VCF 9.1 what’s new: release date, builds, component changes, licensing and upgrade paths

VCF 9.1 release date, build numbers and the main changes

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 was released on 12 May 2026, according to Broadcom’s release notes and KB 314608. Its bill of materials lists ESX 9.1.0.0 as build 25370933, vCenter 9.1.0.0 as build 25370922, NSX 9.1.0.0 as build 25318225 and the VCF Installer and SDDC Manager as build 25371088. The maintenance release 9.1.1 followed on 3 September 2026, with ESX build 25714478 and vCenter build 25712839, and Broadcom published patches for 9.1.1 components on 12 October 2026. The release notes, last updated on 15 October 2026, say: “Use the latest available binaries for components when you deploy, upgrade, and patch.”

For an estate of 10 to 60 hosts, five changes carry the most weight. Licences move to a licence server managed through VCF Operations. Live patching now works on ESX hosts with a TPM, for up to 80% of patches by Broadcom’s count, and vCenter gets quick patches with short downtime. Memory Tiering over NVMe can be configured without a host reboot, and vSAN ESA adds global deduplication with RAID-6 as its default. Lifecycle management moves into VCF Operations, and USB and SD boot, unencrypted syslog to vCenter on port 514 and vCLS are deprecated or switched off.

Broadcom TechDocs, VCF 9.1.0 release notes: What’s New and its component pages (updated 12 and 15 October 2026) and Product Support Notes (15 October 2026).

vSphere 9.1 and ESX 9.1: hosts, memory and vMotion

Broadcom’s What’s New page lists live patching for ESX on TPM-enabled hosts, “covering up to 80% of patches”. The patch is applied to the running kernel memory while the VMs keep running. Broadcom’s VCF blog post of 12 May 2026 adds that live patch is “enabled by default on all clusters” and that a patch which cannot be applied live falls back to maintenance mode and a reboot.

Zero Touch Provisioning installs ESX on bare-metal servers through a secure UEFI and HTTPS network boot. Broadcom calls it “a forward-looking replacement for legacy Auto Deploy, which is deprecated in VCF 9.0”.

Memory Tiering keeps active pages in DRAM and moves cold pages to local NVMe. In ESX 9.1, enabling it and selecting the device no longer require a host reboot, limitations on the VM types that can power on in a tiered host are removed, and a second NVMe device can mirror the tier in RAID 1. Requirements, ratios and sizing are in our guide to vSphere Memory Tiering with NVMe.

User-Level Monitor becomes “the default monitor for all virtual machines”, and AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX for confidential VMs reach general availability. For DRS and vMotion, Broadcom lists a non-disruptive maintenance mode, which per the same blog post evacuates a VM only when the destination hosts can meet its current compute demand, and dynamic concurrency control that goes beyond the static cluster-wide limit of eight concurrent migrations.

vCenter 9.1 and vSphere Lifecycle Manager

vCenter quick patches upgrade vCenter “with zero to 5 minutes of downtime”, per the TechDocs page. Broadcom’s blog speaks of under one minute, so plan windows on the TechDocs figure. File integrity monitoring is on by default and runs every four hours, and a logs agent that sends to VCF Operations comes pre-installed.

vSphere Lifecycle Manager adds global remediation settings, which set how hosts and VMs behave before and during the remediation of a cluster, and it validates the integrity of customised ESX images. The support notes block the unencrypted syslog port 514 (UDP and TCP) on vCenter, so any device or script that still sends syslog to vCenter on port 514 moves to the TLS-encrypted port 1514 before the upgrade. vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) “is deactivated by default and you cannot re-activate the capability”, and its functions are removed from the SDDC Manager and VCF Installer interfaces.

vSAN 9.1 and NSX 9.1

In vSAN ESA, “vSAN clusters use RAID-6 as the default RAID level” under Auto-RAID. Global deduplication arrives as a cluster-wide, post-processing setting with encryption support. A whole site of a stretched cluster can now go into maintenance mode. vSAN replication accepts VMs on any storage as the source, with vSAN ESA as the target.

NSX 9.1 introduces the Virtual Network Appliance and a series of VPC features, among them load balancing on that appliance and IPsec VPN on a centralised transit gateway. The management domain can share its NSX Managers with workload domains. Edge clusters are now upgraded at the end of the domain upgrade sequence, which Broadcom describes as consolidated maintenance windows for NSX and vSphere. NSX 9.1 does not support IPFIX on distributed switch uplink port groups, which vCenter 9.1 deprecates.

VCF Operations, fleet lifecycle and recovery

In VCF 9.1, “the standalone VCF Operations Fleet Management Appliance no longer exists”, and lifecycle runs as fleet lifecycle inside VCF Operations. A cluster upgrade can now target selected hosts instead of the whole cluster, and standalone hosts and single-host clusters come under lifecycle management.

Security Posture Management replaces the deprecated Compliance feature. The support notes also state that “direct vCenter authentication for VCF Operations has been removed”, and API authentication with vCenter credentials goes with it, so teams and scripts that log in to VCF Operations with vCenter accounts need another identity source before the upgrade. For recovery, the What’s New page lists “Integrated cyber recovery to on-premises VCF isolated clean rooms”, and the bill of materials lists Protection and Recovery 9.1.0.0 among the VCF services with “Add-on” in its column for inclusion in the VCF SKU, so check the subscription before you plan for it.

VCF 9.1 licensing: the licence server and connected mode

The VCF Operations page of the release notes says: “Your licenses are now stored in a license server, instead of in VCF Operations”. Broadcom’s licence server overview, updated on 12 October 2026, says a licence server “is deployed during new VCF or vSphere Foundation deployments, and during upgrades to version 9.1 and later”, and that most VCF Operations instances need only one. A licence server cannot be shared between fleets, and its network path needs a latency of 300 ms or less. During an outage, running workloads and management operations continue until the next usage report is due, but licences cannot be assigned.

Before assets can be licensed, VCF Operations and a licence server are registered with the VCF Business Services console. In connected mode, which Broadcom recommends, VCF Operations downloads a new licence file every 24 hours. In disconnected mode an administrator generates a usage file and uploads it. Broadcom’s licensing overview requires usage reports “at least once every 180 days to maintain your licenses”. A licence whose usage is not reported and which is not refreshed expires, and 90 days later ESX hosts disconnect from vCenter and workloads cannot be started, while running workloads are not stopped. Licences can now be assigned to individual assets as overrides of the vCenter licence, and usage of ESX 8.x and 9.x hosts is reported together. What VVF and VCF each include, and how override licences mix the two, is in our comparison of VVF and VCF 9.1.

Our licence optimisation matches editions and subscriptions to your actual workloads, within Broadcom’s current licensing logic. Write to us with your vCenter instances and subscription end date, and say whether VCF Operations runs in connected mode today.

Upgrade paths to VCF 9.1 from 9.0, 5.2 and vSphere 8

VCF 5.2.x and 9.0.x upgrade in place, starting with the VCF instance that hosts VCF Operations, with VCF Operations before SDDC Manager. From 5.2.x the upgrade can be sequential or skip-level, while an estate on an earlier VCF version first brings its management domain and all workload domains to 5.2.x. Workload domains can follow later as a Day-N procedure. vSphere 8 estates converge, import or upgrade component by component, as our step-by-step guide to upgrading vSphere 8 to VCF 9 explains.

Release dates also limit the target. Broadcom supports an upgrade only to “a target version that is released after the release date of your current version”, and its own example rules out VCF 5.2.4, released on 27 May 2026, to 9.1.0. For vSphere 8, KB 450972 supports upgrade, converge and import to 9.1.0 from 8.0 U3 to U3i, and only import from U3j and U3k. KB 448135 says VCF 9.1.1.0 “has been released with an updated Bill of Materials (BOM)”, which resolves the block for vCenter and ESXi 8.0 U3j and later and for NSX 4.2.4 and later. The release date rule still applies to any 8.0 patch released after 9.1.1 on 3 September 2026. The vCenter 8.0 U3k release notes (29 July 2026, updated 16 September 2026) still say the forward path to 9.1.x “will be available in a future 9.1.x release”, so confirm U3k sources in the Interoperability Matrix.

Broadcom TechDocs VCF 9.1: Upgrading VMware Cloud Foundation and VCF 9.1.1 release notes (both updated 15 October 2026); KB 450972 and KB 448135 (no date shown, read on 16 October 2026).

Checks before you upgrade to VCF 9.1

The order below is ours; each step rests on the Broadcom documents above.

1. List every vCenter, ESX host, NSX Manager and VCF Operations instance with its build, and map each build to its release date with KB 314608 and the bill of materials.
2. Check each source and target pair in the Broadcom Interoperability Matrix with “Hide Patch Releases” unchecked, as KB 448135 asks.
3. Check the hosts against the ESX 9.1 hardware requirements; USB and SD boot devices and system storage under 32 GB are deprecated for removal in the next major release, as our ESX 9 hardware requirements guide sets out.
4. Find what sends syslog to vCenter on port 514, who logs in to VCF Operations with vCenter accounts, and scripts that call APIs removed in 9.1, such as the vStats APIs and the NSX logical MP API for port mirroring.
5. Plan the licence server, its registration in the VCF Business Services console and the connected or disconnected mode before the first maintenance window.
6. Choose 9.1.1 or a later patch where the source allows it, since Broadcom asks for the latest available binaries, and record the end of general support of the release you land on, using the dates in our vSphere 9 end of support guide.

Our VMware optimisation service runs version updates of vSphere, vSAN, NSX and VCF in agreed maintenance windows with a rollback plan. Send us the builds each vCenter and cluster runs through the form below, with the open points from this list.

What we do

Under VMware optimisation, Eurokommerz holds the contract and the engineering is by our partner Vixen.UNO. The estate and licence audit takes a full inventory of your VMware estate, with versions, subscriptions and actual resource usage, and the technical assessment ends in an action plan ahead of renewal and end of support, with dates. The modernisation of vSphere, vSAN, NSX and VCF to 9.1 then runs in agreed maintenance windows, step by step, with a rollback plan at every stage, followed by support under an agreed SLA. The first call is free of charge, and the price of the technical assessment is fixed before work begins.

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