About VMware Cloud Foundation Operations Guide

The VMware Cloud Foundation Operations Guide provides best practices and step-by-step instructions about operating VMware Cloud Foundation™ including full-stack shutdown and startup, verifying whether the state of VMware Cloud Foundation is intact after a maintenance operation, password policy configuration, and manual host certificate replacement.

This guide covers all software products and workload domain types that are supported by VMware Cloud Foundation including VMware vSphere^® with VMware Tanzu^® and VMware vRealize^® Suite.

To maintain component integration and avoid operation faults, you follow the specified order and steps to shut down and then start up the management components in VMware Cloud Foundation. See Shutdown and Startup of VMware Cloud Foundation.

As a best practice, you verify the configuration and main functions of the VMware Cloud Foundation management components after deployment, upgrade, restore, or disaster recovery. See Operational Verification of VMware Cloud Foundation.

To meet the requirements of your organization for security and compliance for your VMware Cloud Foundation environment including industry compliance standards, you configure manually the password policies of the individual management components in the environment. See Password Policy Configuration for VMware Cloud Foundation.

Because SDDC Manager does not manage certificates for ESXi hosts, if required by the policy of your organization, you manually replace the default host certificates that are signed by the VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) with external CA-signed certificates. See ESXi Certificate Management for VMware Cloud Foundation.

You can use VMware Skyline™ Health Diagnostics™ to collect diagnostic data about the management components of VMware Cloud Foundation, including detecting failures and known issues, running health checks, and identifying issues with impact on availability and product upgrade. See Proactive Diagnostics of VMware Cloud Foundation with Skyline Health Diagnostics.

Intended Audience

The information in VMware Cloud Foundation Operations Guide is intended for data center cloud administrators and operators who are familiar with:

Concepts of virtualization and software-defined data centers (SDDCs)
Networking and concepts such as uplinks, NICs, and IP networks
Hardware components such as top-of-rack (ToR) switches, inter-rack switches, servers with direct attached storage, cables, and power supplies
Methods for setting up physical racks in a data center
Using VMware vSphere^® to work with virtual machines.

Related VMware Cloud Foundation Publications

The VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 Release Notes lists the software components, new features, compatibility, and known issues in VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5.

The VMware Cloud Foundation Planning and Preparation Workbook contains the environment specification of your VMware Cloud Foundation deployment. It also provides dynamic sizing guidance.

The VMware Cloud Foundation Design Guides explains the design principles of and provides best practices for the management component configuration in a VMware Cloud Foundation environment.

The VMware Cloud Foundation Deployment Guide is intended for data center cloud administrators who deploy a VMware Cloud Foundation system in their organization's data center.

The VMware Cloud Foundation Administration Guide contains detailed information about how to administer and operate a VMware Cloud Foundation system in your data center.

The VMware Cloud Foundation Lifecycle Management document describes how to manage the life cycle of a VMware Cloud Foundation environment.

VMware Validated Solutions provide technical reference for designing and implementing add-on configurations on top of VMware Cloud Foundation that solve a business use case, such as, central identity management, workload provisioning, vSphere with Tanzu configuration, and others.

You can open these documents from the VMware Cloud Foundation Documentation main page.

Your VMware Cloud Foundation system includes a stack of VMware software products and components. You can find the documentation for those software products at VMware Docs.

VMware Cloud Foundation Glossary

The VMware Cloud Foundation Glossary defines terms specific to VMware Cloud Foundation.

Update History

This VMware Cloud Foundation Operations Guide is updated when necessary.


Revision	Description
15 JUN 2023	You can now use VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics to collect diagnostic data about the management components of VMware Cloud Foundation. See Proactive Diagnostics of VMware Cloud Foundation with Skyline Health Diagnostics.
08 JUN 2023	To replace the default ESXi certificates, signed by VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA), with CA-signed ones, you can follow step-by-step UI instructions or use the VMware.CloudFoundation.CertificateManagement PowerShell module. See ESXi Certificate Management for VMware Cloud Foundation.
25 APR 2023	You now use the VMware.CloudFoundation.PasswordManagement PowerShell module for configuring password policies for the management components of VMware Cloud Foundation
31 JAN 2023	To configure password policies for the management components of VMware Cloud Foundation according to industry compliance standards or unique requirements of your organization, including password expiration, password complexity, and account lockout, you can now follow the step-by-step instructions in Password Policy Configuration for VMware Cloud Foundation.
10 JAN 2023	You can now shut down and start up the management domain and virtual infrastructure (VI) workload domains by using PowerShell. See Shutting Down and Starting Up VMware Cloud Foundation by Using PowerShell.
11 OCT 2022	Initial version.