VCF 9 has arrived as the shiny new private cloud platform from VMware by Broadcom. As part of the new platform you will find that Operations is now the one management platform for your environment. And yes.. it is now officially VCF Operations (console). Bye bye Aria… vRealize….

Looking at the new platform what really excites me is the simplification. It is really a cloud platform: you have VCF Operations for everything management (and really everything…) and VCF Automation for the provisioning, tenants,… Where are Operations for Logs and Operations for Networks you ask? They are built into Operations!! One interface, remember? For Networks this is a basic version, but you can still deploy the complete thing.

This is a first look at the new platform and VCF Operations and Fleet Management. Obviously I will publish more posts about the different parts and in more details in the coming weeks.

Luckily for us the interface and possibilities of Operations is an evolution, not a revolution. If you had Operations 8.18.x running everything is still there, including the menus. But a lot of new things have been added. And where is the standalone version? Gone. We were warned. Operations 8.18.x is the last feature version to run standalone. If you do not upgrade to VCF, you do not get the new management interface. I am still trying to find out what happens to customers who still use it.

Let’s dive into some remarkable new features in VCF 9. First of all the installer for the whole platform has been overhauled. Very much better I think. You now use Cloud Foundation Installer to setup and deploy your platform. (You use it for VVF too). You still need bare metal ESX deployed first. I am not going through the whole install here, but the Operations part is very interesting. You can connect to an existing Operations instance.

Where has Lifecycle Manager gone ? It is now called Fleet Management Platform. A lot has changed here. Fleet management with Operations and Automation are deployed in the first VCF instance in your environment. After that you can add Instances with Management Domains (NSX, vSAN,..) and workload domains.

The UI of Fleet Management is disabled, you find everything on the launchpad in Operations (see image above):

• Identity management
• certificate management
• password management
• configuration management
• tag management

I think you see some interesting new things there….

Identity is now a broker, not a provider. This means you can integrate a lot of solutions from the likes of Okta and others. You use one identity for the whole platform.

Certificate management for the whole VCF platform has been extended. You can now also manage renewals automatically! And password management is done centrally from the Operations Console too.

Configuration management is an extended version of config drift monitoring that was already in Operations 8.18.x, with an interface that looks a lot like the late Aria Hub with Secure Clouds… You can for example monitor that all your vCenters have SSH disabled.

What a lot of customers will applaud- I hope – is the new tag management. This is the central point to import, edit, create tags and categories for all vCenters. I do not know yet if it will work for other metadata like Cloud Director.

Next installment we will dive into health and diagnostics features: integrated skyline diags, logs and network monitoring. I think it will give teams a great step forward to manage the platform from – yes I will say it only once – a single pane of glass!

Stay tuned!