VCF 9 Installer Validation Found Less Than Two Uplinks For The DVS

Installing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 in a lab often means using less than ideal hardware configurations. In my case, I have ASUS Intel NUCs that have only one physical NIC for an uplink. Recommendations dictate you should have at least two for redundancy and the VCF Installer checks this. If you have less than two uplinks, VCF Installer will block the deployment. There is a way around this and it is simple.

Cross vCenter vMotion with Different Distributed Switch Versions

Cross vCenter vMotion enables live VM migrations from one vCenter environment to another. This prevents downtime when migrating between these two separate environments. An example use case is moving workloads from a vCenter 8U3 environment to a new VCF (vCenter) 9 deployment. However, by default, vMotion does not allow live migration of VMs across different virtual distributed switch (VDS) versions. There is a workaround.

Introduction to VMware vSAN Data Protection

VMware vSAN Data Protection, introduced in vSphere 8.0 Update 3, is a powerful capability included in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) license for customers running vSAN ESA. This solution provides local protection for virtual machine workloads at no additional licensing cost. Key capabilities include:

• Define protection groups and retention schedules.
• Schedule crash-consistent snapshots of VMs at regular intervals.
• Create immutable snapshots to help recover from ransomware.
• Retain up to 200 snapshots per VM.
• Per-VM replication locally and/or to remote clusters.

VMware vSAN Daemon Liveness - EPD Status Abnormal

I reinstalled ESXi and vSAN ESA 8.0 on hosts that were previously running ESX and vSAN ESA 9.0. It's a lab environment. I did not bother to delete the previous VMFS volume on a local drive in each host. This is where ESXi was storing scratch data, logs, etc. After reinstalling 8.0 and turning on vSAN, I noticed the following error in vSAN Skyline Health: vSAN daemon liveness.

VMware VCF Installer Warning - Evacuate Offline VMs Upgrade Policy

I ran across this warning in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Installer when deploying VCF 9:

cluster <cluster name>: Evacuate Offline VMs upgrade policy configured for cluster <cluster name> on vCenter does not match default SDDC Manager ESXi upgrade policy. It has value false in vCenter, and default value true in SDDC Manager.

The fix is simple...