the foundation for the others.

A key shift in VCF 9 is the increased flexibility in storage options. While vSAN remains supported, Fibre Channel and NFS are now supported out of the box for the management domain, offering more choices for Greenfield deployments. The presentation outlines detailed design decisions for Greenfield deployments, including considerations for fault domains, operations placement, scale, and organizational separation. Two deployment models for operations, Simple and High Availability, are discussed, along with scalability options.  Additional considerations include vCenter limits, host limits, HCL compliance, and IP/DNS requirements. The upgrade process emphasizes the importance of design planning and performing all prerequisites, due to changes like the removal of Enhanced Linked Mode and VMware Update Manager.

For upgrades from vSphere environments, a nine-step process is outlined, emphasizing the shift to keyless licensing and the move to vSphere Lifecycle Manager. The VCF installer now handles the conversion process, simplifying upgrades compared to previous versions. Customers are expected to be able to perform these upgrades themselves with the help of available upgrade guides. Significant changes include the replacement of Enhanced Link Mode with VMware Cloud Foundation operations and VMware Identity Broker, along with new IP address requirements and licensing procedures. Various import scenarios for workload domains are supported, including NSX-attached domains and standalone hosts.  Two distinct depots must be configured: SDC Manager’s depot and the VCF Operations Fleet Manager depot.