VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 had just GA'ed last week and it is a packed release with a ton of new capabilities! Creating a brand new VCF environment (greenfield) is generally much easier than converting an existing vSphere-based environment (brownfield) into a compliant VCF environment, which can be quite challenging and our users have been asking for a better solution.
With VCF 5.2, we now have the ability to import or convert an existing vSphere and vSAN environment into either a VCF Management Domain or Workload Domain using a new VCF Import Tool without needing to rebuild your existing environment!
As with anything I do, I typically want my infrastructure setup be fully automated, so that I can actually spend time exploring the actual capability and not waste time deploying or installing the required prerequisites. After spending a few minutes reading through the VCF Import Tool Scenarios and Considerations, I could adapt my Automated vSphere Lab Deployment scripts (here and here) to automatically deploy the required environment, so that I could quickly try out the new VCF Import Tool.
Creating a Nested vSphere/vSAN infrastructure was trivial, but due to the supported scenarios, this environment also needed to have a self-managing vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) running within the nested environment as well as the SDDC Manager appliance, since I was interested in the VCF Management Domain conversion.
I have created the following Github project vcf-automated-import-lab-deployment which will automatically deploy all the required infrastructure and even copy the VCF Import Tool into the respective appliances, so that once the environment is deployed, you can simply go to SDDC Manager appliance and run the conversion or import. For more information on how to use the script, please see the README on the Github repo.
Below are some screenshots when running the script, it will prompt for confirmation before it begins:
In my environment, it took a little over 1hr to fully deploy the required infrastructure and the script even outputs the exact command to run to convert the vSphere/vSAN environment into a VCF Management Domain as you can see from the screenshot below:
The actual conversion process was quite fast and after that I could login to the SDDC Manager, which now shows my existing vSphere/vSAN environment has been successfully converted to a VCF Management Domain and is ready to get the benefits of VCF!
Great write-up! What kind of hardware are you running this on?
The script was developed on some beefy R640 systems 🙂
Great work! Fantastic script!
No errors on deployment, but on running the python3 vcf_brownfield.py there are two errors
Any ideas what - [ERROR] request_helper: Result status code from SDDC Manager controller info retrieval: 404
[ERROR] request_helper: Result status code from set datasource: 400
and it fails to complete.
It would appear that the SDDMC VM deployment failed, and the VM did not function, so try try again.
Further comments, the - [ERROR] request_helper: Result status code from SDDC Manager controller info retrieval: 404
[ERROR] request_helper: Result status code from set datasource: 400
is normal, it's not the result of the deployment, or script, I've successfully ran the conversion script, and the above error was displayed, but conversion worked.
It would appear the issue is with a failed deployment of SDDMC, which I suspect was storage space, when I creased vSAN Capacity disks to 1000MB, no issues were observed.
Hi William,
do you know when the repos of VMUG will be updated and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 will be available for download?
Thank you for your great work here!
Kind regards
Chris
That’s a question for the VMUG organization, since they have process through their own portal for downloads, which I have no insights on
The required files to not appear to be available from the Broadcom support portal.
Could you be more specific ... what is not available. If you're entitled to downloads and/or trial, the required files are indeed there 🙂
ugh..sorry. Did not even see the 'Drivers and Tools' tab