Broadcom is about to release a brand-new instructor-led course: What's New in VMware Cloud Foundation [v9.1]. I've had the chance to review the course materials, and this is not your typical two-day delta class — it's a full five-day, deeply technical program covering everything that changed between VCF 9.0 and 9.1, backed by no fewer than 36 hands-on and simulation labs. The course will be available shortly, and I'll be scheduling delivery dates soon. Here's what you can expect.
Course at a Glance
The curriculum is built around eleven modules that follow the full VCF stack: installer and deployment, operations and licensing, compute, storage, networking, fleet and lifecycle management, upgrade pathways, automation, vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), and VCF Operations. Roughly a third of classroom time is spent in the lab environment, working directly against a live VCF 9.1 fleet. The course targets system administrators, solution engineers, consultants, architects, and support personnel with working knowledge of VCF, vSphere, NSX, and vSAN. It also fits neatly into the path towards the upcoming VCP-VCF 9.1 Administrator certification.
Day 1 — Installer, Operations Console, Compute, and Storage
The week opens with the VCF Installer enhancements: the updated component architecture, deployment and import workflows for existing environments, custom and dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6) network configurations, and the new handling of management services and credentials. Lab 1 walks through a complete VCF deployment with the VCF Installer.
Next up is the redesigned VCF Operations console, including a side-by-side comparison of VCF 9.0 versus 9.1 licensing and the options for connected and air-gapped deployments. The compute module then digs into the vCenter, ESX, and vSphere resource enhancements — think memory tiering, CPU optimizations, virtual machine improvements, certificate management improvements, and the latest API additions.
Day 1 closes with storage, and there's a lot to cover:
- vSAN ESA Auto-RAID — automatic RAID-level selection and reconfiguration, validated in a dedicated lab where you add hosts and watch component placement change.
- vSAN data services, file service updates, and stretched cluster enhancements.
- vSAN disaggregated storage — deploying vSAN compute clusters that consume remote vSAN capacity, including converting one to a stretched compute cluster.
Day 2 — Data Protection and a Full Day of NSX Networking
Day 2 starts with vSAN protection and recovery: tag-based protection groups, and a lab where you deliberately delete a VM and recover it. Then the course shifts to what is arguably the most technical part of the week: the VCF networking module.
This module covers the new VPC consumption model directly from vCenter, platform and management enhancements, and a deep treatment of both Distributed and Centralized Transit Gateways. The labs are where it gets serious:
- Deploying a VNA cluster through vCenter.
- Configuring and validating VLAN extension to VPC subnets, including distributed VLAN extension connections in NSX projects and VLAN port groups on the VDS.
- Deploying a VCF Route Controller cluster and verifying its status.
- Configuring EVPN VXLAN support for the Distributed Transit Gateway — MP-BGP on the route controller, distributed VXLAN connections, and end-to-end validation via both UI and CLI.
- Advanced Centralized Transit Gateway connectivity: additional external connections per tenant project, provider SNAT, and advertising private Transit Gateway IP blocks.
Day 3 — Networking Wrap-Up, Fleet Management, and Upgrade Pathways
After a lab on dynamic BGP peering (static-to-dynamic and dynamic-to-static neighbor configurations) and a lesson on VPC service enhancements, the focus moves to fleet and lifecycle management. Highlights include creating workload domains without a vSphere cluster, the VCF management services architecture and its high-availability mechanisms, out-of-band validation enhancements, identity and access improvements, and cluster-level configuration drift detection. A fleet management lab covers password policies, bulk certificate signing requests, VCF roles, and the identity broker.
The upgrade pathways module is one I expect a lot of interest in: it maps out every supported route to 9.1 — upgrading existing VCF environments, moving from plain vSphere into VCF, and converting VVF deployments to full VCF.
Days 3–4 — VCF Automation
The automation module spans two days and reflects how much this layer has grown. Topics include scalability enhancements, organization management, multi-supervisor region quotas, networking and blueprint enhancements, the container service, and the Cloud Director migration path. The lab list speaks for itself:
- Creating region quotas backed by multiple Supervisors and validating multi-supervisor namespace behavior.
- Project content libraries with image promotion between projects.
- Infrastructure policies built on vSphere tags and compute policies.
- Third-party integrations: Infoblox for IPAM and Avi Load Balancer for organization networks.
- Namespace self-service via CLI, deploying namespaces from blueprints, and — new in 9.1 — capturing an existing namespace as a reusable blueprint.
- Deploying and scaling containers with the Container Service, verified down to the pod level in vCenter.
Days 4–5 — vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS)
The VKS module covers the enhanced Supervisor architecture with multi-cluster zones, DTGW support for the Supervisor, and VM Service enhancements. The multi-network capabilities get particular attention: selecting your CNI (for example Calico) through the bootstrapAddons ClusterClass variable, building multi-NIC cluster nodes with parent/child subnets and VLAN extension bindings, and creating multi-NIC pods using IPPool and NetworkAttachmentDefinition custom resources with Antrea feature gates.
Node customization is also new: labs cover enabling AppArmor profiles and custom TuneD profiles on VKS cluster nodes, and there's a lesson on building your own RHEL-9 VKr images with the VCF CLI using Image Baker, plus supported upgrade paths and guardrails.
Day 5 — VCF Operations
The final module ties it all together on the operations side. VCF Health and Findings give you proactive issue detection across the private cloud. The new Real-Time Metrics component — deployed in its own lab — feeds custom dashboards with PromQL viewer, Object List, and Top-N widgets. Log Management gets a dedicated architecture lesson and a hands-on lab covering log collection, event creation, and query-based analysis. The course wraps up with automated VKS cluster monitoring, capacity optimization (rightsizing exclusions and storage-aware workload optimization), memory tiering recommendations, cost and price management, and VCF security and compliance.
Prerequisites and Certification
You'll want working experience with VCF, vSphere, NSX, and vSAN before attending — this class moves fast and assumes you know the 9.0 platform. The course aligns with the VCP-VCF 9.1 Administrator certification, which is expected to be released alongside the updated curriculum.
