VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4

VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4

VMware recently announced general availability of VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4.

VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4 Bill of Materials

The Bill of Materials for VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4 includes the following products:

  • Cloud Builder 4.4
  • SDDC Manager 4.4
  • vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3c
  • vSphere 7.0 Update 3c with Tanzu
  • vSAN 7.0 Update 3c
  • NSX-T Data Center 3.1.3.5
  • vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.6.2
    • vRealize Log Insight 8.6.2
    • vRealize Operations 8.6.2
    • vRealize Automation 8.6.2
    • Workspace ONE Access 3.3.6

What’s New in VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4

  • Enhanced AI/ML workload support with NVIDIA AI Enterprise Suite and ability to share vGPUs across multiple instances. Check Delivering AI Ready Infrastructure with NVIDIA and VMware Cloud Foundation blog post for more details.
  • Flexible vRealize Suite product upgrades – you can upgrade vRealize Suite products directly through vRealize Lifecycle Manager, instead of waiting for a newer release of VMware Cloud Foundation. vLCM will check for compatibility and support for the requested versions.
  • Improvements to upgrade prechecks Upgrade prechecks are verifying now the filesystem capacity and passwords.
  • SSH disabled on ESXi hosts Starting with this release, VCF will disable the SSH service on ESXi hosts by default, following the vSphere security configuration guide recommendation.
  • User Activity Logging – New activity logs capture all the VMware Cloud Foundation API invocation calls, along with user context.
  • SDDC Manager UI workflow to manage DNS and NTP configurations – This feature provides a guided workflow to validate and apply DNS and NTP configuration changes to all components in a VMware Cloud Foundation deployment.
  • Security fixes – This release includes fixes for Apache Log4j Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046) and and Apache HTTP Server (CVE-2021-40438).
  • Improvements to reduce SDDC Manager service CPU and Memory usage – Reduces the overall SDDC Manager service resource usage and improves service stability in scaled deployments.

Resolved Issues

  • Connecting vRealize Operations Manager to a workload domain fails at the “Create vCenter Server Adapter in vRealize Operations Manager for the Workload Domain” step
  • Unable to download SoS bundles from SDDC Manager using APIs
  • Unable to remove host from vSphere cluster in workload domain
  • SDDC Manager UI does not load correctly
  • vRealize Operations Management Pack for VMware Identity Manager is not installed
  • Deploying a second vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager fails
  • Domain prechecks for vRealize Suite products show incorrect health state

Known Issues

  • Workload Management does not support NSX-T Data Center Federation
  • NSX-T Guest Introspection (GI) and NSX-T Service Insertion (SI) are not supported on stretched clusters
  • You cannot stretch a cluster on which Workload Management is deployed.
  • Cluster-level ESXi upgrade fails
  • ESXi upgrade fails with the error “Incompatible patch or upgrade files. Please verify that the patch file is compatible with the host. Refer LCM and VUM log file.”
  • Skip level upgrades are not enabled for some product components after VMware Cloud Foundation is upgraded to 4.3
  • vRealize Operations Manager upgrade fails on the step VREALIZE_UPGRADE_PREPARE_BACKUP with the error: Waiting for vRealize Operations cluster to change state timed out
  • vRealize Suite product upgrade request fails in vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager
  • The upgrade of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager fails with error “Timed out while waiting in-place upgrade of vRSLCM to complete”
  • After upgrading to VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4 an NSX Manager that is shared between VI workload domains cannot connect to vCenter Server
  • Upgrade precheck shows the incorrect health status for vRealize Operations Manager when it is part of an environment that also includes vRealize Automation
  • Upgrading to vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager does not download the vRealize Log Insight content packs or vRealize Operations Manager management packs
  • The Cloud Foundation Builder VM remains locked after more than 15 minutes
  • Adding host in a workload domain fails when host is on a different VLAN
  • Deploying partner services on a workload domain displays the “Configure NSX at cluster level to deploy Service VM” error
  • If the witness ESXi version does not match with the host ESXi version in the cluster, vSAN cluster partition may occur
  • vSAN partition and critical alerts are generated when the witness MTU is not set to 9000
  • The vSAN Performance Service is not enabled for vSAN clusters when CEIP is not enabled
  • Creation or expansion of a vSAN cluster with more than 32 hosts fails
  • Removing a host from a cluster, deleting a cluster from a workload domain, or deleting a workload domain fails if Service VMs (SVMs) are present
  • vCenter Server overwrites the NFS datastore name when adding a cluster to a VI workload domain
  • Disabling CEIP on SDDC Manager does not disable CEIP on vRealize Automation and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager
  • The VMware Cloud Foundation API ignores NSX VDS uplink information for in-cluster expansion of an NSX Edge cluster
  • Updating the DNS or NTP server configuration does not apply the update to vRealize Automation
  • Removing vRealize Automation from a vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager environment does not remove integrations

Constantin Ghioc

I usually play with vSphere API, Ansible, vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator, and different AWS tools. In my other life I’m a husband and a father, an amateur photographer and a Go enthusiast.

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