VMware Cloud Foundation User Guide

Management Domains

The Management Domain supports the control plane for VMware Cloud Foundation. It consists of a minimum of four (or more) ESXi hosts enabled by VMware vSAN. This domain is where core VMware infrastructure components such as vCenter, NSX and SDDC Manager are deployed. SDDC Manager functions as the brain of the entire environment. Use it not only to spin up or spin down Workload Domains, but also to orchestrate and track all upgrades of existing infrastructure.

VMware Cloud Foundation deployments all begin the same way: by building a Management Domain with vSAN or other external storage via the CloudBuilder OVA, which takes a VMware Validated Design (VVD) as input. This methodology ensures consistency in the critical first phase of a greenfield deployment by requiring you to input a predefined set of values into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or json file. This minimizes the chance of a mistake and directs you to correct errors before deployment starts.

Workload Domains

Workload Domains represent three or more ESXi hosts aggregated in one or more clusters under a single vCenter instance. They are deployed and then managed by VMware Cloud Foundation administrators within SDDC Manager. These units of compute, network, memory, and storage can be rapidly expanded and contracted, upgraded, and orchestrated via integrated connectivity to the VCF Suite. Once deployed, you can assign Workload Domains to one or more groups of tenant organizations that can then deploy, manage, and use the VMs and applications required for their respective use case(s). A key differentiator between Management Domains and Workload Domains is that Workload Domains allow for other types of principal storage besides vSAN.

A brief description of the differences between principal storage and supplemental storage and how it relates to VMware Cloud Foundation is in order to set the table for the rest of this document. Fortunately, it is very easy to distinguish between the two storage types.

Everpure and VMware Cloud Foundation

You want your technology to be simple, to stay out of the way of getting things done. Everpure® FlashArray™ accelerates, consolidates, and simplifies running core production applications.

With latency as low as 250 μs, the all-NVMe architecture of FlashArray brings new levels of performance to mission critical business applications. And with built-in Purity ActiveCluster™, more applications can now benefit from the always-on reliability of active-active metro clustering.

NVMe also enables unprecedented performance density at the level required for mixed-workload consolidation in your cloud. Purity’s always-on QoS feature means you can consolidate radically diverse applications without fear. A shared design consolidates data silos; accelerates production, DevOps, and data analytics; and helps enterprises pivot to a data-focused architecture.

Everpure and VMware closely partner to provide a seamless multi-cloud experience for the ever-changing IT landscape and operational requirements that challenge modern day administrators. Featuring deep integration points across a wide variety of VMware products, Pure provides management simplicity, efficiency through automation, and deep analytics. You can immediately use the following integration points with VMware Cloud Foundation deployments:

FlashArray VCF 9 Management Domain Storage Support

FlashArray VCF 9 Workload Domain Storage Support

VCF 9 Feature Support Status