VCF 9 enables customers to provide services like cloud service providers for their clients. Compared to previous version, this version brings in Operational simplicity by reducing the number of management portals to use. Initial versions required VSAN as Principal Datastore for the Management Domain. With VCF 5.2 onwards, they relaxed that option. Now, they support any vSphere supported Datastores.
VCF 9 supports VMFS on FC and NFSv3 as part of standard deployment process for Greenfield environment (a new instance of VCF 9 environment). If you need to use other options, deploy vCenter 9, vSphere 9 and other components like ONTAP tools
to provision the datastore. Then, during deployment of VCF 9, pick existing vCenter option and provide the details to complete the installation.
For stretch cluster solutions, MetroCluster is used NFSv3 and SnapMirror active sync is often used for VMFS on FC. ONTAP tools can be used to setup the SnapMirror active sync relationship.
Here is the reference for a high level VCF 9 Design and Deployment with ONTAP.
One instance of ONTAP Tools for VMware vSphere can manage the VCF Fleets in same datacenter. SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere requires one appliance to be deployed on each VCF Domain. BlueXP is used to manage across all instances.
Always check Interoperability Matrix for supported versions of ONTAP Tools and SnapCenter Plug-in for VCF 9.
As VCF 9 brings in VPC feature in vCenter, the VMs can be connected to distributed port groups or subnet in VPC. The VM guest storage networks will route via edge routers when VPC subnets are used. The traffic flow will be similar like Kubernetes environments.
VCF 9 uses vSphere Supervisor services to carve out resources and create namespaces to allocate resources for the VKS clusters. vSphere Supervisor uses Storage Policy Based Management to create the storage policies. So any Datastores created by ONTAP Tools can be consumed by Supervisor including the Datastores protected by SnapMirror active sync. The Control VMs of VKS Clusters will be hosted on this. VKS Cluster can use Trident CSI or vSphere CSI. While using Trident CSI, the users get complete features of Trident including Trident Protect. While, vSphere CSI provides better integration with VCF 9 ecosystem by providing PV details via user interface.
BlueXP Backup and Recovery is used to protect the VMs as well as Kubernetes resources using native array based features.
BlueXP Disaster Recovery as a Service or VMware Live Site Recovery is used for disaster recovery of virtual machines.
If consuming the VCF 9 for Private AI, DataOps Tool Kit is available to orchestrate storage operations.
