An interesting set of deployment scenarios has been coming up as customers begin planning their upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1. Customers' existing deployments are often the result of years of organic growth, evolving operational requirements, and infrastructure constraints. Whether driven by available hardware, project timelines, or changing business priorities, today's deployment topology is not always the one customers would choose if they were starting from scratch.
For some customers, rather than performing a like-for-like upgrade, customers is using the transition to VCF 9.1 as a natural opportunity to consolidate and/or relocate some of their existing deployments, better aligning their architecture with current operational and infrastructure requirements.
VCF Instance Consolidation/Relocation
For customers with multiple VCF 5.x deployments, a common objective is to consolidate all or a subset of their VCF Instances into one or more VCF 9.1 Fleets. In addition to reducing operational overhead, this allows customers to take advantage of the centralized management capabilities introduced with VCF Fleets, which were not available in VCF 5.x.
Starting with VCF 9.0, it became possible to relocate a VCF Instance between VCF Fleets by removing the existing VCF Operations integration and registering the VCF Instance with another VCF Operations instance. While this effectively enabled VCF Instance relocation, it was a by-product of how VCF Operations integrations worked rather than an intentionally designed relocation workflow.
With VCF Operations 9.1, VCF Instance integration is handled differently, and there is currently no supported method to relocate a VCF Instance after it has been integrated into a VCF 9.1 Fleet. This is an important planning consideration for customers looking to consolidate or relocate VCF Instances. The recommended approach is to first upgrade the VCF 5.x deployment to VCF 9.0.x, perform any required VCF Instance relocations, and then upgrade to VCF 9.1. Once a VCF Instance has been upgraded to VCF 9.1, relocation is no longer possible.
VCF Fleet Consolidation/Relocation
Another scenario that has come up involves customers with multiple VCF 9.0.x Fleets looking to consolidate their VCF Instances into fewer VCF 9.1 Fleets. Prior to upgrading to VCF 9.1, VCF Instances can be relocated between VCF 9.0.x Fleets by removing the existing VCF Operations integration and registering the VCF Instance with another VCF Operations instance. This must be completed before upgrading to VCF 9.1, as there is currently no supported method to relocate a VCF Instance after it has been integrated into a VCF 9.1 Fleet.
If you already have VCF 9.1 deployed, either through a new deployment or an upgrade, and later decide to consolidate or relocate an existing VCF Instance, this is currently not supported, as mentioned earlier.
Given the growing interest in this use case as customers plan their VCF 9.1 deployments, this capability is being evaluated by product management for a future VCF 9.1 release. The goal is to enable VCF Instance relocation as a Day-N operation rather than as part of the upgrade workflow, reducing both upgrade complexity and the operational risk associated with making multiple architectural changes during an upgrade.
If this is something you might be interested in or have other use cases or requirements, feel free to leave a comment with as much detail as you can and I will be sure to forward this to the product team for their considerations.
Thanks for the comment!