VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 brings additional flexibility by supporting multiple types of principal storage: vSAN (OSA/ESA), Fibre Channel & NFS v3 that users can now choose from.
Right before heading out for PTO a couple of weeks ago I was experimenting with NFS as my principal storage for deploying my initial VCF 9 Fleet with a Minisforums MS-A2 system. While the MS-A2 does have multiple network adapters that are supported with ESXi 9.0, I only had the ethernet NIC connected.
While a single NIC can be used to deploy VCF 9.0, especially when using vSAN as the principal storage. However, in my testing with NFS and a single NIC, the migration from Virtual Standard Switch (VSS) to Virtual Distributed Switch (VDS) ran into some issues.
Note: When using NFS as your principal storage, the NFS network must reside in its own dedicated VLAN (e.g. can not be shared with the ESXi Management Network)
Upon further troubleshooting, as I was still able to connect to the vCenter Server, I immediately saw the problem. The single NIC had already been migrated to VDS, but the VMkernel interface and respective portgroup for the NFS traffic was still on the VSS, which no longer had connectivity.
The fix was straight forward, using the vSphere UI in vCenter Server, initiate the migration of the NFS VMkernel interface and ensure you are selecting the distributed portgroup that has already been created.
Once the NFS VMkernel is running on the VDS which is backed by our single NIC, you can then restart the VCF Installer deployment and it will pick up right where it had left off!
Hi,
I encountered an error during the validation phase while deploying VCF 9 using NFS storage.
Under NFS Datastore Configuration, the remediation message states:
Ensure that the datastore is mounted on the host.
I tried mounting the NFS datastore on vSwitch0 using a second VMkernel for NFS traffic, but then received another error:
vSwitch0 cannot have more than one VMkernel.
Could you please advise on how I should proceed with the validation and deployment?