For a long time, I wanted to get my hands on VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and understand closely how the deployment process has changed with the introduction of the VCF Installer. Thanks to a few days off and a desire to experiment, I decided to dedicate my Home Lab to this project, retracing the entire installation process step by step, from preparing the infrastructure to the first boot of the environment.

In this post, I tell you how I set up the deployment, what hardware and network resources I used, the configuration choices made along the way and, of course, the difficulties encountered (and how I solved them) during the installation via VCF Installer. The goal is to share a practical experience useful to those who want to approach VVF starting from a laboratory environment, without the complexity (and costs) of an enterprise deployment.

In this first post, we will see the installation; in the next posts, we will install/activate the licenses and install the Log component

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Being a home lab, my environment will consist of nested ESXi Hosts; here are some details:

Physical HW

ESXi Nested

Two VMs where I install my ESXi to 9.1

Check the Machine Certificate for each ESXi; the certificate needs to trust the ESXi FQDN name.

Storage 

As NFS, I created a TrueNAS VM that resides on SSD disks

Network of ESXI nested:

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Required resources

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As you can see, we have, in addition to the vCenter add-ons, which are:

License Server

A part of VCF Operations. Provides secure and integrated license management for your platform.

vCenter

To say that we all know him well

VCF Operation

VMware Cloud Foundation Operations® (formerly VMware Aria Operations) or VCF Operations helps your organisation build, manage, operate, and secure your private cloud infrastructure by deploying and maintaining its fleet-level components, providing visibility and enhanced performance across the workload and infrastructure stack, and helping your organisation stay compliant with regulatory standards and organisational guidelines.

VCF Management Services

VCF 9.1 introduces VCF management services to provide a unified architecture for centralised lifecycle and operational functionalities. The VCF services runtime instance of the first VCF Instance hosts the fleet-level VCF management services components that perform global operations and the instance-level components for that VCF Instance. Every VCF Instance has a VCF services runtime instance that hosts the instance-level VCF management services that run local tasks. This foundation allows for a unified architecture, simplified lifecycle management, and streamlined backup and recovery of all hosted components.

For the VVF in management servers, we have:

Fleet lifecycle

Log management (to be installed in DAY+1)

SDDC lifecycle

Software depot

Telemetry

VCF services runtime

More details: Components in VCF and vSphere Foundation

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The steps we’ll take are:

1-Installing ESXi (we won’t cover it in this post)
2-Deploying the VCF installer
3-Configuring the DEPOT
4-Deploying VVF

VCF installer installation

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Log in to Broadcom Support Portal https://support.broadcom.com/ and Download VCF Installer

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The next step is to deploy the OVA to ESXi or VMware Workstation

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 Once the installation of the OVA is finished, access the URL with the IP or FQDN and log in with the admin@local account and password you set during the deployment

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Configure Depot Connection and download the installation Binaries

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Configuration of the repository for downloading the software for installation (vCenter, ESXi, etc.)

A token must be generated from the portal vcf.broadcom.com

To log in from the Support Portal, select Version 9. Licenses can be found

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Go to the VCF Installer and create the ID of the depot to upload to the portal

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Return to the portal and upload the depot ID to the page that opened

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Copy the Activation code and enter it on the vcf installer screen

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Let’s download the binaries of the VMware vSphere fountadion

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Once the download is complete, we will see everything “Success”

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Now I have two ESXi Hosts (in my case, nested vvfesxi01.pollaio.lan and vvfesxi02.pollaio.lan) at version 9.1.0, just installed with no particular configuration (No Storage and more)

Deploy VVF

Let’s proceed with the deployment, selecting “Deployment Wizard” from the VCF Installer

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Let’s define the FQDNs for the various components (vCenter…), and I must obviously have already entered the association with the IP in my DNS (always remember the reverse of the DNS)

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I run the validate all

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Now let’s save and continue

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Select the version of VVF and DNS, NTP server and DNS suffix

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We add the ESXi hosts

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Caution: Verify the certificates correctly on the ESXi hosts, and that the hostname is populated correctly

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Let’s configure the network, where we will enter the configurations for the VVF management, vMotion and NFS part.