This post is a followup article to VCF Operations 9 with vSphere 8 for smaller shops ready to make the jump to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9. A high-level overview is provided here. This article is not step-by-step instructions. See the VCF documentation for detailed guidance. The assumption from a licensing perspective is that your organization purchased a VCF subscription.
Prerequisites
You must upgrade vCenter from version 8 to 9 prior to deploying VCF. The ESX hosts can remain on 8. The steps for upgrading vCenter are similar to the past few versions. Guidance on upgrading vCenter can be found here: vCenter Upgrade.
Your vCenter and hosts will also need to be using a Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS). Otherwise, you will see messages like the screen shot below when you get to the Validate & Deploy step in the VCF Installer deployment wizard. See Migrating from Standard to Distributed vSwitch for guidance, if needed.
VCF Installer
Begin by deploying the VMware Cloud Foundation Installer virtual appliance from the OVA file. The OVA can be downloaded from the Broadcom Support Portal. Perhaps the easiest way to find the VCF downloads is to click Downloads in the left column and enter "foundation" in the Search Product Name field. The item you need will look like this: VCF-SDDC-Manager-Appliance-x.x.x.x.xxxxxxxx.ova where the x's are a specific version number. Why is it not named VCF-Installer? The Installer appliance becomes the SDDC Manager appliance after installation. Note that you will need to have an IP address, DNS record, etc. set aside for use with this appliance just like most other VMware virtual appliance deployments.
After the appliance is deployed, point your web browser to the appliance FQDN or IP address and log in with the admin@local password you provided during deployment. One of the first things you will need to do is configure a depot connection to enable downloads. The easiest method is an online depot using your download token. For those in air-gapped/disconnected environments, an offline depot can be set up.
Ensure you have IP addresses, DNS records, NTP settings, etc. for the other appliances that will be deployed as part of VCF.
- Fleet Management appliance
- Operations Collector appliance
- NSX virtual IP (VIP)
- NSX Manager appliance
Download the components you will be using in Depot Settings. In my example below, I am not deploying VCF Automation at this time so it is not selected. I already upgraded vCenter to 9.0.2 so that component is not needed.
Wait until all of the components you are downloading have a "Success" status before proceeding.
In the Deploy section, click Deployment Wizard and select VMware Cloud Foundation. Next, choose the "Deploy a new VCF fleet" radio button and click Continue. We will use existing VCF Operations and vCenter components.
Complete the General Information step as desired. Select the "Standard (Single-node)" radio button to minimize the resource consumption of the VCF management appliances.
In the next step, you will specify your existing VCF Operations instance. VCF requires two additional operations appliances: Fleet Management Appliance and Operations Collector Appliance. Provide the FQDNs and passwords for these components.
VCF Automation deployment is optional. It can be deployed later, if needed.
Next, you will enter the details for your existing vCenter instance. As mentioned previously, you must be running vCenter 9.
NSX Manager is deployed as part of VCF regardless of whether you plan to use NSX overlay capabilities. I chose to keep with a VLAN-backed configuration as shown in the screen shot below. Note that you will need two FQDNs and IP addresses for NSX.
The VCF Installer becomes SDDC Manager as part of the installation process. We simply need a password for SDDC Manager.
Ensure all of the validations succeeded. If not, remediate all issues and re-run the validation until all show a Succeeded status.
Then click Deploy, grab some popcorn, and watch as the VCF Installer converts the environment from vSphere with VCF Operations to VCF.
