VCF Operations fleet management

In the Ultra Transcenders books

2V0-15.25

Each book explains VCF Operations fleet management in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• Fleet management

  VCF Operations area, running on its own appliance, that centrally looks after licences, lifecycle, identity, certificates, passwords, tags and drift for an entire fleet. Aria Suite Lifecycle is not upgraded into it but replaced by it.

• 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.

• Capability

  Something that a person, organisation or system is able to do.

• 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.

• IDENTITY

  A column property, written IDENTITY(seed, increment), that gives each new row the next number in a rising sequence. SCOPE_IDENTITY reports the latest value created in the current scope, and a rolled-back transaction still uses up the numbers it took.

• ALL

  A DAX function that ignores any filters and gives back every row of a table or every value of the named columns. Used within CALCULATE, it works as a modifier that clears filters, although REMOVEFILTERS states that intent more clearly where it is available.

Related terms

• Appliance VCF Identity Broker model

  Runs VCF Identity Broker as its own three-node cluster in a management domain, added after initial deployment via VCF Operations fleet management, so logins keep working if a host fails and don't rely on vCenter. It suits platforms needing critical uptime or spanning several instances and sites, and supports as many as five VCF Instances, but uses more resources than the embedded model, which runs inside the management vCenter.

• Certificate auto-renewal

  Sixty days ahead of expiry, VCF Operations fleet management can replace TLS certificates automatically on components that allow non-disruptive updates, whether issued by OpenSSL, Microsoft CA or VMCA, or self-signed. Management components and each VCF Instance are enabled individually, after setting up any OpenSSL or Microsoft CA involved.

• Certificate management

  Part of VCF Operations fleet management that shows TLS certificates for all VCF components in one place. It warns about expiry, configures CAs, generates CSRs, and replaces or automatically renews certificates.

• Configuration management

  Drift detection and reporting for vSphere clusters and vCenter instances, run on demand or to a schedule from VCF Operations fleet management against stored desired-state templates. Those templates may live in GitHub or GitLab for version control.

• patch planner

  A lifecycle feature, found in VCF Operations fleet management, for pushing individual patch and update binaries to particular core components of VCF within one domain. An upgrade plan already set up for that domain blocks it until the plan is cancelled.

• VCF management components

  Fleet-level VCF components, among them VCF Identity Broker, VCF Automation, VCF Operations and the VCF Operations fleet management, logs and networks components. A single set can look after multiple VCF Instances; for upgrades the fleet management appliance goes first, followed by VCF Operations.

• VCF Operations fleet management appliance

  Successor to VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle, which cannot be upgraded to 9.0. This appliance underpins VCF Operations fleet management, looking after lifecycle and binaries for VCF Operations, VCF Automation, VCF Identity Broker and add-ons.