VCF 9.1 came out in May and 9.1.1 followed in early September. I’ve been reading through the release notes and blog posts, and these are my notes on what’s different. Noticeable in the architecture diagram is the NSX VNA appliance in workload domain and a new license server so let’s see what is does along with the fleet changes
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Fleet management got moved
If you ran 9.0, you had the fleet management appliance sitting next to VCF Operations. That’s gone in 9.1 and so is Aria Suite Lifecycle.
Their work now runs as services inside something called VCF Management Services, or VCFMS a Kubernetes-based runtime with some services on top such as Fleet Lifecycle, a Software Depot for binaries, and Salt RaaS for config. Licensing is separate.
The License Server is its own appliance in the management domain, sitting next to VCFMS rather than inside it.. We still do everything from VCF Operations, which is now where upgrades, patching and hardware management happen. You don’t need new licenses to go from 9.0 to 9.1. Components drop into evaluation mode during the upgrade and you re-license them in VCF Operations.
During the upgrade, VCF Operations pulls the inventory, certificates, CSRs, service accounts and the rest of the old appliance, then shuts it down and decommissions it.
A few things
- VCFMS needs new IP addresses and FQDNs have to be lower case
- There’s a new password standard for vCenter root.
- A small VCFMS deployment doesn’t come with HA. In 9.1.1 you can turn it on from the VCF Installer.
vSAN
The capacity view now shows effective capacity.
Global dedupe is finally GA on ESA. There’s also a new compression algorithm that gets better ratios. It’s on by default and only applies to new writes, so turning it on doesn’t disrupt anything.
Auto-RAID is something new. You set it in the storage policy and vSAN picks the RAID layout per object based on how big the cluster is which prevents the policy sprawl.
Other vSAN changes:
- Compute clusters can mount remote vSAN capacity including as a stretched compute cluster.
- Native S3 object storage is here.
vSphere
The main things worth knowing:
- vCenter Quick Patch lets you apply security fixes without taking vCenter down.
- ESX Live Patch covers more now, including TPM hosts and vSAN daemons.
Everything else
The SDDC Manager UI is deprecated, and Cloud Builder is replaced by the VCF Installer. One VCF instance can now handle up to 5,000 hosts, and cluster upgrades are supposed to be up to 4x faster. Tags across all your vCenters show up in VCF Operations and sync both ways.
Log management is built into VCF Operations now too.
Networking: the Virtual Network Appliance
The other new box in the workload domain is the NSX Virtual Network Appliance, or VNA. You now get a choice between a full NSX Edge and a VNA and this is new in 9.1.
In 9.0 you had to choose between two VPC models. The centralized model gave you NAT and load balancing, but everything went through the Edge, which could become a bottleneck. The distributed model was fast, but it had no NAT or load balancing.
VNA is meant to give you both. Routing stays distributed on the ESX hosts. When someone asks for outbound NAT, DNAT, a load balancer or an IPsec VPN in a distributed VPC, that service runs on a small VNA cluster. It’s a lightweight appliance you deploy straight from vCenter. Distributed Transit Gateway also uses VNA to support VKS Supervisor and VCF Automation.
Edges aren’t going away. They’re still the north-south connection to your physical network. VNA just means you don’t need a full Edge for every workload domain that wants NAT or a load balancer.
9.1.1
9.1.1 shipped on September 3. It’s mostly a rollup of all the Express Patch fixes plus security hardening. It also shrinks the VCFMS footprint, adds HA for small VCFMS deployments in the installer, and lets the download tool grab the latest component versions.