VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) offers a powerful, integrated platform for managing your virtualized infrastructure, but deploying it successfully requires thoughtful planning. At AHEAD, we’ve helped organizations across industries navigate the complexity of VCF adoption, and we’ve seen firsthand what makes the difference between a smooth rollout and a challenging one.

Here are the five key things you need to know before you get started.

VCF Edition Choices Matter

Your choice of VCF edition isn’t just a licensing decision. It shapes your architecture, supported features, and even long-term upgrade paths.

In VCF 9.0, Broadcom has fully embraced subscription licensing. Instead of juggling multiple product keys, you’ll have a single entitlement that’s portable across environments, making it ideal for organizations running a mix of on-premises and hosted workloads. Version numbers for VCF, ESXi, and NSX are now aligned, which simplifies compatibility planning.

However, there are trade-offs. Support for vVols is deprecated in 9.0, so storage design must focus on solutions such as vSAN, NFS, or Fibre Channel.

If you’re still on VCF 5.2, you’ll find a different landscape: perpetual licenses are still an option, and each component has its own term license. This allows flexibility if you’re not ready to move to a subscription model. Understanding the differences will help you align your edition choice with your technical and business goals.

Prerequisites and Planning

VCF has strict hardware, network, and software requirements—and skipping the preparation step can cause major delays.

• Hardware: All components must be on Broadcom’s Hardware Compatibility List (HCL).
• Networking: Physical and virtual networks must meet VCF’s demands for segmentation, microsegmentation, scalability, and performance.
• Software: Expect dependencies like NSX, vCenter, and other VMware ecosystem components.

Both 5.2 and 9.0 now support importing existing vSphere and vSAN environments into VCF, which helps minimize disruption. Advanced features like vSAN Max, stretched clusters, vGPU support, and network assessment tools can improve scalability, but only if planned for in advance.

Taking the time to validate readiness upfront will dramatically reduce those “uh-oh” moments during deployment.

Automation in VCF 9.0

VCF 9.0 offers a major boost in automation capabilities, streamlining both infrastructure and application deployment.

On the infrastructure side, lifecycle management is integrated directly into the installer, and built-in VCF operations (formerly Aria Operations) allows you to define and repeatedly deploy environments. Tools like Terraform and PowerCLI 9 expand your automation options, with new modules for NSX and SDDC Manager.

On the application side, VCF Automation and vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) make it simple to create a service catalog, provision virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters, and integrate them with GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines. Together, these capabilities shorten deployment times, reduce manual errors, and make scaling a much smoother process.

VCF Operations: The New Management Hub

What used to be called Aria Operations (and before that, vRealize Operations) is now VCF Operations, and it’s becoming the central point for managing your VMware environment.

In VCF 9.0, VCF Operations consolidates identity and access management, certificate handling, and tagging across the platform. No more juggling multiple portals or reconciling vSphere and NSX tags. Everything is unified.

If you’re not using VCF Operations today, we recommend getting familiar with it before upgrading to 9.0. That way, the new interface and workflows will feel natural. You’ll only need to adapt to new features, not the entire toolset.

Design: The Critical Success Factor

If there’s one thing that separates successful VCF deployments from the rest, it’s front-loaded design work.

Design considerations include:

• Network layout: How will you segment traffic for NSX, vSAN, management, and workloads?
• Domain and cluster planning: Will you separate VMs and containers into different domains or clusters?
• Scalability: Understanding maximum supported configurations (which have expanded in 9.0) and planning accordingly.

AHEAD works with clients of all sizes to ensure these design elements are thoroughly addressed before deployment. Even if you don’t have a large-scale environment, expert design input can help avoid costly rework later.

Ready to Begin Your VCF Journey?

This overview just scratches the surface. For a deeper dive, download our VCF Adoption Whitepaper or connect with the AHEAD team to discuss how we can help design, plan, and implement a VMware Cloud Foundation deployment that aligns with your business goals.