We are pleased to announce the general availability of VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5. This version of VMware’s multi-cloud platform was announced at VMware Explore 2022 as part of the introduction of VMware Cloud Foundation+. VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 is the first version of Cloud Foundation to support VMware Cloud Foundation+, delivering a new cloud-connected architecture for managing and operating full-stack HCI in data centers or co-location facilities. General Availability of VCF+ will be announced at a future date.
What’s New
The VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 release includes the following:
- Support for VCF+: This release introduces support for subscription cloud services including vSphere+ and vSAN+. General Availability of VCF+ will be announced at a future date.
- Improvements to using VCF at scale: Users can now add clusters in parallel and add/remove and commission/decommission hosts at scale.
- Improvements to upgrade pre-checks: Upgrade pre-checks have been expanded to verify license and NSX-T edge cluster password validation, file permissions checks, password and certification rotation failed workflows validation, and also noisy vSAN health checks can be silenced.
- Operational improvements: Users can now rename clusters and apply user-defined tags to objects.
- SDDC Manager Onboarding Workflow: The SDDC Manager UI provides an easy, wizard-like interface for new users to configure their VCF deployment.
- Storage improvements: With HCI Mesh on vSAN ReadyNodes, a cluster can mount a remote vSAN datastore that has been configured with another cluster (two or more clusters can share the same vSAN datastore).
- VxRail improvements: The UI for VxRail domain manager workflows is brought to on par to that of vSAN ReadyNodes. Also, LCM cluster retry operations have been improved.
- Accessibility improvements: This release resolves critical accessibility issues to provide a fully accessible interface.
- Migration enablement: This release introduces support for Mixed Mode migrations, as well as supporting new topologies for migration from VCF 3 to 4.
- BOM updates: Updated Bill of Materials with new product versions:
- Cloud Builder VM: 4.5
- SDDC Manager: 4.5
- VMware vCenter Appliance: 7.0 Update 3h
- VMware ESXi and VMware vSAN: 7.0 Update 3g
- VMware Virtual SAN Witness Appliance: 7.0 Update 3c
- VMware NSX-T: 3.2.1.2 (see detail below)
- VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager: 8.8.2
New networking and Security Features delivered in VCF 4.5 through integration of NSX-T 3.2.1.2
NSX Federation Enhancements:
NSX Federation is enhanced in NSX-T 3.2.1.2 to support VM tag replication between local managers so that VMs replicated and restarted during a Disaster Recovery (DR) event and retain the necessary security policies. NSX-T 3.2.1.2 also implements enhanced health monitoring for communication channels between Global Managers and Local Managers.
New Security Features:
Numerous enhancements to Gateway Security and Distributed Firewall, such as:
•GFW: Enhanced L7 App IDs, Malware Detection and Sandboxing, URL filtering, User-ID firewall, TLS inspection (Tech Preview) and Intrusion Detection and Prevention Service (IDS/IPS).
•DFW: Malware detection and Prevention, Behavioral IDS/IPS, enhanced application identities for L7 firewall.
Container Networking and Security with NSX-T and Antrea:
With NSX-T 3.2.1.2, network administrators can now define Antrea networking and security policies for containers from the NSX-T Manager user interface. Policies are applied on K8s clusters running Antrea 1.3.1-1.2.2 using the interworking controller. Kubernetes objects such as pods, namespaces, and services are collected in NSX-T inventory and tagged so that they can be selected in Distributed Firewall policies.
Additionally, the NSX-T user interface can manage Antrea Traceflow and also collect log bundles from Kubernetes clusters using Antrea.
Enhanced Migration Coordinator:
The NSX Migration Coordinator has been enhanced to support customer defined NSX topologies, larger scale, and several other features and environments not previously supported, including VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO), fixed topologies with OSPF, Guest Introspection for partners that support Migration Coordinator, and identity-based firewall (IDFW/RDSH) configurations.
The release notes for VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 can be found here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/4.5/rn/vmware-cloud-foundation-45-release-notes/index.html
