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vSAN ESA Disk & HCL Workaround for VCF 9.0

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vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) has become the preferred architecture when deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). For those interested in exploring vSAN ESA with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 but may not have compatible hardware from the vSAN ESA HCL, there are a couple of workarounds that you might want to be aware of.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, please use at your own risk. For production deployments, you should be using supported vSAN ESA Hardware which you can refer to Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG)

There are potentially two scenarios you may come across when using vSAN ESA to deploy your initial and/or extending your VCF Fleet.

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Automating the vSAN Data Migration Pre-check using vSAN API

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I was chatting with a customer yesterday on various automation topics and one of the questions was about automating the vSAN Data Migration Pre-Check capablitity, which is available in the vSphere UI under vSAN Cluster->Monitor->vSAN->Data Migration Pre-check as shown in the screenshot below.


The specific vSAN API that you will need to use is both the VsanPerformResourceCheck to perform the operation and then VsanGetResourceCheckStatus to retrieve the results as the operation can take some time depending on the size of your environment.

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Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG)

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The Broadcom Compatibility Guide (formerly VMware Compatibility Guide) is where users would go to check hardware (new or existing) compatibility with VMware software.


There are a number of different compatibility guides that you can search through from CPU processors to servers to the various of I/O devices including accelerators and graphics cards. For users with a small number of hardware devices, search is pretty straight forward but if you have a variety of different hardware to check, the web interface may not be the quickest.

One thing that I was pleasantly surprised to learn was that the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) could easily be consumed programmatically, unlike the previous VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG) which had a different backend system.

While there is not an official BCG API, which would include documentation, support and backwards compatibility, users can interact with the BCG using the same API as the BCG web interface.

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