So it’s now been 130 days since the release of VMware Cloud Foundation 9. The release that’s likely the largest single release released by VMware, where over 1 million hours of engineering was poured into making a unified private cloud platform.
I’ve now spent a lot (a lot!) of time digging into the new VCF Automation platform, and thought i’d provide a consolidated list of really cool things you can do.
Lets start with whats new with VCF Automation? Well, it’s still a 3-node appliance that runs automation software, but there’s now two different automation frameworks that offer different capabilities that might suite your business better or worse.
VCF Automation VMApps, is what was known as Aria Automation. This automation software wasn’t really “truely” multi-tenant. It worked well to deliver resources internally within a company that had soft boundries between business units. We could call it “soft tenancy”.
VCF Automation AllApps, is the new kubernetes based automation framework introduced in VCF9. It shares the same 3-node appliance format, but runs in different containers. I would best describe it as if the vSphere Supervisor, NSX VPC, and VCD had a child. If you’re familar with VCD (VMware Cloud Director) which VMware Service Providers currently use, you’ll be familiar to how resources are provided to the “organisation/tenant”, and the user interface. The NSX VPC functionality ensures that we now have true “hard tenancy” between different organisation/tenants. The Supervisor is what actually delivers services to the user in form of VMs, Kubernetes instances, Load balancers, Databases, and much, much more.
Why Kubernetes? Because Kubernetes is insanely good at orchestrating resources, and very extensible.
In this blog series i want to take you through what you need to do to get started with VCF Automation AllApps, from some pre-configuration to actually deploying things, building a catalog, and how to offer your more advanced users, advanced services.
To get everyone level set, here’s a list of articles from what my lab looks like, how i got to vcf-a, and then how to use vcf-a.
Index
Lab setup
VMware Identity Broker
Creating a Workload Domain
Creating a Cluster
Deploying NSX-Edge Cluster
Enable 3-zone Supervisor
Configuring the Service Provider
Every day is a learning day 