WilliamLam.com

Enhancement in VCF 5.2.2 to bypass vSAN ESA HCL Check

by // Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more...]

Quick Tip – How to Rename a vSAN Virtual Machine and its files

by // 3 Comments

While renaming a vSphere Virtual Machine is very straightforward using the vSphere UI or API, this operation only updates the display name in the vSphere Inventory. To ensure the underlying VM configuration files (e.g. .vmdk, .vmx, etc. ) are also updated, a Storage vMotion is also required, which requires you to have at least two vSphere Datastores to perform the operation.

If Storage vMotion is not an option, you only have a single datastore or you are using vSAN, then your only option is to manually rename the individual VM files. For vSAN-based VMs, one additional step is required as vSAN manages objects and not files.

[Read more...]

vSAN ESA Disk & HCL workaround for VCF 9.0

by // 13 Comments

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.

UPDATE (09/29/25) - As of VCF 9.0.1, you no longer need to deploy the vSAN ESA Hardware Mock VIB, please see this blog post for more details which will allow you to easily bypass this check directly within the VCF Installer.

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.

[Read more...]