VCF 4.1 What's new?

 VCF 4.1 What's new?

Recently VMware released 4.1 VCF lets take a look what all new things were added (source: vmware.com)

The list is big and can be checked on the vmware VCF release notes site. I have just picked the ones I think are most commonly used and helpful in this release.

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Remote Clusters ROBO

VCF extends its capabilities to the ROBO and Edge sites with Remote Clusters. Now customers can enjoy the same consistent cloud operations in their core data center and edge/ ROBO sites.

ESXi Parallel Upgrade

Parallel upgrades reduce the overall time required to upgrade your environment. This enables the customer to update the ESXi software on multiple clusters in the management domain or a workload domain in parallel.

NSX-T Data Center Parallel Upgrades 

Same for NSX-t also, enables the customer to upgrade all Edge clusters in parallel, and then all host clusters in parallel

External CA-signed certificates support for ESXi

VMware Cloud Foundation supports APIs to perform bring-up of hosts with certificates generated by an external Certificate Authority (CA). 

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager in VMware Cloud Foundation mode 

Improved integration with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. When vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager in VMware Cloud Foundation mode is enabled, the behavior of vRLCM is aligned with the VCF architecture.

Support for Renaming VMware Cloud Foundation Objects 

The customer can rename workload domains, network pools, and compute clusters after you have deployed them. This allows the flexibility of naming these Cloud Foundation objects to align with company policies.

VMware Skyline Support

VMware Skyline brings proactive intelligence to VCF by identifying management and workload domains, and proactively surfacing VMware Cloud Foundation solution findings. 

Start up and shut down order guidance 

This is something cool. Start up and shut down order guidance for VCF is now available, enabling the customer to gracefully shut down and start up the SDDC components in a prescriptive order.

Lifecycle Management Enhancements 

VMware Cloud Foundation allows skipping versions during upgrade to minimize the number of upgrades applied and time consumed in upgrading. Skip-level upgrade is managed using SDDC Manager and the public API. 

vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) Support 

vCLS is a new capability introduced in the vSphere 7 Update 1 release. vCLS ensures that if vCenter Server becomes unavailable, cluster services remain available to maintain the resources and health of the workloads that run in the clusters.

Resolved Issues

A list of issues that are fixed in this release,
 

• Adding an NSX-T Edge cluster fails if the SDDC Manager reboots before the task completes.
• vSAN File Services cannot be enabled on vLCM-enabled workload domains.
• Unable to remove hosts from a cluster that was unsuccessfully stretched.
• Unstretch cluster operation fails at task "Get Data from Inventory".
• After you create an NSX-T Edge cluster, SDDC Manager does not support expanding or shrinking it by adding or deleting Edge nodes. While this is still unsupported in SDDC Manager, you can contact VMware Support if you need to expand or shrink an NSX-T Edge cluster.