While new features and enhancements are always exciting, new releases often also come with deprecation notices and end of support notices for features that were previously available, and those might also have a huge impact on a deployment. That is also the case for VCF 9 / VVF 9, and they are highlighted in the Release Notes for VCF 9 under Product Support Notes.
A few of these warrant a closer look, and here are some examples that caught my attention.
vSphere#
ESX#
Deprecation of vSphere Auto Deploy
Auto Deploy via PXE is being deprecated and will be removed in a future release
Deprecation of legacy log file formatting and deprecation of vmware.log and vmsyslogd message formats
This one is interesting, especially since my colleage Espen Ødegaard posted Troubleshooting syslog from VMware ESXi 8 U2 IA and missing STRUCTURED-DATA using RFC5424-based syslog nearly two years ago. Hopefully the new logging format will adhere to the RFC.
Removal of the internal runtime option execInstalledOnly
Good! It was way to easy to turn off execInstalledOnly when logged into ESX, rendering the runtime option a bit useless. The runtime option is now removed, and the boot option is on by default. Andreas Olsson has a great article explaining what this is, and how it works: VMware ESXi 8.0 and execInstalledOnly – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
vCenter#
Deprecation of vSphere Virtual Volumes
This is a big one! vVols are being deprecated and will be removed in future releases. Support will continue for critical bug fixes only, and only in vSphere 8.x and VCF 5.2.
Deprecation of vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM)
VCF 9 does not use ELM to connect vCenters into a single sign-on domain. Support in v9 is only there to enable upgrades from existing environments to VCF 9, but in VCF 9 grouping in VCF Operations is the unified management method acress vCenters.
Deprecation of vSphere Host Profiles
Not really new, but worth noting. Host Profiles has been replaced by vSphere Configuration Profiles.
VMware Update Manager Download Service (UMDS) becomes part of the VMware Cloud Foundation Download Tool
UMDS has been moved into the VCF Download tool, and will no longer be a standalone tool.
Removal of vSphere Lifecycle Manager baselines
Also previously announced, vLCM Baselines (Legagy VUM workflows) are no longer supported, Image based configuration in vLCM is the way to go.
vSAN#
Deprecation of the hybrid configuration in vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA)
vSAN OSA Hybrid Mode has been deprecated, and it was about time too. I’ve not seen any hybrid implementations of vSAN the last 4 or 5 years, and the time for it has passed.
As mentioned, there are more notices in the official documentation. Make sure to read through those before starting to implement VCF/VVF9, so you don’t get any surprises moving forward.