VCF 5.1.1 Release with VMware Private AI Foundation NVIDIA

March 26th 2024 marks an exciting milestone for VMware as it unveils the VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.1 release, introducing groundbreaking support for VMware Private AI Foundation in collaboration with NVIDIA. This release signifies a significant leap forward in the realm of virtualization, catering specifically to the burgeoning demands of artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

Managing licenses for various components within a software ecosystem can be a daunting task for IT administrators. The complexity increases as organizations scale up their infrastructure, often leading to administrative overhead and potential licensing discrepancies. Recognizing these challenges, VMware is excited to announce the release of VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.1, which introduces a game-changing enhancement in license management single license key at the offering level except for vSAN (TiB license). The introduction of License Later Mode further enhances the flexibility of VMware Cloud Foundation, particularly for customers in the evaluation phase. During the 60-day evaluation period, organizations can now fully deploy VMware Cloud Foundation components without immediately entering license information. This means that customers can explore and test the platform's capabilities comprehensively before committing to a full license deployment.

Some key Deprecation Notes :

Starting with VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1, Configuration Drift Bundles are no longer needed as part of the upgrade process and are now deprecated.
The Composable Infrastructure feature is deprecated in VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1 and will be removed in a future release.
In a future release, the "Connect Workload Domains" option from the VMware Aria Operations card located in SDDC Manager > Administration > Aria Suite section will be removed and related VCF Public API options will be deprecated
Starting with VMware Aria Operations 8.10, functionality for connecting VCF Workload Domains to VMware Aria Operations is available directly from the UI. Users are encouraged to use this method within the VMware Aria Operations UI for connecting VCF workload domains, even if the integration was originally set up using SDDC Manager.

The Following is a list of all the components and their versions as per *VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.1**:(BOM)*

Software Component	Version	Date	Build Number
Cloud Builder VM	5.1.1	26 MAR 2024	23480823
SDDC Manager	5.1.1	26 MAR 2024	23480823
VMware vCenter Server Appliance	8.0 Update 2b	29 FEB 2024	23319993
VMware ESXi	8.0 Update 2b	29 FEB 2024	23305546
VMware vSAN Witness Appliance	8.0 Update 2	21 SEP 2023	22443122
VMware NSX	4.1.2.3	12 MAR 2024	23382408
VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle	8.16	29 FEB 2024	23377566