When vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) is selected as the primary storage for deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x, the Cloud Builder Appliance will validate the system against the vSAN ESA HCL and will block the deployment if the hardware components are non-compliant.
For a production deployment, this should be the default experience but for non-production or proof-of-concept (POC), this can be annoying if you wish to accept the risk and proceed with using non-certified vSAN ESA hardware.
Today, the most viable workaround is to install the vSAN ESA Hardware Mock VIB , which will allow users to proceed with the deployment but it does require the additional installation step for each ESXi host.
Having spoken with VCF Engineering about this topic awhile back, they have introduced a nice enhancement with the latest release of VCF 5.2.2 that will allow users to easily bypass the vSAN ESA HCL check without requiring additional ESXi configurations changes.
VCF Bringup
The default behavior of VCF 5.2.2 Cloud Builder is to still validate the hardware against the vSAN ESA HCL when vSAN ESA is selected as the primary storage, but you can now override this behavior with a configuration parameter, which will turn the error into a warning, thus allowing users to proceed with their VCF deployment.
Step 1 - SSH to the VCF Cloud Builder Appliance
Step 2 - Append vsan.esa.sddc.managed.disk.claim=true to /etc/vmware/vcf/bringup/application.properties and then restart the VCF bring up service
Once the VCF Bring up service has restarted, you will see that the vSAN ESA HCL error will now turn into a warning
echo "vsan.esa.sddc.managed.disk.claim=true" >> /etc/vmware/vcf/bringup/application.properties systemctl restart vcf-bringup
VCF Host Commissioning
Once your VCF Instance has been deployed, if you wish to add a new host into your existing VCF Management Domain or create a new VCF Workload Domain by commissioning an ESXi host that will use vSAN ESA as its primary storage, you will see the exact same validation fail. Again, we can override this behavior with a configuration parameter within SDDC Manager, which will allow us to complete the host commissioning process to use the newly added ESXi host.
Step 1 - SSH to the SDDC Manager Appliance
Step 2 - Append vsan.esa.sddc.managed.disk.claim=true to /etc/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/application-prod.properties and /etc/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/application-prod.properties and restart the SDDC Manager services.
echo "vsan.esa.sddc.managed.disk.claim=true" >> /etc/vmware/vcf/domainmanager/application-prod.properties echo "vsan.esa.sddc.managed.disk.claim=true" >> /etc/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/application-prod.properties echo 'y' | /opt/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/scripts/cli/sddcmanager_restart_services.sh
Thanks for the comment!