I have been a huge fan of using the Minisforum MS-A2 to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, which has been a fantastic way to get hands-on experience with the latest release of VCF!
Best of all, it allows us to explore all the exciting new capabilities that VCF 9 has to offer, while balancing the required resources for a minimal footprint deployment!
Over the past couple of months, I have been performing extensive testing and validation of VCF 9 running on the MS-A2 and I have documented the full installation process that users can follow along in this Github repository:
https://github.com/lamw/vcf-9x-in-box
In the coming weeks, I will also be publishing a series of write-ups on how to configure the various features within the VCF 9 platform using this exact same setup, so stay tuned!
For those attending VMware Explore Las Vegas next month, I’ll also be diving deeper into this topic with my buddy Alan Renouf during our session [CLOB1201LV] Deploying a Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Lab. Be sure to sign up if you have not already, space is limited if not already waitlisting!
Here is a just a taste of all the capabilities and components that I have been able to successfully deploy AND consume with my minimal VCF 9.x setup:
✅ VCF 9.0 Fleet with VCF Operations and Automation
✅ VCF Single Sign-On (SSO)
✅ ESX Live Patching (applied my 1st Live Patch recently)
✅ vSAN ESA
✅ NSX Edge Cluster (Active/Standby) with Centralized Transit Gateway (TGW)
✅ NSX Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
✅ vSphere Supervisor
✅ vSphere Supervisor ArgoCD Service
✅ vSphere Supervisor vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) w/deployed VKS Cluster
✅ vSphere Supervisor Local Consumption Interface (LCI)
✅ vSphere Supervisor VM Service w/deployed VM
✅ Data Services Manager (DSM)
✅ VMware Avi Load Balancer
How do you run vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) and VKS clusters on a two node (two ESXi hosts) setup?
Wouldn't this require at least three nodes?
You just do 🙂
VCF 9 officially supports single vSphere Supervisor (Control Plane Node) and smallest VKS Cluster would be 1 Control Plane & 1 Worker
Hello William!
I've tried to add the package with nested-vsan-esa via injecting it into the ESXi image and using it for installing hosts. Everything goes okay till the step of deploying the vCenter server. vCenter tries to create a cluster and take the image from the host and stuck at error:
" A general system error occurred: Failed to extract image from the host: an error occurred while re-creating VIB williamlam.com_bootbank_nested-vsan-esa-mock-hw_1.0.0-1.0. Extraction of image from host mgmt-esx01.vcf.lab failed."
And after that he destroys the vCenter and in the loop tries again to deploy it.
It is possible to fix that without reinstalling the hosts?
Is ESXi installed on an SSD or USB device? I've not had this issue and as long as ESXi is on persistent device (SSD), you should be fine as I install the same VIB as part of my kickstart setup for deploying VCF 9 on bare-metal ESXi hosts
SSD device. I've reinstalled with new version of kickstart - now it works fine, thanks a lot!
Hi Alexey,
I had the same problem on my first try, when the vCenter LCM tried to get the VIB from the host. With the Kickstarter Script of William the problem was gone (after a while till I disabled Secure Boot 😉).
@William: Great work, you helped me so much to get the Minisform online, and I've learned so much in the last week - Thank you!
Hello Robert,
Thanks for an advice, reinstall with new kickstart files helps 🙂
Hey William, do you have a new json spec for VCF 9.1 "in-a-box"? I'm having trouble getting all of the parameters right. Thanks!
I plan to add new 9.1 repo ... just haven't had chance to get around it.
The easiest way is to use the VCF Installer (interactively) to go through the wizard as there are several new components and than export the JSON for your specific deployment choices, since yours will likely differ from what I'm using
Agreed, but the UI doesn't let you proceed unless you have 3 valid hosts (even if you've added the override). In my case, I'm trying to deploy on a single host. I may just spin up a few nested ESX hosts to get past the issue. Thx.
Here's an example JSON from Tech Docs https://techdocs.broadcom.com/content/dam/broadcom/techdocs/us/en/dita/vmware/vcf/vcf-90/installation/resources/domainSpec-sfo-m01-example02.json and https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vcf/vcf-9-0-and-later/9-1/deployment/deploying-a-new-vmware-cloud-foundation-or-vmware-vsphere-foundation-private-cloud-/use-a-json-specification-to-deploy-vmware-cloud-foundation-or-vmware-vsphere-foundation.html for reference (which is where I got the example)