VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 has been released

VCF 5.2 has been released today.

What’s New

• Support for Identity Federation with Entra ID: VCF users can now configure Microsoft Entra ID (formerly known as Azure AD) as an identity provider.
• APIs for Auditing PCI Compliance: VCF users can now use a new set of APIs that audit VCF configuration for compliance with 9 relevant PCI-DSS controls.
• vSAN Max support: vSAN Max is a disaggregated storage offering which enables petabyte scale storage-only clusters. vSAN Max is powered by ESA as the underlying storage platform, which is a high-performance file system that can scale up to high densities with no penalty to performance. ESA also provides other benefits such as built-in, efficient, scalable snapshots, and low overhead data services such as encryption and compression.
• vSAN ESA Stretched Cluster: VCF users can now configure ESA Stretched Cluster in vSAN Ready Nodes. It enables customers to take the concept of fault domains to protect an environment spanning two physical sites from downtime in the event of a site failure.
• VCF Import Tool (for vSphere & vSAN): The VCF Import Tool integrates existing vSphere environments into VMware Cloud Foundation, centralizing management and optimizing resources without needing a full rebuild. 
• Dual DPU Support: VCF users can now leverage Dual DPU support. Dual DPU support boosts availability and performance. Active/Standby ensures continuity against failures, while dual independent DPUs double offload capacity and provide isolation. 
• Avi Load Balancer Integration with VCF: VCF users can now deploy Avi (formerly NSX Advanced Load Balancer) as part of a new workload domain and perform password rotation and certificate management of the ALB infrastructure from SDDC Manager.
• Deploying NSX as a Day-N Operation: VCF users can now choose to deploy NSX (VLAN Backed) from SDDC Manager on top of a workload domain originally deployed/converted/imported with vSphere Networking. 
• Out of Band Changes from vCenter: Out of Band changes from vCenter can be manually synced with SDDC Manager. This includes inventory changes (for example, adding a host to a cluster) and object name changes (for example, datacenter name, datastore name, port group name).
• ESXi Live Patching : VCF users can now apply ESXi security patches without requiring VM evacuation on ESXi hosts.
• Flexible Target BOM for Upgrades: VCF users can now create a composite and customized BOM using patches when upgrading workload domains. Customers can plan an upgrade along with patches in one orchestrated workflow instead of performing an upgrade and applying patches in separate maintenance windows.
• Async Patching with SDDC Manager: Customers previously used the standalone Async Patch Tool to apply patches to the VCF BOM components. VCF 5.2 provides the ability to apply BOM component patches from the SDDC Manager UI.
• Day N workflows with Embedded Async Patching: VCF users can now add new workload domains and clusters with patched versions of individual BOM components from SDDC Manager.
• Asynchronous SDDC Manager Upgrades: VCF users can now upgrade SDDC Manager independently from the rest of the BOM to apply critical fixes, security patches, and to enable specific features related to SDDC Manager.
• Authenticated Proxy: VCF users can now  use proxy authentication from SDDC Manager to enable secure connectivity from SDDC Manager to the internet.
• Offline Depot: VCF users can now perform lifecycle bundle downloads in offline/air-gapped environments in a simplified manner. The offline depot downloads and stages VCF SDDC Manager and BOM component bundles and enables customers to configure SDDC Manager to download the bundles directly from the offline depot.
• Isolated Workload Domains Sharing NSX: VCF users can now create and manage isolated workload domains that can share an NSX Manager instance between them. 
• Language support: Beginning with the next major release, VCF will be supporting the following localization languages:
  • English
  • Japanese
  • Spanish
  • French

VMware Cloud Foundation Bill of Materials (BOM)

Upgrade Information – Upgrading to Cloud Foundation 5.2

NOTE 1: Before you upgrade a vCenter Server, take a file-based backup. See Manually Back Up vCenter Server.
NOTE 2: Read through the issues and understand them.

You can perform a sequential or skip-level upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 from VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5.0 or later. If your environment is at a version earlier than 4.5.0, you must upgrade the management domain and all VI workload domains to VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5.0 or above and then upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2. For more information see VMware Cloud Foundation Lifecycle Management.

Known Issues

Resolved Issues
VCF Known Issues
Upgrade Known Issues
Bring-up Known Issues
SDDC Manager Known Issues
Workload Domain Known Issues