Technical Architecture From vSphere 8 to VCF 9.x Upgrade with No Spare Hosts : The Consolidated Domain Path with DR Strategy A practical guide to adopting VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 in a brownfield, two-site environment when dedicated management hardware is not an option. SB Sachin Bhardwaj Principal Architect · April 2026 The challenge Every customer who considers VCF 9 eventually hits the same question: where do I put the management VMs? The standard guidance calls for a dedicated management domain — a separate cluster of hosts running nothing but SDDC Manager, NSX, vCenter, and the VCF Operations stack. For a greenfield deployment that is straightforward. For a brownfield vSphere 8 environment at capacity, it is a capital expenditure problem that can stall an entire modernisation programme. The scenario this post addresses is deliberately constrained: a production vSphere 8 environment across two sites, no spare hosts , no NSX deployed,...