What’s new in VCF Operations: key features and benefits

One of the standout features in VCF Operations is the ability to build fully custom dashboards.  These make it easy to surface the exact metrics you need, helping teams monitor performance and spot issues faster. 

vSphere dashboards 

You can create vSphere dashboards that provide real–time insight into key operational metrics, including:

• Inventory statistics 
• Guest VM CPU, memory and disk usage in real time 
• Host CPU and memory 
• Datastore capacity 
• CPU overcommit 
• Snapshots 
• Cluster time remaining 
• Networking usage 
• VM Capacity over time 
• Overall environment health

vSAN dashboards

vSphere Standard remains VMware’s trusted hypervisor for basic server virtualisation. It’s ideal for development, testing, and smaller production environments. With vSphere Standard, you get: 

• Essential features for virtualising physical servers 
• Tools to manage virtual machines efficiently 
• High availability and reliability for your workloads 

VM dashboards

You can also build VM-specific dashboards that focus on performance and resource usage in 5-minute intervals.

These dashboards allow you to select a powered-on VM from the list and instantly view detailed data across multiple widgets, such as:

• CPU usage 
• Memory usage 
• Disk usage 
• Disk latency 
• Network usage 
• VM properties 

Diagnostic findings

VCF Operations includes built‑in diagnostic and best-practice findings, helping you quickly identify risks, misconfigurations or areas for improvement across your environment.

Each finding includes a clear explanation of why it was triggered…

…as well as recommended remediation guidance.

This makes it much easier to maintain a healthy, compliant and well configured environment. 

Automated snapshot clean-up 

Stale or forgotten snapshots are a common cause of performance issues and, in some cases VM corruption.  VCF Operations can automatically detect and remove old snapshots based on your chosen policy.

For example, you can schedule daily checks and automatically remove any snapshot older than 28 days. Exclusions and filters are available if needed, allowing you to tailor the process to specific VMs or workloads.

Full lifecycle management 

VCF Operations provides centralised lifecycle management for all VCF appliances, enabling you to manage both your VCF management domain… 

and your VCF workload domains,

Centralised licensing 

Another useful capability is centralised license management. Instead of applying licenses to each product individually, you can onboard your workload domains into a VCF instance in VCF Operations.  Licences are then automatically pulled from the central pool and applied where needed, helping maintain consistency and saving valuable admin time.