VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) first introduced the Brownfield Import capability in VCF 5.2, making it easy for customers to onboard their existing vSphere environments into a VCF deployment. While the Brownfield Import capability had some limitations in earlier releases, it has seen significant enhancements since VCF 9.0 and now provides a native onboarding experience using either the VCF Installer or as a Day-N operation within VCF Operations.
While some customers may have the opportunity to deploy a brand new VCF 9.1 Fleet as part of a hardware refresh initiative, the vast majority will start by converting an existing vSphere environment into their initial VCF Management Domain and then import their remaining vSphere environments as VCF Workload Domains.
In addition to providing centralized visibility and lifecycle management (patching and upgrades) for imported environments, one of the most common question is around what host lifecycle operations can be performed after an environment has been imported into VCF.
Here is a quick visual that summarizes the various scopes (vCenter Server, vSphere Cluster or Workload Domain) where host lifecycle operations (add host/remove host) can be performed.
As you can see from the visual above, the VCF Host Commission (Add Host) workflow can be used to provision hosts to both an imported vCenter Server as well as a vCenter Server that is part of a newly deployed Workload Domain, which also includes VCF Host Decomission (Remove Host) workflows.
- Creating a new vSphere Cluster in the imported vCenter Server (docs)
- Expanding a new or existing vSphere Cluster in the imported vCenter Server (docs)
- Creating a new Workload Domain (docs)
- Creating a new vSphere Cluster in a newly deployed Workload Domain (docs)
- Expanding a new or existing vSphere Cluster in a newly deployed Workload Domain (docs)
The one exception to the workflows above is the ability to add or remove hosts from an existing vSphere Cluster within an imported vCenter Server Workload Domain.
For imported vSphere Clusters, the ESX hosts were not provisioned or managed by SDDC Manager. As a result, VCF commissioned hosts cannot be added to an imported cluster, which is why this workflow is not available. However, customers can continue to manage their imported vSphere Clusters just as they did before the import, by simply adding and removing hosts directly from vCenter Server using the vSphere UI.
To ensure SDDC Manager always had the latest inventory information, especially before patching and upgrading operations, users historically needed to download and run a separate inventory synchronization script. Starting with VCF 9.0, the inventory synchronization script became integrated into SDDC Manager. While inventory synchronization is still required, VCF 9.0 also introduced a new SDDC Manager Synchronization API that enables the operation to be performed remotely without having to SSH into SDDC Manager and execute the script manually.
To demonstrates the use of the SDDC Manager API, I have created PowerShell script called synchronize_imported_vcenter_server_host_inventory_with_sddc_manager.ps1 that can be used to easily sync changes for a given Workload Domain.
The script will run in validation mode by default as users will need to provide both the Domain Name & ID that should be synchronized, which needs to be updated in the script before change $ValidateOnly to $false.
Once the synchronization process has been kicked off, you can monitor the progress using the SDDC Manager UI, which I believe might also show a task in vCenter Server.
Another question that has come up recently is what happens after importing a vCenter Server 8.x and NSX 4.x environment into a VCF 9.1 Fleet if you decide not to upgrade to the latest VCF software stack. Can those systems still be patched and updated? The answer is absolutely.
While most of you probably do not need a reminder that the End of Support (EOS) date for vSphere 8.x is October 2027, customers can continue to manage the lifecycle of these environments while also taking advantage of several VCF Fleet management capabilities, including certificate and password management, which is natively integrated into VCF Operations for both 8.x/9.x imported environments.
Note: For existing VCF customers who would like to continue using SDDC Manager for password management, ESX root credentials needs to be added into SDDC Manager for imported environments.
Thanks for the comment!