Protecting the Recovery Control Plane: A VCF 9.1 Management-Component Backup and Fleet DR Runbook

This article provides a comprehensive runbook for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 disaster recovery, emphasizing that protecting workload VMs is insufficient without safeguarding the management control plane. It outlines distinct backup mechanisms for components like SDDC Manager, vCenter, NSX, and VCF Operations, plus instance reconstruction and fleet DR. The operational objective is rebuilding a trustworthy recovery control plane in dependency order, preserving credentials, encryption, DNS, certificates, and documentation. It addresses common gaps like backup console availability and passphrase storage, making it essential for platform engineers designing resilient VCF recovery strategies.