VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architecture and Fleet Components Latency

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Architecture is prepared to cover the whole planet. If your business covers the whole globe you proably have datacenters at least in three regions where these regions are typically located at EMEA (Europe / EU), AMER (America / United States), APJ (Asia / Malaysia, India, etc.). 

For such deployments, you have to consider network latency and the following diagram is for you.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Fleet Latency

However, there is also VCF Minimal Architecture starting with just 4 ESXi hosts (servers). 

In the rest of this blog post I will describe VCF terminology, VCF components and relationship between them.

VCF Architecture Components 

It is good to recap how VCF Architecture actually looks like and from what components it is composed.

VCF Fleet Management 

VCF Fleet is a set of independent VCF Instances managed by a single VCF Fleet Manager which is part of centralized deployment of VCF Operations. 

VCF Instance

Each VCF Instance is composed from one or up to 15 VCF Workload Domains. The first workload domain is special. It is called VCF Management Domain. Additional 14 workload domains are optional. If VCF Instance contains only VCF Management Domain, it is called Consolidated VCF Architecture. If VCF Instance has VCF Management Domain and at least one additional VCF Workload Domain, it is called VCF Standard Architecture.

VCF Workload Domain

VCF Workload Domain contains one or multiple vSphere Clusters, typically leveraging vSAN Service and having VMware Software-Defined Storage called vSAN. VMware vSAN has two flavors

1. Original Storage Architecture (OSA - SSD Cache Tier + SSD or HDD Capacity Tier)
2.  Express Storage Architecture (ESA - Full NVMe, Single Tier Storage System),

Nowadays, you will typically use Express Storage Architecture (ESA - Full NVMe), because Original Storage Architecture (OSA - SSD Cache Tier + SSD or HDD Capacity Tier) usually does not make sense for virtualized environment and NVMe is the first choice over SSD or Rotational Disks (HDD). 

VCF Management Domain

VCF Management Domain is a special type of Workload Domain. It is a first VCF Workload Domain in VCF Instance. All VCF management components (vCenters, NSX Managers, SDDC Manager, VCF Operations, etc.) are deployed on this VCF Management Domain.

Conclusion

And that's it. It is not difficult, right? It is just an standardized infrastructure architecture which makes perfect sense and it is fully automated. You just have to understand various VCF Terminology, Components and its purpose.

The picture is worth thousands words, therefore following blueprints describes various VCF Architectures.

VCF Full Fleet Architecture

Full Fleet Architecture is good for large organizations having multiple regions.

VCF Full Fleet Architecture

VCF Minimal Architecture

Minimal VCF Architecture is good for smaller environments and it starts with a single vSphere Cluster with 4 ESXi hosts (servers).

VCF Minimal Architecture

VCF Minimal Fleet Architecture for VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS)

Minimal VCF Architecture with VKS, is good for smaller environments having the need for Kubernetes. It starts with a two vSphere Cluster each starting with 4 ESXi hosts (servers).

VCF Minimal Architecture with VKS

Hope this blog post helps other folks in VMware community to understand VCF Conceptual Architecture. It is not a rocket science, it is just about few standardized components (building blocks).