Per-instance VCF appliance that automates jobs such as workload domain deployment, lifecycle of ESX, NSX and vCenter, importing vCenter, stretching clusters, and handling passwords and certificates. VCF 9.0 positions it within VCF Operations, whose console is replacing its separate UI.
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Terms in this definition
- VMware Cloud Foundation
Broadcom's platform for private cloud. It unifies management of NSX, vSAN, vSphere, VCF Automation and VCF Operations as one fleet; VVF, by contrast, lacks automation and cloud management.
- workload domain
Domain in VCF for business applications. It gets a dedicated vCenter and NSX that may be dedicated or shared; the management components live separately in the management domain.
- Model deployment
Inside a resource, each deployment is a named copy of a Foundry model with its own TPM quota and deployment type. Requests identify the model by this deployment name.
- ESX
VMware's bare-metal hypervisor, installed on each host in a VCF fleet. Up to version 9.0 it was known as ESXi.
- NSX
Software that handles networking and security across VCF, covering firewalling, load balancing, NAT, VPCs, overlay segments and Tier-0/1 gateways.
- vCenter
Management software for VMs, clusters and ESX hosts. Each domain in VCF gets a dedicated one.
- VCF Operations
VCF's console for running the fleet. It covers alerting, monitoring, capacity, reporting, log analysis and licensing alongside fleet management of identity, passwords, certificates and lifecycle.
Related terms
- Host commissioning
Bringing ESX hosts into the SDDC Manager inventory of VCF, where they are validated and linked to a principal storage type and a network pool so clusters can use them. Decommissioning takes unassigned hosts back out.
- lookup_passwords
SDDC Manager shell command printing credentials for built-in accounts under its control in a VCF Instance; GET /v1/credentials gives the same via API.
- network pool
Subnets defined in SDDC Manager for one layer 2 domain. Hosts joining a VCF domain get static IPs from it automatically for their vMotion and vSAN/NFS/iSCSI VMkernel adapters.
- SDDC
Short for software-defined data centre, where software virtualises and controls networking, storage and compute. VCF provides this in private cloud form, and SDDC Manager keeps the name.
- SDDC Manager mode
Permanent state a VCF Installer appliance adopts after deployment onto a host meant for the management domain: from then on it acts as that instance's SDDC Manager and can never install anything again.
- Sync Inventory
Action run from VCF Operations against a VCF domain when SDDC Manager's records and vCenter disagree, bringing the two back into line. It is unrelated to detecting configuration drift.
- VCF Benchmarks
Compliance checks in VCF Operations for NSX, vSAN, vCenter, SDDC Manager and ESX, drawn from three sources: the VCF security baseline (the VCF Audit Guides), the CSA Compliance Pack and the CIS Compliance Pack for VCF.
- VCF Instance
Combination of a management domain with any number of workload domains, each instance having its own NSX, SDDC Manager and vCenters. A VCF fleet is made up of one or more of them.