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VCF 9.1 - Understanding VCF Express Patches

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AI has fundamentally changed the software industry through its ability to discover software vulnerabilities at an unprecedented pace. This has driven software vendors to adopt faster release cadences, making more frequent software updates the new industry norm.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is no exception. With the unified versioning introduced in VCF 9, several release types are available to deliver updates, each serving a specific purpose.

The following diagram summarizes the VCF unified versioning model, showing whether each release type is synchronized across the VCF software stack or delivered independently, along with its installation method.


Rather than bundling security fixes into the next scheduled maintenance release, Express Patches allow them to be delivered as soon as they are available. Unlike upgrades, which must be applied in a specific order, Express Patches can be applied in any order, reducing some of the overhead in rolling out the fixes.

As a result of this faster release cadence, product fixes can also be delivered much sooner, rather than waiting for the next maintenance or minor release.

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Quick Tip: How to Identify Which Kubernetes Cluster Owns a vSphere Container Volume (PV)

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I was recently cleaning up some orphaned vSphere Container Volumes and while I was able to compare the Persistent Volumes (PV) IDs against the ones currently in use by a couple of Kubernetes clusters, I wanted to be 100% sure before removing them, especially since I planned bulk delete using PowerCLI’s Remove-CnsVolume cmdlet.

You can view all provisioned vSphere Container Volumes in the vSphere UI by navigating to vSphere Cluster->Monitor->Cloud Native Storage->Container Volumes. In addition to the volume details, you also get access to all of the associated metadata and labels, very similar to what you would see using kubectl, which is quite nice!


While reviewing the PV IDs in the UI, I noticed an attribute named Kubernetes Cluster, which appeared to identify the Kubernetes (K8s) cluster that owned the volume. How do I find this Kubernetes Cluster ID?

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What Host Lifecycle Operations Are Available after Importing vCenter into VCF 9.x Fleet?

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) first introduced the Brownfield Import capability in VCF 5.2, making it easy for customers to onboard their existing vSphere environments into a VCF deployment. While the Brownfield Import capability had some limitations in earlier releases, it has seen significant enhancements since VCF 9.0 and now provides a native onboarding experience using either the VCF Installer or as a Day-N operation within VCF Operations.

While some customers may have the opportunity to deploy a brand new VCF 9.1 Fleet as part of a hardware refresh initiative, the vast majority will start by converting an existing vSphere environment into their initial VCF Management Domain and then import their remaining vSphere environments as VCF Workload Domains.

In addition to providing centralized visibility and lifecycle management (patching and upgrades) for imported environments, one of the most common question is around what host lifecycle operations can be performed after an environment has been imported into VCF.

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