Introduction:
VMware Validated Designs are a collection of comprehensive end-to-end design guides that serve as a blueprint for a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) implementation.
VMware Validated Designs have been discontinued, are retained as a historical reference, and have evolved into VMware Cloud Foundation Designs.
To better understand what this means from an NSX perspective, it’s import to first understand the close relationship between VMware reference architectures and VMware Cloud Foundation.
VMware Cloud Foundation:
VMware Cloud Foundation is a cloud infrastructure platform that delivers a set of software defined services for compute, storage, networking, security, and cloud management in both private or public environments.
Each version of VMware Cloud Foundation has a corresponding reference architecture and versions of its constituent products, including NSX. These designs can be used as reference guides without actually implementing VMware Cloud Foundation.
From this table, notice that VMware Validated Designs have been replaced by VMware Cloud Foundation Designs:
| Cloud Foundation Major Release | Reference Architecture Name and Version | NSX Version |
| 5.0 | VMware Cloud Foundation Design 5.0 | NSX 4.1.0.2 |
| 4.5 | VMware Cloud Foundation Design 4.5 | NSX-T 3.2.1.2 |
| 4.4 | VMware Cloud Foundation Design 4.4 | NSX-T 3.1.3.5 |
| 4.3 | VMware Cloud Foundation Design 4.3 | NSX-T 3.1.3 |
| 4.2 | VMware Validated Design 6.2 | NSX-T 3.1.0 |
| 4.1 | VMware Validated Design 6.1 | NSX-T 3.0.2 |
| 4.0 | VMware Validated Design 6.0 | NSX-T 3.0 |
| 3.11 | VMware Validated Design 5.1 | NSX-T 3.0.3.1 NSX-V 6.4.12 |
For additional information correlating VMware Cloud Foundation versioning, reference the following VMware Knowledge Base article: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52520.
Design Reference Comparison:
To get a better idea what this change means, let’s compare a VMware Validated Design with the newer VMware Cloud Foundation Design, say for the NSX Management cluster deployment recommendation.
VMware Validated Designs, version 6.2, the Architecture and Design for the Management Domain is as follows, three NSX Manager nodes with an internal virtual IP (VIP) address for high availability:
VMware Cloud Foundation Design, version 4.5, NSX-T Data Center Design for the Management Domain, design is the same, three NSX Manager nodes with an internal virtual IP (VIP) address for high availability:
Based on this simple comparison, you can see how close the documents actually are.
In Summary:
- Each version of VMware Cloud Foundation has a corresponding reference architecture and versions of its constituent products, including NSX.
- These designs can be used as reference guides without actually implementing VMware Cloud Foundation.
- VMware Validated Designs have evolved into VMware Cloud Foundation Designs.
- You can think of this more of as a nomenclature change, since as in this example, the design recommendations remain unchanged
- In this example the recommendation is to deploy three NSX Manager nodes with an internal virtual IP (VIP) address for high availability.