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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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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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After deploying the new VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Installer appliance, the first thing you must setup is the software depot which is where the VCF Installer will go to download the software binaries for deploying either VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

Users have two options to select from:

• Online Depot - Connect over the internet to Broadcom (directly or in-directly via network proxy), which will require a download token to be provided
• Offline Depot - Connect locally to a depot that you have setup (using the VCF Download Tool) within your own environment

By default, the VCF Installer connects to Broadcom's online depot using HTTPS, which is expected when connecting over the public internet. With that said, for an offline depot that is running within your own infrastructure, you can simplify the offline depot setup by serving the content over HTTP, which also removes the need to setup a TLS certificate for your web server.

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