VCF Upgrade Field Guide: Planning the Maintenance Move

This article provides a detailed field guide for upgrading VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) from version 9.0 to 9.0.1, focusing on the planning and validation required for a maintenance release. It emphasizes that even incremental upgrades require discipline due to the composed nature of VCF, involving fleet-level components, SDDC Manager, NSX, vCenter, ESX hosts, and more. The guide covers scope assumptions, prerequisites like healthy management domains and DNS/NTP dependencies, and why maintenance releases matter for stability and lifecycle management. It aims to help teams avoid treating the upgrade as a casual patch by validating readiness before prechecks and creating a solid change plan.