When you spin up a brand new SDDC using VMware Cloud Foundation, minimum number of hosts that are needed in Management Domain and VI Domain are 4 & 3 respectively. You can scale up Management domain up to 8 hosts and VI domain to 64 hosts.

Before scaling up the workload domains, we need to commission the host first and add it to vCF inventory. To add new hosts to inventory, we need to create a new network pool or expand the default network pool created during bring-up.

Once network pool has been created, you can start commission of new hosts by navigating to SDDC-Manager > Hosts and click on “Commission Hosts” button

Once the host have been commissioned, it will appear under unassigned hosts with configuration status as Active.

Note: If a host is in error state because of issues encountered during host commission workflow, you need to de-commission host first and fix the issue and commission it back again. … Read More

Recently while playing with vCF 3.7.2 in my lab, I encountered an issue where SDDC Bringup process was halted because of NFS mount problem.

If you are experienced with vCF then you would be knowing that during bringup process, NFS share from the sddc manager vm is mounted as a NFS datastore across the management domain by the name “lcm-bundle-repo”.

On checking the hostd.log on Esxi host I saw following log entries

… Read More

In this post we will learn how to perform online upgrade of VMware Cloud Foundation from version 3.7.2 to 3.8.0. Although upgrade process is fairly simple and straight forward, it needs a bit of planning. 

As a best practice, it is always recommended to read the release notes & known issues in new version of product before performing upgrade. vCF 3.8 known issues are documented here

To perform online upgrade of vCF, your SDDC Manager appliance should have direct connectivity to internet or via a proxy server. 

Upgrade Prerequisites

Below screenshot from vCF documentation list the requirements that you should meet before attempting any upgrade operation.

vCF includes two types of bundles: Upgrade bundles & Install Bundles. To know more about these please read vCF official documentation

Upgrade Steps

To start the upgrade process we need to download the upgrade bundles. If you have configured repository settings and authorized my vmware account under Repository Settings, you will be notified about available updates.… Read More