By default, the new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Installer will validate the ESXi management interface is at a 10GbE network adaptor and it will prevent users from proceeding if the minimum link speed is not detected.
This pre-check had also existed in VCF 5.x and users could bypass the pre-check, but it required users to deploy using the VCF Cloud Builder API which was not as nice when compared to using the VCF Cloud Builder UI.
While the default behavior is designed for production-grade environments, there is a much simpler way to disable this pre-check for lab purposes in VCF 9.0 and it would allow users to use either the VCF Installer UI or API!
Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, please use at your own risk
Step 1 - After successfully deploying the VCF Installer appliance, you will need to SSH to the system using the vcf username and the password that you had specified during the deployment.
Step 2 - Switch to the root user by running the following command:
su -
Step 3 - Append enable.speed.of.physical.nics.validation=false to /etc/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/application.properties configuration file
Step 4 - Restart the VCF Installer services for the change to go into effect:
echo 'y' | /opt/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/scripts/cli/sddcmanager_restart_services.sh
Step 5 - Re-run the pre-check and you will find the 10GbE NIC pre-check is no longer performed
Thanks William I was stuck without this as our lab hardware is limited. I was also forced to regen my certs and reboot the ESXi hosts. Resetting the hosts in that ESXi screen in the wizard is a real pain by the way when your thumbprint is wrong and you've accepted it. I had to restart the wizard.
I also ran into issues with the installer complaining about NTP on the VCF installer. It said my /etc/ntp.conf file did not match the IP it wanted, yet it did. Instead it said it was set to both null and the FQDN of the NTP IP. So clearly it went out and got that information and the declared my IP bad? I had to just bypass the warning because I could never get it to validate if you've seen that before.
I've seen similar issue, but on VCF 5.2. /etc/ntp.conf had NTP IP defined and synced, but in `curl localhost/inventory/sys-info | json_pp` returned empty/null value in "ntpInfo". It caused crashing UI and failing API calls, so only way was to set value directly in database (don't try this on production environments without consulting support)
Interesting point about removing the hosts and re-adding them after the fingerprint has been accepted! I ran into this too, and had to add a new blank host for each existing entry which I wanted to remove/re-add. It seems that because the minimum of hosts is 3 you cannot remove a line until there's >3 (even if one is empty)
Hi William
Thank you for your sharing.
It always brings a ray of hope to us engineers who work in non-standard testing environments. Thank you!