As modern data centers scale to support increasingly complex infrastructure and application demands, the need for streamlined operational governance becomes critical. With VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a new level of operational consistency has been introduced: VCF-level Tag Management. This capability extends beyond traditional tagging confined to individual components like vCenter Server or NSX, enabling VCF Fleet-wide visibility and orchestration.
This enhancement empowers administrators to define and manage tags uniformly across the VCF Fleet setting the stage for smarter automation, refined policy enforcement, and simplified fleet operations.
Let’s explore the foundational capabilities of this new tag management functionality in VCF.
You will find more details in the official VMware by Broadcom documentation @ https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vcf/vcf-9-0-and-later/9-0/fleet-management/what-is-tag-management.html
Core Tag Management Capabilities in VCF
The new tag management system is tightly integrated into VCF’s Fleet Management UI, offering a centralized interface to create, import, edit, and distribute tags and categories across managed domains. Here’s a snapshot of what you can do:
1. Create a Tag Category
Administrators can create custom tag categories directly within the VCF Operations UI. Each category includes properties like cardinality (single or multiple tag association) and associable object types. This sets the groundwork for consistent classification across infrastructure components.
2. Create a Tag and Add It to a Category
Once a category is defined, individual tags can be created and assigned accordingly. This step allows you to classify resources with meaningful labels that map to business functions, compliance zones, ownership models, or operational states.
3. Import Tags and Categories from a vCenter Instance
To simplify onboarding and maintain continuity, you can import existing tags and categories from a connected vCenter Server instance. This ensures alignment between VCF and vCenter tagging schemas and reduces duplication of effort.
4. Push Tags and Categories to a vCenter Instance
In addition to importing, VCF also supports pushing centrally managed tags and categories back to individual vCenter instances. This promotes consistent operations across the board.
Real-World Use Cases: Unlocking Value with Centralized Tag Management
Now that you know about some of the new operational capabilities introduced in VCF Operations around tag management, let’s jump right into some of the high-impact scenarios where customers can realize immediate value:
1. Fleet-Wide Visibility: Compare Tags Across Your Entire VCF Landscape
In large-scale environments where multiple vCenter instances are deployed across domains or regions, it’s common for tag sprawl and inconsistency to emerge. The new VCF-level tag management capabilities enable a structured approach to auditing and comparing tag usage across your fleet.
With just a few steps, administrators can identify and resolve discrepancies across vCenters:
- Import tags from one of your vCenter instances into VCF Operations. This creates an independent copy of the categories and tags in VCF Operations, allowing safe review and modification without affecting the original source.
- Next, import tags from another vCenter instance.
- VCF Operations automatically detects and surfaces conflicts or duplicate tags, allowing you to take informed actions—whether consolidating, renaming, or retiring obsolete entries.
- Once imported, all tag data can be reviewed centrally in the Tag Management pane, providing visibility that simplifies cross-vCenter comparison and consistency in tagging.
This use case empowers operations teams to clean up legacy inconsistencies, enforce standard taxonomies, and ensure policy alignment across domains—without hopping between interfaces.
2. Tag Consistency: Easily Propagate Metadata Across vCenters
Creating and maintaining a consistent tagging strategy across multiple vCenters can be tedious and error-prone. With VCF Operations, you can now replicate tags and categories from one vCenter instance to another through a seamless import-push workflow.
Here’s how it works:
- Start by importing tag categories from a source vCenter into VCF Operations. As before, this is a non-destructive copy—edits here won’t impact the source.
- From the centralized Tag Management interface, select the categories you want to replicate and use the Push to vCenter option to send them to your target vCenter.
- Once the operation is complete, you can log in to the destination vCenter and find the entire tag structure—categories and tags—intact and ready to use.
- And as before, edits here won’t affect the source, so your local vCenter Tag Admin can manage the newly copied tags without impacting other VCF components
This greatly simplifies the task of ensuring consistent metadata across your cloud environments, making it easier to apply uniform automation rules, policies, or reporting logic across sites.
Whether you’re enabling workload mobility, aligning policy enforcement, or standardizing lifecycle automation, this replication flow eliminates manual rework while keeping each environment independently manageable.
In short, VCF-level tag management enables teams to move from reactive administration to proactive governance—at fleet scale. And this is only the beginning. Stay tuned for more innovations in fleet-level operations with VMware Cloud Foundation.
