In my last blog, I talked about new hardware for my lab Unboxing the MINIS FORUM MS-01 Mini PC. Below is a Build of Materials I’m using for the deployment of VCF 5.2.1
- 4 x MINIS FORUM MS-01 Mini PC
- Intel Core i9 13900H
- 8 x Crucial DDR5 5600 48GB SO-DIMM
- 2 per workstation equaling 96GB in each host
- Purchased these from Newegg
- 4 x Western Digital 1TB WD Blue SN550 NVMe M.2 2280
- 1 NVMe dedicated for ESXI OS, while overkill on size, I had some extra laying around.
- 8 x Samsung 990 EVO PLUS SSD, 2 in each MS-01
- Networking – Ubiquiti USW Aggregate Pro with Ubiquiti SFP+ cables
- 2 x10GB SFP+ cables plugged into each host
I’m not endorsed or paid by any of the companies mentioned in the BOM above. This is all experimental in my home lab please always refer to VMware by Broadcom best practices, validated designs, and check VMware Hardware Compatibility Guides.
Following the VCF 5.2.1 BOM (See Release Notes) I performed a clean ESXi install on each machine with ESXi 8.0 U3b-24280767. Minimal configurations, configure an NTP server and ensure service is started to Start/Stop with the host. I chose to not use SSH/SSL thumbprints however to overcome any SSL errors, it was helpful to regenerate certificates and restart services. Regenerate the Self-Signed Certificate on All Hosts.
Go through and fill out the vcf parameter workbook in detail and carefully, the specific version of the VCF Cloud Builder is 5.2.1-24307856. Ensure that your NTP server on the Cloud Builder appliance matches with what is in the workbook and is helpful on the hosts as it performs a check. Ensure you have all DNS entries for Forward & Reverse. I was running into some difficulties with deploying vSAN ESA, so this was an vSAN OSA deployment. I was striving for ESA but encountered several HCL check errors even though the parameter workbook specified a custom HCL. See William Lam’s blog here; Custom vSAN HCL JSON for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1 and vSAN ESA using Nested ESXi
I was able to stand up vSAN ESA with a standalone
The Cloud Builder Validation was successful other than an NTP drift on one of the hosts, the Warning does allow us to ‘Acknowledge’ and proceed.
…and we’re off to the races, you can toggle the status to monitor
We made it to the vCenter, it deployed it one of the hosts and now the vCenter is available to log in and monitor and you can find the cluster has been created and hosts added.
During deployment, I encountered the following error with ‘ Failed to install VMCA Certificate on SDDC Manager ‘ ….and it seems the fix was rebooting the vCenter. Then attempt the ‘Retry’ within Cloud Builder
Once it continued, all other tasks completed successfully and SDDC is ready to be launched.
Here is the Management Domain
Here are the 4 hosts in the Management Domain.
Here is the view from the vSphere Client
Launched NSX and verified connectivity
If you made it this far, hope you found this to be helpful.
