Some people might wonder why Cloud Foundation is not supporting the latest, greatest vSAN releases. Here is a question I received:
You might be looking for the latest vSphere 6.7 features, but Cloud Foundation currently only supports vSphere 6.5 U2. You may need to buy extra hardware (e.g. 6.5 is slower), and you can't use the new HTML interface yet, etc.
Do you know if the Cloud Foundation team have a plan to get more current with releases? A couple of months after release I can just about understand, but more than that just isn't ideal... I don't want to have a nuanced conversation where I'm talking about one product, then saying 'but if you consume it this way it's different'.
There will always be a time lag between the latest and greatest brand new VMware software releases and what you find included in Cloud Foundation.This is because we do very extensive interoperability testing between all included components from vSphere, vSAN, NSX to the vRealize Suite. Installation, configuration, patching, upgrading, all has to work flawless before we include this in Cloud Foundation. Sometimes the individual components are not compatible with each other, and you will not see this if you only have a subset of components in your data center.
This is why the coming Cloud Foundation 3.0 release supports vSphere 6.5 U2 and not vSphere 6.7. yet. For your refererence, here is the software BOM for the coming Cloud Foundation 3.0 release which had been announced during VMworld 2018:
- ESXi/PSC/vCenter Server/vSAN 6.5 EP7/U2b
- NSX 6.4.1
- Log Insight 4.6.1
- vRealize Operations 6.7
- vRealize Automation 7.4
- vRealize Suite Lifecycle Management 1.2
The goal is to have the time gap of new releases down to 1-3 months, right now it is longer in some cases. Note that urgent patches or security bug fixes get published for Cloud Foundation within a few days, so there is no time lag here. If you really need the very latest releases then you can use them stand-alone. Cloud Foundation is designed for customers who find the automation of resource provisioning and automation of lifecycle management more important. You chose based on your priorities.
