VMware Cloud Foundation

VCF-9 – Part 1: Introduction & Architecture

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Introduction

VCF-9 was introduced at VMware Explore 2024, marking a pivotal advancement in how enterprises build and manage private clouds. Designed to simplify and consolidate IT environments, VCF 9 promises faster deployment, streamlined consumption, and simplified management—all while boosting security and cost-efficiency. VCF-9 is aimed at allowing organizations to manage their entire infrastructure as a single, unified system.

Some of the key features of VCF-9 are:

1: Streamlined Infrastructure: One Platform, Many Capabilities –VCF 9 integrates compute, networking, storage, and automation into a unified framework. This helps two main audiences:

  • Infrastructure teams can automate and simplify private cloud deployment.
  • Platform engineers & developers benefit from a self-service environment for VMs, containers, and Kubernetes workloads.

2: Tailored Experiences for Cloud Admins and Engineers

  • Cloud Admins: Gain a consolidated control center to manage capacity, policies, tenants, and security—all from a single console. Diagnostic tools and topology maps accelerate issue resolution.
  • Platform Engineers: Can self-provision environments across traditional VMs and modern container stacks.
… Read More

One Node (ESXi) Management Domain Deployment in VMware Cloud Foundation

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Those who are familiar with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) are aware that deploying the management domain requires a minimum of 4 ESXi hosts. In a production environment, this is not a problem, but in resource-crunched Lab/PoC environments, it is very difficult to deploy the full-fledged management domain.

In this blog post, I am going to demonstrate how to deploy a VCF management domain with just a single ESXi host in a nested lab. This tidbit will be very helpful for the folks who want to test VCF but don’t have adequate resources available in the lab.

I am following VCF 5.1.1 BOM for my deployment. I will cover resource requirements as well as touch base on the nested ESXi configuration. Let’s get started!!!

Nested ESXi Configuration

1: Resource Allocation

The nested ESXi was deployed with 96 GB Memory and 14 CPUs, 2 network adapters, and 1000 GB SSD storage. Although 96 GB is a bit less especially if you plan to deploy NSX Edges later after the SDDC bringup.… Read More

Quick Tip- Cleanup Failed Tasks from SDDC Manager Dashboard in VCF

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Tasks in VCF might fail because one or more subtasks within the primary task have failed. Some of these tasks are not retriable and remain in a lingering state in the SDDC Manager dashboard.

The command provided in this blog post will help you in clearing out such tasks from the dashboard.

Step 1: Fetch the failed task ID from the SDDC manager interface.

Click on the failed task and notice the URL change in the browser. The task id is displayed in the URL itself.

Make a note of the task id.

Alternatively, you can run the below API call directly from the SDDC Manager VM.

The output of this API call returns a list of the tasks. You can filter the failed tasks and get the task ID.

Step 2: Delete the failed task

Execute the below API call and it will delete the failed task from the SDDC Manager dashboard.… Read More

Tip and Tricks for VCF Lab Deployment

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In this post, I’ll go over a few tips/tricks that you may use throughout your VCF lab deployment to get the most out of this fantastic tool.

Tip 1: Bring down lab resource utilization

Most of us, I believe, use VCF as a nested lab, and because VCF requires a lot of computing power, this is one area that we struggle with. Because of the limited resources available, a full-fledged deployment is not always practicable. NSX-T nodes, in my experience, are the most problematic component. VCF deploys several NSX-T nodes and each NSX-T requires a lot of resources.

You can limit the number of NSX-T nodes in both the management and workload domains by following the below instructions:

Step 1: SSH into SDDC Manager using the vcf user and switch to root user by running the command: su – root

Step 2: Modify application-prod.properties… Read More

Quick Tip: Cleanup Unused Image Bundles in VCF

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I recently downloaded the image bundles for vRealize components while working in my newly deployed VCF 4.4 environment, not realizing that SDDC Manager does not orchestrate the deployment of any vRealize suite component except the vRealize Suite Life-Cycle Manager. I came across a useful out-of-the-box SDDC Manager feature when looking for a way to clean out the unneeded image bundles.

The process outlined in this post will assist you in clearing out any partially downloaded image bundles or unnecessary bundles that SDDC Manager is not currently using.

Step 1: SSH into SDDC Manager using the vcf user and switch to root user by running the command: su – root

Step 2: Grab the unwanted image bundle id from UI

Step3: Run the following command to clean up the unwanted bundle

where bundle_id is the Id of the unwanted bundle

Example:

… Read More

Quick Tip: Deploy VCF Management Domain with Single NSX-T Node

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This article will show you how to set up a VCF Management domain with just one NSX-T manager. When there is a resource constraint, such as in a lab environment, this suggestion will be useful for lowering the management domain footprint.

The below steps outline the process of deploying an SDDC with one NSX-T node.

Step 1: Fill in all the parameters in the VCF configuration workbook spreadsheet.

Step 2: Transfer the spreadsheet to the cloud builder VM using WinSCP or a similar utility.

Step 3: Use the following command to convert the spreadsheet to the json format

Where VCF-4.4.xlsx is the name of my spreadsheet. Change the name of the file to reflect your environment.… Read More

Quick Tip: Disable vSAN Precheck During Workload Domain Upgrade in VCF

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Before an upgrade bundle can be applied to a workload domain (Mgmt or VI), the SDDC manager trigger a precheck on the domain to identify and alert if there is an underlying issue, so that the issue can be remediated before applying the upgrade bundle. In lab environments, one of the common precheck failures is regarding the vSAN HCL compatibility.

In lab environments, you might be running VCF on unsupported hardware that is not present in the vSAN HCL

During upgrade precheck on the workload domain, you will see the vSAN HCL status as Red, and SDDC Manager won’t let you upgrade the domain until the issue is fixed.

You can force SDDC Manager to ignore the vSAN precheck by adding the following lines in the applications-prod.properties file and modifying the below entries. The file is located in the directory “/opt/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm-app/conf”

Change the vsan health check related data from true to false.… Read More

Nested ESXi Gotchas with VCF

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Nested ESXi is a great way to quickly spin up a test/demo environment and fiddle around things in the lab. I have been doing so for quite a bit now. VCF is very dear to my heart and because VCF needs a hell lot of resources, I always test new versions/features in my nested lab.

Nested ESXi doesn’t always behave nicely and sometimes gives you a hard time and I encountered this recently in one of my VCF deployments.

What was the problem and how it started?

The problem was with ESXi UUID and due to which vSAN configuration was failing. I will talk about more this later in this post.

To save time, I created a nested ESXi template following this article. Deployed few ESXi hosts and everything was working fine. One day I tweaked my template to inject some advanced parameters and booted the template VM. This generated a new UUID entry for ESXi in /etc/vmware/esx.conf… Read More

What’s New in VMware Cloud Foundation 4.2

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VMware Cloud Foundation 4.2 will be out soon and like every other release, 4.2 is coming up with exciting new features. In this post, I will be explaining a few of those. So let’s get started.

1: Static IP Pool for NSX-T TEPs: This one is probably one of the most awaited features of VMware Cloud Foundation. VCF 4.2 allows you to leverage static IP pools for NSX-T Host Overlay (TEP) networks as an alternative to DHCP. Now you no longer need to maintain additional infrastructure items (DHCP Server).  Both management domain and VI workload domains can now make use of static IPs.

In the VCF configuration workbook, you will now see an additional section where you can specify the IP range for Host TEP.

2: Release Versions UI:A new tab (Available Versions) has been added in the SDDC Manager UI which shows the information on the Bill Of Materials, new features, and end of general support dates for each available VCF release.… Read More

AVN Based Bringup Without BGP Support in VCF

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Application Virtual Network was first introduced in VCF 3.9.1. AVN networks are nothing but software-defined overlay networks that spans across zone of clusters and traverse NSX-T Edge Gateways for their North-South traffic (ingress and egress).

One of the requirement for an AVN enabled SDDC bringup was to configure BGP on NSX-T edges. In production environment, BGP routing is not an issue, but there are situations (Lab/POC) when you don’t have BGP support available and that can be an hindrance in implementing and testing AVN.

In this post I am gonna propose a workaround which you can implement in your lab to test this feature. To perform AVN based SDDC bringup, we can leverage static routes instead of BGP. Below are high level steps for doing so.

Step 1: Download VCF configuration workbook and fill in all the details. In Deploy Parameters tab of the spreadsheet, fill BGP specific details with some dummy data.… Read More