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Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) host commission using ESXi Kickstart

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ESXi Scripted Installation (Kickstart) has been my go-to method for achieving zero-touch provisioning of ESXi hosts at scale, which I had started using back in the ESX 2.5 days when I was a customer! Having worked at some very larger enterprises, I got the opportunity to experience and manage a variety of environments for automated ESXi provisioning.

For more than a decade, I have written hundreds of articles about ESXi kickstart and how it can help solve a variety of use cases stemming from my own background to some of the unique requirements that have come up from some of our largest VMware customers. To date, some of my favorite ESXi kickstart solutions includes my 2014 blog post in automating VM deployments using a USB device which became the basis for my USB to SDDC project in 2017.

While playing with the latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1 Holodeck release (currently in Beta), I was thinking about the current VCF host commissioning workflow, which is a multi-step process after an ESXi host has been provisioned where you need to manually (or using automation) to add the hosts to SDDC Manager before they can be consumed for either expanding and/or deploying a new workload domain.

I thought, why could we not just skip this step all together and that was when I had the idea of just incorporating the VCF host commissioning workflow automatically as part of an ESXi Kickstart installation! 😀

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Determining new VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) & VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) license usage in vSphere 8.0 Update 2b

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vSphere 8.0 Update 2b was just released last week and with this release, customers can now take advantage of the new included 100 GiB trial vSAN storage capacity for each deployed VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) core for use with vSAN!

Note: If you would like to understand how much vSAN storage you are entitled to (100GiB for VVF and 1TiB for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)), check out the new inventory and calculator script in KB 95927 (brownfield) and KB 96426 (greenfield) for more details.

In addition to installing and/or updating your vCenter Server to vSphere 8.0 Update 2b, you will also need to login to Customer Connect to download your new VVF and/or VCF license keys that will activate your vSAN entitlement.

I have already received questions on how to determine whether an ESXi host has been licensed with the new VVF and/or VCF license keys and which you can do so by using the vSphere UI by navigating to Administration->Licensing->Licenses->Assets->Hosts or vSAN Clusters and using the various filters, but this can be time consuming when you have a large environment with various license editions.

This is where automation and vSphere API can help!

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Automated Aria Suite (Lifecycle, Identity, Operations, Logs & Automation) Lab Deployment Script

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I recently got reacquainted with the Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager (ASLCM) solution, which makes it super easy for anyone to manage the deployment, configuration and lifecycle for the complete Aria suite of products including Aria Identity, Aria Operations, Aria Operations for Logs and Aria Automation.

Users can deploy the various Aria products in either standalone or clustered mode (for high availability purposes), with the former being ideal for learning and homelab purposes. In addition to deploying ASLCM and the individual Aria products, I wanted to also use this as an opportunity explore the ASLCM REST API and what better way to learn than to have a use case to get hands on experience.

While ASLCM already provides a simple way to deploy Aria products using the UI and includes a nice export/import feature for an environment configuration in JSON, I wanted to do the same, but programmatically using the ASLCM REST API to fully configure the environment.

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