operations
The First Ninety Days on 9.1
You upgraded and nothing changed. Most estates land on the platform and keep operating exactly as before. Here's the sequence I'd work through instead.
lifecycle
Bring Your Own Licence Is No Longer Optional
VMware on Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle has moved to BYOL, with deadlines. The nearest one is 31 October. And it quietly changes how you should compare clouds.
architecture
The Engineer's Companion: Topology, Network, Storage and Integrations at Each Stage
The data plane barely changes across all four stages. The management plane triples. That is the real cost curve of adoption, and it belongs in front of an operations lead early.
lifecycle
The Staged Path From vSphere 8 to VCF 9.1
Rushing a full adoption to hit a compliance date produces a worse VCF outcome than staging it. Five stages, three stopping points, and the distinction that decides your scope.
lifecycle
Cloud Director 10.6.2: A Migration Release, and a Lifecycle Statement
10.6.2 shares its end-of-life date with VCF 9.1. The migration timeline is no longer entirely yours to set
lifecycle
VCF 9.1.1 Is Billed as a Maintenance Release. The Networking Documentation Says Otherwise.
The release notes call it maintenance. It also brings an AI assistant you can point at your own model, shared models across teams, six networking changes, and a patch order that will catch you out.
operations
The Layer Below the Hypervisor Why Bare-Metal Lifecycle Became a Compliance Problem
Adding a host to a VCF cluster still means a manual, a firmware lookup and a twelve-step checklist. DORA Articles 8 and 11 now have opinions about that, which turns an operational annoyance into a regulatory one.
Newsletter
Baselines Are on Borrowed Time The Architect’s Guide to Moving ESXi Patching to vLCM Images
Baseline-based host patching has been deprecated since vSphere 8.0 and cannot carry you into vSphere 9.
Newsletter
Upgrading to VCF 9.1 from vSphere + Aria Operations: A Customer Migration Guide
The architect’s read on the journey from a standalone vSphere + Aria Operations estate to VCF 9.1. Convergence vs Brownfield Import vs Side-by-side.
Newsletter
VCF 9.1 Lifecycle Deep Dive: Patching, Upgrades, and Brownfield Import
Lifecycle stopped being a tool you bolt on. In VCF 9.x, it’s the backbone — and 9.1 finishes the architectural shift with the Fleet Update Service, 4× faster parallel cluster upgrades, live patching a