If you are using ESXi hosts that have mixed hardware vendors, the VCF 9.0 Installer will throw the following error as shown in the screenshot below:

ESX Hosts don't have the same vendor. vLCM is not supported on ESX Hosts with different vendor. Found vendors are: [micro computer (hk) tech limited. gmktec]

The reason as outlined is that vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) does not support heterogeneous hardware vendors when it attempts to construct the vLCM Image Profile for the vSphere Cluster that is for your VCF Management Domain.

With that said, for lab purposes there is a workaround ...

In fact, this was something I had shared a while back which is the ability to simulate custom ESXi SMBIOS strings and I just recalled the solution because I wanted to test something out but unfourntately, my ESXi hosts were from two different hardware vendors.

[Read more...]

By default, the new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Installer will validate the ESXi management interface is at a 10GbE network adaptor and it will prevent users from proceeding if the minimum link speed is not detected.

This pre-check had also existed in VCF 5.x and users could bypass the pre-check, but it required users to deploy using the VCF Cloud Builder API which was not as nice when compared to using the VCF Cloud Builder UI.

While the default behavior is designed for production-grade environments, there is a much simpler way to disable this pre-check for lab purposes in VCF 9.0 and it would allow users to use either the VCF Installer UI or API!

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, please use at your own risk

[Read more...]