One of the major benefits of VCF on VxRail is the orchestration of the end-to-end life cycle of the entire hardware and software stack. This orchestration makes operating the data center fundamentally simpler by bringing the ease of integrated life cycle automation to the entire cloud infrastructure stack including hardware. The SDDC Manager orchestrates the end-to-end life-cycle process and is fully integrated with VxRail Manager for each VxRail cluster. The VxRail hardware and software life cycles are orchestrated from the SDDC Manager. VxRail Manager manages the underlying hardware, firmware, vSphere ESXi, and vSAN upgrade process for each VxRail cluster.

Figure 64.    VCF on VxRail LCM components

Credentials for a My VMware account and a Dell Support account must be provided for the LCM process to download the appropriate upgrade bundles. VMware and Dell Technologies validate updates and distribute them using native VCF and Dell VxRail upgrade bundles. Upon notification of the available update, the upgrade bundle must be manually downloaded and staged to SDDC Manager before starting the upgrade.

Note: The Mgmt WLD must be upgraded first. Upgrades cannot be applied to VxRail VI WLD before they are applied to the Mgmt WLD.