Recently Broadcom announced the release of VMware Cloud Foundation 9, this is not just vSphere alone, but your own modern private cloud giving you capabilities, to build, operate, consume & protect. To learn more about this news, please read about it on VMware’s blog here.
If you’ve followed any of my previous personal blog articles, it’s been using installing VCF 5.2 on my MINIS FORUM MS-01, today I will be deploying VCF 9 on those same systems using the VMware Cloud Foundation Installer.
I’ve already installed ESXi 9.0 on my 4 nodes, loaded William Lam’s vSAN ESA mock vib, (see William Lam’s Blog) and some prerequisite configurations on the hosts, which can be found here.
To start reading about the VCF Installer, check out the; What is the VMware Cloud Foundation Installer?
After the SDDC Manager Appliance is deployed, (I deployed mine on a VMFS datastore on ESX01 host and configured the ‘VM_Network’ portgroup with the vlan for the appliance.
The first thing I will do is plug in my token and
From the top-left corner, check out ‘Settings’, I will make some personal preferences here and ‘Save’
Configuring ‘Download Binaries’, click on ‘DEPOT SETTINGS AND BINARY MANAGEMENT’ and then to connect to an online depot, click ‘Configure’
Input your download token generated from the Broadcom Portal and click ‘Authenticate’.
Upon successful authentication, you will find Binary Management below it will load and you will have the options to begin downloading binaries.
You can see here binaries will change toggling between VMware Cloud Foundation or VMware vSphere Foundation, select the checkbox next to the product you plan on deploying and click the ‘Download’ button.
After some time, donwloads completed successfully and will move on to Deployment Wizard.
You can see we have binaries downloaded for either VCF or VVF. From here, I will select VCF deployment wizard
I will be deploying a new VCF Fleet (please read and familiarize yourself with this term as it will be used more often)
The next step (not shown here) is if you have an existing vCenter or VCF Operations environment that is being imported, this part I would love to test out later on.
For General Information, I will fill out required information, being I’m limited on resources in a lab, I will perform ‘Simple’ which deploys appliances in non-High Availability.
Filling out details and sizing for VCF Operations
For Step 4, I will elect to skip VCF Automation, this is due to resource constraints, also notice the graphic on the right, it’s changing as you go through the steps.
Fill out vCenter details
NSX appliance, because this is only a single node, I provided an FQDN for cluster VIP and for my first NSX node in the event I expand in the future.
For storage you can see you have several options as primary storage, I will be leveraging vSAN, and also vSAN Architecture ESA is default, however you can select OSA from the drop down menu.
Input your password for your ESXi hosts, add additional hosts if needed (by default 3 prompts appear), click ‘Add’ first and then click ‘CONFIRM ALL FINGERPRINTS’
This is what a successful confirmation should look like
The next configuration step defining Networks for ESXi Management, VM Management, vMotion & vSAN netwroks.
For Distributed Switch, I selected Default, initially I had 2 active NICs but that does generate some validation errors, so I was able to change it back to 1.
At the bottom of the switch configuration, this is where you define the NSX Transport Zone. To read more about Transport Zones, check Broadcom Docs ‘Create Transport Zones‘
The final step is confirming password for the SDDC Manager appliance
For the Review, you can check the settings inputted, review the configuration in JSON and download the JSON file as well.
For the final ‘Warning’ messages will allow you to Acknowledge but proceed. Not entirely sure why those messages are appearing, I’ve encountered success through those checks in the past. (I happen to switch the theme as part of a demo).
Click ‘Deploy’ and we’re off to the races.
Everything came back successfully deployed, we have options to review all passwords configured and links to launch VCF Operations.
A quick tour…VCF Operations
The Cluster object view of vSphere
Logging into NSX we can see the node and cluster VIP was configured
I hope the steps help you with your journey on deploying VCF, please continue reference Broadcom documentation, any professional services from a partner and Broadcom support.
