If you are using ESXi hosts that have mixed hardware vendors, the VCF 9.0 Installer will throw the following error as shown in the screenshot below:
ESX Hosts don't have the same vendor. vLCM is not supported on ESX Hosts with different vendor. Found vendors are: [micro computer (hk) tech limited. gmktec]
The reason as outlined is that vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) does not support heterogeneous hardware vendors when it attempts to construct the vLCM Image Profile for the vSphere Cluster that is for your VCF Management Domain.
With that said, for lab purposes there is a workaround ...
In fact, this was something I had shared a while back which is the ability to simulate custom ESXi SMBIOS strings and I just recalled the solution because I wanted to test something out but unfourntately, my ESXi hosts were from two different hardware vendors.
Step 1 - SSH to the ESXi host (source) that you would like to match the hardware vendor information, run the following command and make a note of all the values
vsish -e get /hardware/bios/dmiInfo
Step 2 - SSH to the ESXi host (destination) and edit the /bootbank/boot.cfg configuration file and append ignoreHwSMBIOSInfo=TRUE to the kernelopt line and then reboot.
Step 3 - Follow the blog post HERE to generate the required vsish command to configure SMBIOS information.
In my setup, I had an Minisforum MS-A2 and GMktec NucBox K11 and I wanted the K11 to look like an MS-A2, so I was able to simulate that by using the following:
vsish -e set /hardware/bios/dmiInfo {\"MS-A2\", \"Micro Computer \(HK\) Tech Limited\", \"XXX\", [246, 46, 243, 67, 168, 163, 203, 68, 145, 55, 49, 203, 76, 108, 82, 10], \"1.0.0\", 6, \"SKU=YYY\", \"MINISFORUM\"}
As mentioned in the referenced blog post, this settings does NOT persist after a reboot, so you would need to re-run this command. While I was able to successfully bypass the validation check and successfully deploy VCF 9, its possible there maybe other issues that you could run into but at least it will allow you to proceed if you simply wanted to go through the initial deployment.
Thanks for the comment!