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VCF 9.1 - Quick Tip: Upgrading ESX Hosts with Non-Certified vSAN ESA NVMe Devices in SDDC Manager

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I recently started rolling out the latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 Express Patch 1 (9.1.0.0100) into my lab environment, and everything had been going quite smoothly. After successfully upgrading vCenter Server and NSX earlier this morning, I moved on to my ESX hosts. Since I always run the pre-checks before kicking off an upgrade, I immediately noticed the following error message, which prevented me from proceeding further within SDDC Manager:

vSAN health test 'NVMe device is VMware certified' reported an issue for cluster 'VCF-Mgmt-Cluster'. Detailed error message: The NVMe device is not listed in the VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG).


I immediately recognized the error message and the solution, especially having spent far too much time experimenting with NVMe devices that are NOT on the vSAN ESA BCG in my lab environment. 😅

Note: This workaround is NOT required if you are using supported NVMe devices for vSAN ESA

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VCF 9.1 - Deploying VCF Automation (VCFA) to non-Management Network

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Similar to VCF Management Services (VCFMS), VCF Automation (VCFA) can also be deployed to a non-management network using an API workflow. A typically deployment workflow is to first upgrade to VCF 9.1, deploy VCFMS and then deploy VCFA as a Day-N operation using the new VCF Operations Fleet Lifecycle Management (Fleet LCM) capability, located within VCF Operations under Build->Lifecycle->VCF Management.


When using the Fleet LCM UI to deploy VCFA, you will see that the required IP address input uses a CIDR format. This is not ideal for VCFA, which requires exactly 5 IP addresses for the VCF services runtime; the smallest CIDR that meets this requirement is a /29, which ends up consuming 8 IP addresses.


The good news is that we can use the Fleet LCM API to select an alternative vSphere-based network (VLAN or NSX Overlay) and we also get added benefit to use an alternative IP allocation method, which would allow us to specify the exact number of IP Addresses that is required!

Note: This solution is only applicable for brand new deployments of VCFA, for existing Aria Automation 8.x or VCF Automation 9.0.x/9.1.x deployments, the upgrade workflow will use the existing network that VCFA is deployed on and will availabled IP Addresses from that network.

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VCF 9.1 - Deploying VCF Management Services (VCFMS) to non-Management Network during VCF Upgrade

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As part of upgrading an existing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment from either VCF 5.x or 9.0.x to VCF 9.1, one of the required steps is deploying the new VCF Management Services (VCFMS) component using a workflow provided by SDDC Manager.


The current default behavior of the VCFMS deployment workflow is to automatically deploy the VCFMS components, shown below, onto the existing VM Management network. This is typically the same network that hosts infrastructure components such as vCenter Server, NSX and other management services.


While defaulting to the management network may be convenient, most enterprise organizations do not have a large number of free IP addresses sitting idle. Even if there was available IP capacity, it is usually not contiguous blocks of IPs, which can make accommodating the CIDR-based IP allocation requirements of VCFMS more challenging than expected.

The good news is that we can use the SDDC Manager API to select an alternative vSphere-based network (VLAN or NSX Overlay) to deploy VCFMS!

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