Comprehensive and Detailed 150 to 250 words of Explanation From VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Automation/Course Guide/topics:
Hard tenancy establishes an infrastructure boundary by allocating dedicated physical or virtual infrastructure capacity to an individual tenant or Organization. In VCF, this can be implemented by assigning the tenant a dedicated cluster, a dedicated workload domain, or—in the strongest isolation model—a dedicated VCF instance. The tenant’s workloads therefore do not consume compute capacity from the same cluster-level resource pool as unrelated tenants.
Physical separation strengthens security, performance predictability, and compliance. It reduces the risk of resource contention and limits the impact of infrastructure, administrative, or security failures occurring in another tenant environment. Dedicated workload domains can also provide separate vCenter Server, networking, storage, lifecycle, and identity boundaries, depending on the selected tenancy model.
Shared infrastructure combined with NSX projects, VPCs, quotas, RBAC, and policy controls represents logical or soft tenancy. That model improves utilization and reduces cost, but the underlying compute infrastructure remains shared. Similarly, allocating compute from a common pool through VCF Operations does not establish a hard-tenancy boundary. Consequently, dedicated workload infrastructure and physical separation are the two defining characteristics required for regulated Organizations that cannot share their execution environment.
References/topics: Networking and Hard Tenancy in VCF Automation ; Centralized Management with Dedicated Workload Domains .
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