Today is the day a lot of people have been looking forward to for a long time. Ever since VMware by Broadcom announced VCF 9 at VMware Explore Las Vegas 2024, people have been wondering what this release would be like. I was one of those people as well. Over the past few weeks, during the beta program, and during a briefing we got through the vExpert program, a lot was made clear.

In this post I’m going to go over a couple of things that I found interesting and my thoughts in general. This won’t be a post to outline all the new features and improvements, there will be dozens of those already.

Key Changes

When the briefing began, the emphasis was clear. This is a new release of VMware Cloud Foundation. Not of vSphere, not of NSX, not of Operations or automation or anything else. The suite gets an update. This is a very important nuance and it clearly shows where the focus lies. VMware by Broadcom wants everyone to use the suite in it’s entirety.

The new VCF Installer, which replaces the cloud builder, also shows this focus. You can now deploy VCF and VVF is a much more intuitive way than before and it clearly shows that a lot of time and attention was put into making the day 0 process smoother. Something that was briefly mentioned, but I think is very important, with VCF 9 it is no longer possible to deploy individual components and even the individual entitlements will disappear from the portal.

vcf-installer

Another welcome change is that the requirement for vSAN on the Management Domain no longer exists. You can now use any supported type of storage for the Management Domain as well as the Workload Domain!

Operations

Another thing you’ll notice in VCF 9 is that a lot of stuff is getting moved into VCF Operations. Things that were previously done by SDDC Manager, like password rotation and certificate management, have now been moved into Operations. Kate Rychlik made a statement at VMUG NL earlier this year, there are 2 types of people when it comes to Operations. People that use Operations and people that will be using Operations. I now completely understand the statement, you can’t get around Operations starting from VCF 9. Another feature that’s moved into Operations is license management.

After the sale of Omnissa to KKR, VMware needed to replace Workspace One Access. With VCF 9, this is now also a feature of Operations. VMware also improved on the functionality. The SSO component in Operations is no longer a full fledged IdP, but just serves as a broker. Out of the box, the usual suspects like Okta, Entra ID, SAML 2.0, … are supported. But you can also add your own. There’s no details on what this process entails yet but that’ll become clear soon!

SSO

This release should also bring true SSO, if you’re logged into vCenter and you then switch to NSX, you should no longer need to log in.

Certificate management is another huge improvement, the new Operations view shows all certificates across the entire estate and gives warnings and errors based on the time until expiration. Auto renewal is also supported, ACME support is not included yet but we were told to talk to your account team to get this feature built!

There’s a ton more that’s getting included in Operations, too much for me to write about now. There’s a couple things that I’m definitely interested in and will be playing with in the lab once I get the bits;

  • Configuration management
  • Tag management
  • Security operations
  • Storage operations
  • Integrated Log Insight & Network Insight
  • Improvements to troubleshooting

All these new features and enhancements to Operations really look awesome and I can’t wait to play around with them. VMware is really putting a lot of effort in getting the platform to work properly and remove some of the historical pain points.

Automation

VCF Automation is also getting a lot of attention this release, as more features also get moved into that platform. I’m not overly familiar with the product so it’s hard for me to really judge what’s new and what’s improved. I’m sure my buddy Kristof Asaert will have a blog about those features soon!

Upgrade

With all these new features, I assume a lot of folks will want to start upgrading, the usual caveats apply here. 3rd party vendors will need to work on getting their products qualified for VCF 9. This release is no different than previous releases but there are a few more points of attention. If you’re a VxRail customer, you’ll have to hold off for a bit. We were told more information would be coming soon, but it’s mainly up to Dell to qualify this platform.

As of the 11th, when we got the briefing, there is no upgrade path available yet for vCloud Director to VCF 9, so keep that in mind and stay tuned for more information!

upgrade-readiness