The VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.3 on Dell EMC VxRail release includes the following:
- Workflow improvements for better VxRail integration: API support for streamlining day-N operations, by allowing VMware Cloud Foundation to work with VxRail Manager to orchestrate common workflows, including creating a workload domain and adding a vSphere cluster to a workload domain. This API support facilitates a single pane of glass experience for these workflows.
- Support for two system vSphere Distributed Switches: The ability to separate system traffic across two vSphere Distributed Switches allows you to isolate management traffic from other traffic (vMotion, vSAN, VM traffic) to meet security and bandwidth requirements.
- Flexibility in Application Virtual Networks (AVN): Application Virtual Networks (AVN)s, which include the NSX Edge Cluster and NSX network segments, are no longer deployed and configured during bring-up. Instead they are implemented as a Day-N operations in SDDC Manager, providing greater flexibility.
- FIPS Support: You can enable FIPS mode during bring-up, which will enable it on all the VMware Cloud Foundation components that support FIPS.
- Scheduled Automatic Password Rotations: In addition to the on-demand password rotation capability, it is now possible to schedule automatic password rotations for accounts managed through SDDC Manager (excluding ESXi accounts). Automatic password rotation is enabled by default for service accounts.
- SAN in Certificate Signing Requests (CSR) : You can now add a Subject Alternative Name (SAN) when you generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) in SDDC Manager.
- Improvements for vSphere Lifecycle Manager images: For workload domains that use vSphere Lifecycle Manager images, this release includes several improvements. These include: prechecks to proactively identify issues that may affect upgrade operations; enabling concurrent upgrades for NSX-T Data Center components; and enabling provisioning and upgrade of Workload Management.
- Add vSphere Clusters in Parallel: You can add up to 7 vSphere clusters to a workload domain in parallel, improving the performance and speed of the workflow.
- Add and Remove NSX Edge Nodes in NSX Edge Clusters: For NSX Edge clusters deployed through SDDC Manager or the VMware Cloud Foundation API, you can expand and shrink NSX Edge clusters by adding or removing NSX Edge nodes from the cluster.
- Guidance for Day-N operations in NSX Federated VCF environments: You can federate NSX-T Data Center environments across VMware Cloud Foundation instances. You can manage federated NSX-T Data Center environments with a single pane of glass, create gateways and segments that span VMware Cloud Foundation instances, and configure and enforce firewall rules consistently across instances. Guidance is also provided for password rotation, certificate management, backup and restore, and lifecycle management for federated environments.
- Backup Enhancements: You can now configure an SDDC Manager backup schedule and retention policy from the SDDC Manager UI.
- Capacity Planner tool: Administrators can use the VCF Capacity Planner online tool to model and generate a Software Defined Data Center build of materials. This interactive tool generates detailed guidance of hyper-converged server, storage, network, and cloud software SKUs required to successfully deploy an on-premises cloud.
- Private APIs: Access to private APIs that use basic authentication is deprecated in this release. You must switch to using public APIs.
- BOM updates: Updated Bill of Materials with new product versions.
