Hosts grouped and managed together by vCenter so their pooled resources can support vSAN, DRS and vSphere HA. In VCF, each such cluster belongs to a VCF domain.
Read more: Broadcom TechDocs
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains vSphere cluster in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- vCenter
Management software for VMs, clusters and ESX hosts. Each domain in VCF gets a dedicated one.
- 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.
- DRS
The Default Rule Set, Microsoft's managed WAF rules that succeed OWASP CRS and defend against XSS, SQL injection and other frequent attacks. Single rules may be overridden or switched off.
- vSphere HA
When a host fails, this cluster capability restarts its VMs elsewhere; through VM Component Protection and VM Monitoring it also reacts to storage and VM failures.
- 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.
- VCF domain
A single vCenter together with the storage, switching, NSX Manager and clusters it controls. Every VCF Instance has one for management, plus optional extra ones for workloads.
Related terms
- EVC
vSphere cluster capability that exposes the same baseline CPU features on every host, allowing vMotion between different processor generations from the same vendor. A custom EVC mode can be applied to a cluster or to individual VMs.
- vSphere Zone
Supervisor object tied to precisely one vSphere cluster and one Supervisor. It can be tagged to host the control plane, given to namespaces for workloads, or used for both, as combined workload models do.