VCF Updated to 4.0.1. So What's Changed?

from the Hydra High Council Jun 9th 2020

It's the BOM

In terms of the components listed in the Bill of Materials (BOM) we see Cloud Builder and SDDC Manager going from 4.0.0 to 4.0.1. Cloud Builder automates the deployment of VCF and the SDDC Manager is what allows us to create and manage the workload domains, as well as add and monitor additional pools of resources.

Compute (ESXi 7.0), vSphere management (vCenter Server 7.0), and storage (vSAN 7.0) are now all version 7.0b in VCF 4.0.1.

Networking, provided by NSX-T 3.0, is now version 3.0.1 and Lifecycle Manager 8.1 has a patch added, Lifecycle Manager 8.1 patch 1.

Delta Delta Delta

The delta in features and functions for VCF 4.0.1 include changes for Kubernetes, multiple pNICs, and upgrading clusters within NSX-T workload domains.

In this version, vSphere with Kubernetes can now be deployed in the management domain with only four hosts. It's true that this could also be done in VCF 4.0.0, but the integration was not complete. In VCF 4.0.1, SDDC Manager can now validate that the environment is ready for vSphere with Kubernetes, similar to the pre-flight checklist that is performed by Cloud Builder prior to the Bring Up process.

Speaking of the Bring Up process, in VCF 4.0.1, we can now use the deployment parameter workbook to do a couple of new tricks:

Bring up hosts with 2 or 4 physical NICs (pNICs)
Automatically create of up to two vSphere Distributed Switches (vDS) to isolate VMkernel traffic

And with NSX-T, VCF 4.0.1 now supports upgrading specific host clusters in a workload domain. This should make managing maintenance windows a bit more flexible since the upgrades do not have to include all clusters within a domain.