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First Look at VMware Cloud Foundation 9

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The big news from last week at VMware Explore Las Vegas was the announcement of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9!

For those that attended the VCF Division Keynote 3 Transformations for the Smarter Way to Cloud, you got to hear more about VCF 9 directly from both Krish Prasad (General Manager of VCF Division) and Anu Kirpekar (Head of VCF Platform Engineering).


In addition, I also had the privilege of sharing with the audience several brand new VCF 9 demos showcasing the evolution of the VCF platform from a new simplified VCF Installer to the unified and integrated Operations and Automation experience to better support our end users whether that is for the infrastructure and operations team to the platform engineering and consumer teams.


If you were not able to attend the session or you were not at VMware Explore, you can watch the recording at https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/video/6360759075112, which is completely free and does not even require a login!

For a complete list of all the VMware Explore Las Vegas on-demand sessions, be sure to check out my summary repo HERE. For those interested, below are my other breakouts that are also now available to watch on-demand:

How to upgrade VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with PVSCSI controller incompatibility?

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If you are running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) in a lab using Nested ESXi and you attempt an upgrade workflow, you may find the following upgrade pre-check fail with the following message: VSAN SCSI controller is not VMware certified


You might think you are out of luck, but it is actually pretty straight forward to bypass the checks and still allow the upgrade to proceed, something I recently went through myself when upgrading my VCF 5.1.1 environment to the latest 5.2 release.

Note: To use vSAN ESA in VCF, you should configure your Nested ESXi VM to use an NVMe Controller instead of PVSCSI Controller, so its possible that by changing the controller type, you may not run into this error simliar to findings here. You can also override the vSAN HCL JSON with your own custom HCL JSON which includes the PVSCSI controller by following the blog post here and that would also allow you to proceed, but steps below are the easiest as you do not have to do anything special.

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New PCI Compliance Audit APIs for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2

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One very interesting capability that I had noticed while reading the the latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 release notes are new VCF APIs for auditing PCI Compliance.

VCF users can now use a new set of APIs that audit VCF configuration for compliance with 9 relevant PCI-DSS controls

In addition to exploring these new VCF APIs, I thought this would also be a good opportunity to contribute to the popular PowerShell Module for VMware Cloud Foundation which is also the basis for several other useful VCF modules for automation:

To demonstrate the new VCF Compliance Audit APIs, I crated the following new functions which I have also submitted a pull request (PR) 291 to incorporate functions in a future release of the PowerShell Module for VMware Cloud Foundation, which I hope will get merged by the time this blog post is live!

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