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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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Disable 10GbE NIC Pre-Check in the VCF 9.0 Installer

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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

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Minimal resources for deploying VCF 9.0 in a Lab

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 supports two types of deployment mode for the applicable components (e.g. NSX Manager, VCF Operations, VCF Automation, etc), Simple (Single-node) or High Availability (Three-node).

For Lab/Learning Purposes or Proof-of-Concepts, the Simple VCF deployment will allow users to experience the full capabilities of VCF 9.0, while minimizing the resources required when compared to VCF 5.x where you had to have three NSX Managers as an example.


Since the GA of VCF 9.0, I know many folks have started to prepare their lab environments and I wanted to share the minimal resources that you would need to deploy the initial VCF 9.0 stack also referred to as a VCF Fleet for lab purposes:

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