VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) first introduced the Brownfield Import capability in VCF 5.2, making it easy for customers to onboard their existing vSphere environments into a VCF deployment. While the Brownfield Import capability had some limitations in earlier releases, it has seen significant enhancements since VCF 9.0 and now provides a native onboarding experience using either the VCF Installer or as a Day-N operation within VCF Operations.
While some customers may have the opportunity to deploy a brand new VCF 9.1 Fleet as part of a hardware refresh initiative, the vast majority will start by converting an existing vSphere environment into their initial VCF Management Domain and then import their remaining vSphere environments as VCF Workload Domains.
In addition to providing centralized visibility and lifecycle management (patching and upgrades) for imported environments, one of the most common question is around what host lifecycle operations can be performed after an environment has been imported into VCF.
