With the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a new architectural construct has been introduced called a VCF Fleet. This brings centralized fleet management and provides modern workload consumption across multiple VCF instances, all managed through a single deployment of VCF Automation and VCF Operations, as shown in the diagram below.
A common question that has been coming up quite a bit lately is how many VCF Instances can a VCF Fleet support?
Technically, there is not a fixed number of VCF Instances that can be managed by VCF Operations. As with with most things in our industry, the answer is "it depends" ...
Before we take a closer look at what "it depends" actually means, it is important to understand what is a VCF Instance?
A VCF Instance includes a VCF Management Domain and can include one or more VCF Workload Domains.
- VCF Management Domain includes the core SDDC components: vCenter Server, ESXi hosts, vSAN or other supported principal storage and NSX Manager) along with single instance of SDDC Manager and a VCF Operations collector.
- SDDC Manager provides lifecycle management for all deployed core SDDC components within a VCF Instance
- VCF Operations Collector provides inventory and metric collection within a VCF Instances, which is then sent to VCF Operations
- VCF Workload Domain, when deployed only includes the core SDDC components and all lifecycle management and operations is performed by the single instance of SDDC Manager