VCF 9.0 Gets an Interactive Portal
A vExpert has built and released a VCF 9.0 Journey Portal to replace Broadcom's static PDF documentation. The new interactive site is designed to make navigating the complex VCF upgrade and deployment process much easier. It's a community-led effort to improve user experience.
The creator of the portal, writing on the blog "Angrysysops," aimed to solve a common infrastructure engineering problem: static diagrams become useless the moment you need to zoom or scroll. The interactive site is designed to give a clean sense of progression, breaking the journey into operational phases like "Plan & Prepare," "Deploy VCF 9.0," and "License VCF." This community effort arises as VMware, under Broadcom, has fundamentally altered its product landscape, collapsing a wide range of products into just two main offerings: VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and vSphere Standard. This simplification ended the sale of perpetual licenses and shifted customers to a subscription model, bundling tools like vSAN, NSX, and the Aria Suite directly into VCF. The vExpert who built the portal is part of a long-standing VMware community program that recognizes individuals for contributions like blogging, tool-building, and public speaking. These awards are for individuals, not companies, who go beyond their day jobs to share knowledge. The complexity of VCF 9.0 itself necessitates better guidance. The new version introduces concepts like "VCF Operations" and "VCF Automation" and involves a multi-stage deployment journey that can be a source of configuration failures if not followed correctly. Official documentation even notes numerous known issues across components like SDDC Manager, vSAN, and NSX. Broadcom's changes extend beyond product bundling to the support and download experience. As of March 2025, downloading software binaries, including patches for VCF, requires a unique token obtained from the Broadcom support portal to enhance security.
