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.
Also called VCF.
Read more: Broadcom TechDocs
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Terms in this definition
- private cloud
Infrastructure run for one organisation alone but operated like a cloud, with self-service, automation and multi-tenancy. Broadcom positions VCF as its platform for building one.
- NSX
Software that handles networking and security across VCF, covering firewalling, load balancing, NAT, VPCs, overlay segments and Tier-0/1 gateways.
- vSAN
VMware's software-defined storage, which combines local devices across a cluster's ESX hosts into one shared datastore. Available as OSA or ESA, VCF can use it as principal storage.
- vSphere
VMware's platform for virtualisation, made up of vCenter and ESX hosts, supplying compute for VCF clusters.
- VCF Automation
Self-service platform in VCF for provisioning VM, Kubernetes and AI workloads. Providers manage regions and tenants in one portal, while tenants handle projects and consumption in theirs.
- 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.
- VVF
Broadcom's offering for running enterprise VMs and containers, bundling vSphere and vSAN with simplified deployment and operations management. VCF builds on it, adding the integrated automation and cloud management that VVF does not include.
Related terms
- ADFS
Active Directory Federation Services, Microsoft's identity federation product. VCF Identity Broker accepts it as an outside IdP (over OIDC or SAML) so people can sign in to VCF.
- 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.
- CIS
Center for Internet Security. Its guidance is offered inside VCF Operations twice over: a built-in regulatory benchmark and a dedicated compliance pack for VCF.
- Cloud account
An endpoint plus credentials, for example for vCenter, NSX, VCF, AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, that VCF Operations and VCF Automation (VM Apps) use to gather data or provision resources.
- Convergence
In VCF 9.0, adopting a vCenter you already run, with its hosts and optionally Aria products, as the management domain of a brand-new fleet or instance; absent pieces are deployed for you. Enhanced Linked Mode setups are excluded.
- CSR
Certificate signing request: your public key plus identifying details, sent to a certificate authority, which returns a signed certificate. VCF Operations can create them for VCF products.
- Depot
Binary source for VCF upgrades and installs. Choices: Broadcom's online service, via a download token and optionally a proxy; a local offline web server; or files pulled by the VCF Download Tool. Just one is active.
- Design blueprint
Ready-made, opinionated fleet architecture from the VCF Design guide covering a typical layout, say one small site or many sites over several regions. Use it unchanged, or swap individual models from the design library.