VMware Cloud Foundation 4 has served well many customers across the globe helping them to build new infrastructure. It is now time for an upgrade. Welcome to VMware Cloud Foundation 5!
The VMware Cloud Foundation team has raised the bar once more, with a lot of new features as well as enhancements to help customers build and scale efficiently their SDDCs, while also bringing the security their infrastructure deserves.
But what’s new in that new release? Well, let’s find out!
Software Components for Private Clouds
Just like the previous version of VCF, this new release comes with the new major versions of the core products that build up that solution.
- SDDC Manager comes in version 5 which includes Cloud Builder 5.0.
- vSphere 8 U1a is of course part of the new VCF offering as well as vSAN in the same version. The vSAN Witness Appliance comes also in version 8 U1.
- NSX comes in version 4.1 with VCF 5 to support network and security capabilities.
- And finally, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager is available in version 8.10 patch 1.
VMware Cloud Foundation 5 New Features
What! SDDC Manager 5 Got Isolated?!
One of my favorite features with SDDC Manager 5, which I think many customers were also waiting for is “Isolated SSO Workload Domains.
That new capability will allow you to create SSO domains completely isolated from each other on different workload domains. Note also that each isolated domain will be configured with its own NSX instance, which also has the capability to configure separately identify providers such as Active Directory of LDAP.
I’m sure that many cloud providers using VCF 5 will appreciate that feature, to offer complete isolation to their own customers.
VMware Cloud Foundation 5 More Scalable Than Ever
While using isolated workload domains in VCF 5, you can configure from 15 to 25 workload domains within one single VCF instance. But please note that the vSphere limitation where 15 instances can be associated per SSO domain is still applicable in such configuration. This is again another good news for Cloud Providers but not only 😃!
Note: Remember that only one vCenter license is required for all vCenter instances deployed in your VCF environment.
Support of Direct Skip-Level Upgrade
You might be wondering now, how can you upgrade your current VMware Cloud Foundation environment running version 4.x.
Well, the good news is that you can upgrade VMware Cloud Foundation versions 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5 directly to version 5. For customers in a more restrained environment where Internet connectivity is not possible, an offline upgrade can be performed by using the Blundle Transfer Utility.
Global SDDC Manager Pre-Check Enhancements
SDDC Manager now uses pre-checks prior to performing any upgrade to make sure that your environment is ready.
VMware Cloud Foundation admins now have the choice to update their VCF domains to a specific version after running a pre-check. SDDC Manager 5 also provides better visibility to admins prior to any upgrade, to understand the potential impact of deploying a specific version.
Note also that SDDC Manager can now perform auto-check of BOM component interoperability and upgrade up to 10 clusters across 5 workload domains in parallel.
Regarding licensing, SDDC Manager can perform re-licensing of your BOM components but SDDC Manager license is no longer required.
Wrap Up
VMware Cloud Foundation 5 is very promising with many new features and enhancements that will benefit to many customers. VCF+ and VCF on VxRail customers are invited to wait before upgrading to version 5.
Please do not hesitate to review the official release note here.
I hope that you enjoyed that blog post, and please do not hesitate to share 😃.