VCF Operations Maintenance Mode vs vSphere/ESX Maintenance Mode

I see this question a lot: what's the difference between VCF Operations Maintenance Mode and vSphere/ESX Maintenance Mode? In short:

• VCF Operations Maintenance Mode puts the Operations Object into Maintenance as indicated by the Collection State of the Object which can be found in Infrastructure Operations - Configurations - Inventory Management - Collection States. When an Operations Object goes into Maintenance, Operations stops collecting data from it and stops generating Alerts against it.

• vSphere/ESX Maintenance Mode puts the ESX Host into Maintenance as indicated in vCenter. When an ESX Host goes into Maintenance, it also is reflected in VCF Operations by the Runtime - Maintenance State property. VCF Operations still collects data from objects in vSphere Maintenance and Alerts will still be generated against them.

In practice it looks like this, here's an ESX Host in Maintenance in vCenter.

Maintenance Mode is indicated in the UI and as you can see it's got no VMs on it. This ESX Host shows like this in VCF Operations. Screenshots here are taken from VCF Operations 9.0.2.

Notice the inMaintenance value of the Maintenance State property, yet data is still being collected against it.

For more information on VCF Operations Maintenance Mode see these blogs:

• Using Maintenance Mode in Aria Operations

• Ways to Limit what VCF Operations is Collecting

Hope this was helpful, enjoy!