Welcome to the VMware Cloud Foundation documentation.
Learn how to configure and use VMware Cloud Foundation to deploy and manage your software-defined data center (SDDC). Use the navigation on the left to browse through the documentation available for your release of VMware Cloud Foundation. All VMware Cloud Foundation documentation is also available in PDF format, which you can access by clicking the PDF download icon when you are reading a page or viewing a search result.
Guided Documentation Map
Release Notes
- What's new in the release
- Software components and versions included in the Bill of Materials (BOM)
- Resolved issues
- Known issues
Design Guides
- The VMware Cloud Foundation management domain.
- A VMware Cloud Foundation virtual infrastructure (VI) workload domain.
- Adding and connecting vRealize Suite Lifecyce Manager and a clustered VMware Workspace ONE® Access™ instance to a VMware Cloud Foundation instance.
Planning and Preparation Workbook
The Planning and Preparation Workbook is a Microsoft Excel workbook that helps you gather the inputs required for deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (known as bring-up), VI workload domains, Workload Management, and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. It also provides guidance on the requirements for additional components that you can add to your VMware Cloud Foundation environment, such as vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Automation, and VMware Workspace ONE Access.
Getting Started with VMware Cloud Foundation
VMware Cloud Foundation Deployment Guide
The VMware Cloud Foundation Deployment Guide provides information about installing ESXi software on VMware Cloud Foundation servers and deploying the management domain using the VMware Cloud Builder.
VMware Cloud Foundation Administration Guide
This guide provides information about day-N operations, such as deploying VI workload domains, Workload Management, and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. It also includes topics such as monitoring VMware Cloud Foundation and managing VMware Cloud Foundation users, virtual infrastructure, and certificates.
VMware Cloud Foundation Operations Guide
The VMware Cloud Foundation Operations Guide provides best practices and step-by-step instructions about certain operations in VMware Cloud Foundation, such as, full-stack shutdown and startup and verifying whether the state of VMware Cloud Foundation is intact after a maintenance operation.
VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail Guide
VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail is an integration of VMware Cloud Foundation and Dell EMC VxRail. A successful deployment relies on content in both the Dell EMC VxRail documentation and the VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail Guide. This guide focuses on the tasks that are performed by VMware Cloud Foundation.
VMware Cloud Foundation Lifecycle Management
VMware Cloud Foundation includes built-in lifecycle management capabilities. VMware Cloud Foundation Lifecycle Management describes how to use those capabilities to download, apply, and monitor upgrade and install bundles.
API Reference Guides
This section of the documentation provides links to the API reference documentation on developer.vmware.com.
VMware Cloud Foundation+ Documentation
VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 and later support VMware Cloud Foundation+.
The VMware Cloud Foundation+ Guide provides an overview of VMware Cloud Foundation+, and how-to instructions for connecting on-premises VMware Cloud Foundation deployments to VMware Cloud and managing workload domains across multiple deployments from the VMware Cloud Console.
Review the VMware Cloud Foundation+ Release Notes for information on updates of the cloud functionality, supported on-premises software, and limitations.
VMware Validated Solutions
VMware Validated Solutions are a series of technical reference validated implementations designed to help customers build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads deployed on VMware Cloud Foundation. Each VMware Validated Solution will come with detailed design with design decisions, implementation guidance consisting of manual UI-based step-by-step procedures and, where applicable, automated steps using infrastructure as code. VMware Validated Solutions are available on VMware Docs and https://core.vmware.com/vmware-validated-solutions starting with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation 4.3.
Solution Guides (VMware Validated Design)
The solution guides, available for VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 through 4.2, provide VMware Validated Design deployment and architecture and design guidance for deploying an SDDC. VMware Validated Design is a family of solutions for data center designs that span compute, storage, networking, and cloud operations and automation, serving as a blueprint for your SDDC implementation. In addition to using VMware Cloud Foundation for deployment of the main components of the SDDC, the VMware Validated Design solution guides provide information about solutions and tasks that are not automated by VMware Cloud Foundation. For example, after deploying vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager using the VMware Cloud Foundation SDDC Manager, you can follow the VMware Validated Design guidance to deploy other vRealize Suite products.
| VMware Cloud Foundation Version | VMware Validated Design Version |
|---|---|
| 4.3 | N/A |
| 4.2 | 6.2 |
| 4.1 | 6.1 |
| 4.0.1 | 6.0.1 |
| 4.0 | 6.0 |
