VCF 5.2 Release – Simple Digest

Important Updates

Goal of this blog is to highlight important standouts out of huge release notes

BOM (Bill of Materials )

VCF Import Tool (for vSphere & vSAN)

This feature help customer who are looking to convert their legacy VMware infra (vSphere & vSAN) in to a VCF
Supports two deployment use cases:
- Convert: You can deploy new SDDC manager and convert existing cluster into Management domain.
- Import: Import existing vSphere infra into a VCF Workload domain in existing VCF instance.
As of now this feature only supports environment with vSphere & vSAN. But NSX import feature is not available as of yet on VCF 5.2

VCF Edge

VMware Cloud Foundation Edge (VCFE) is an optimized configuration of VCF tailored for edge use cases.
It provides first of its kind of private cloud IaaS solution for edge locations.
It will bring all the VCF goodness to Edge locations.

vSAN ESA Stretched Cluster

Flexible Target BOM for Upgrades

vSphere Live Patching

VCF users can now apply ESXi security patches without requiring VM evacuation on ESXi hosts.
This adds capability to do certain ESXi updates without host reboot.
This can save lot time since VM’s do not need to be migrated during patching.

Async Patch Tool (4.2.1)

Earlier all workload domains and cluster were deployed in alignment with Mgmt domain software versions.
With Async patches admins can deploy new domains which aligns different patch levels
It improves speed and scalability for operations by eliminating need to patch a newly deployed domain

Offline Depot

Offline bundle transfer utility can be used to create offline depot on a customer managed web server
SDDC manager can downloads patches from this local web server
This eliminates the need to manually copy and import bundles to each VCF instance
Saves lot of time, bandwidth and efforts

Support for Identity Federation with Entra ID

Identity Federation is support with VCF through multiple 3rd party providers
VCF users can now configure Microsoft Entra ID (formerly known as Azure AD) as an identity provider
Support for 3rd party authentication and MFA
This enables seamlessly move between SDDC Manager, vCenter and NSX Manager

Sync changes between vCenter and SDDC Manager

Isolated Workload Domains Sharing NSX:

VCF users can now create and manage isolated workload domains that can share an NSX Manager instance between them.

Easy Virtual Networking Adoption

This step-by-step workflow feature guides customers to migrate existing VLAN port-groups backed workloads to VCF with NSX networking in least disruptive way.
This simplified procedure for moving VMs from VLAN-backed DVPGs to NSX segments while keeping their IP address and maintaining connectivity during migration.
There might be short interruption expected while moving gateway from physical network to NSX T0 Gateway.

TEP Groups

Earlier traffic from ESXi hosts to Edge will go through one Edge TEP interface despite of multiple Edge TEP interfaces availability. This could lead to bandwidth constraints in some environments.
With NSX 4.2 new feature bundles TEPS of an EDGE into a TEP group.
Tx & Rx traffic of TEP group is layer 4 hashed across members of TEP group. This load sharing enhances high bandwidth and availability.
All TEPs in the TEP group will be used to send and receive traffic.
Traffic from any transport node to and Edge will use any TEP of the Edge. Load sharing will be based on per flow basis. Likewise traffic from an Edge to any transport node will use any TEP as source on per flow basis.
This Edge TEP groups feature is not enabled by default. Can be enabled globally via an API call.

NSX Manager XL Size

This feature introduces Extra Large (XL) size form factor for NSX Local and Global Managers.
This offers increased supported scale and also good for future scalability.

NSX ALB integration with SDDC Manager

VCF users can now deploy Avi (formerly NSX Advanced Load Balancer) as part of a new workload domain and perform password rotation and certificate management of the ALB infrastructure from SDDC Manager.

Private AI Foundation

VCF users can leverage a new guided workflow in the vSphere Client to set up infrastructure for VMware Private AI Foundation and maximize the potential of NVIDIA GPU-enabled ESXi hosts.
The workflow streamlines the set up process by centralizing configuration steps from SDDC Manager and vCenter into a single workflow.

Deprecation