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How to deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 8.0 to VMware Fusion or Workstation?

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VMware Fusion and Workstation continues to be another popular way for customers to run a VMware Homelab while leveraging a users existing desktop. In the early days of vSphere 6.5, the method to deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) to Fusion/Workstation was less than ideal with a lot of manual steps. In 2017, the Fusion/Workstation team introduced native OVF support and that made deploying the VCSA much simpler, especially with the VCSA two stage installer.

Even though this is not an officially supported method from VMware for deploying the VCSA, the process has not changed for the last several releases and it just works which was great for our users. With vSphere 8, it looks like there has been a change to the VCSA installer that causes a failure during the Stage 2 configuration.


I was made aware of this issue from a colleague who was looking to setup a vSphere 8 environment using VMware Workstation.

Taking a look at the log file, he noticed the error was regarding the upgrade.import.directory OVF property not being set, which seems to be causing the issue.

# cat /var/log/firstboot/vlcm_firstboot.py_9117_stderr.log
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/vmware-vlcm/firstboot/vlcm_firstboot.py", line 167, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/lib/vmware-vlcm/firstboot/vlcm_firstboot.py", line 129, in main
    fb = VlcmFirstboot(VLCM_COMP, VLCM_SOLUSERNAME)
  File "/usr/lib/vmware-vlcm/firstboot/vlcm_firstboot.py", line 50, in __init__
    os.path.join(get_install_parameter('upgrade.import.directory'), "vlcm")
  File "/usr/lib/vmware/site-packages/cis/tools.py", line 88, in get_install_parameter
    raise InstallParameterException('Install-parameter %s not set' % param)
cis.exceptions.InstallParameterException: {
    "detail": [
        {
            "id": "install.ciscommon.internal.error",
            "translatable": "Encountered an internal error.\n\n%(0)s",
            "args": [
                "Install-parameter upgrade.import.directory not set"
            ],
            "localized": "Encountered an internal error.\n\nInstall-parameter upgrade.import.directory not set"
        }
    ],
    "componentKey": null,
    "problemId": null,
    "resolution": {
        "id": "install.default.failure.resolution",
        "translatable": "This is an unrecoverable error, please retry install. If you encounter this error again, please search for these symptoms in the VMware Knowledge Base for any known issues and possible resolutions. If none can be found, collect a support bundle and open a support request.",
        "localized": "This is an unrecoverable error, please retry install. If you encounter this error again, please search for these symptoms in the VMware Knowledge Base for any known issues and possible resolutions. If none can be found, collect a support bundle and open a support request."
    }
}

Using one of my previous blog post for guidance, he discovered a quick workaround to the problem by simply ensuring this variable is configured with a default value. After running into the problem myself and verifying the solution, I figure this might be useful for anyone looking to run vSphere 8 using VMware Fusion or Workstation, so here are the instructions to work around this issue.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk
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Beta for VMware Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) formally Project Cascade

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When Project Pacific was first announced back in 2019, most of the focus was on Kubernetes and how it would be re-architected into vSphere, basically the "how" or the implementation details. As much as I enjoy diving into the tech, what really stood out to me about Project Pacific was the implication it would have on workload evolution for vSphere.

In fact, I wrote about this very topic in this blog post: Project Pacific - Workload Evolution in vSphere because I felt that most of the focus was only on the "how" but not the "why". Here is a quote from the blog that summarizes why I was excited for Project Pacific:

However, Project Pacific is actually more than just Kubernetes but with all the new lingo like Supervisor and Guest Clusters, one can easily get lost in the implementation or what I would refer to as the "how" part of Project Pacific. If you ask me, the "why" part is much more significant and Project Pacific is fundamentally re-defining what and how to deploy a workload in vSphere.

Fast forward to today, vSphere with Tanzu has been delivering on the vision of Project Pacific since its introduction with vSphere 7 back in 2020. Developers, DevOps and Platform Engineering teams can easily deploy workloads like Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters (TKC) or Virtual Machines into a vSphere Cluster that has been enabled with vSphere with Tanzu, also known as a Supervisor Cluster.

While the current vSphere with Tanzu experience works well for most environments with a handful of Supervisor Clusters, but what happens when you need to support more users, teams and an increased number of Supervisor Clusters across different locations? How do you manage access control for these users and the compute resources that they can consume while providing a simple and intuitive developer ready interface? This is where VMware Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI), formally known as Project Cascade comes in!

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Homelab considerations for vSphere 8

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There has been a lot of great technical content from both VMware and the broader community since the announcement of vSphere 8, which happened a few weeks ago. I know many of you are excited to get your hands on both vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 and while we wait for GA, I wanted to share some of my own personal experiences but also some of the considerations for those interested in running vSphere 8 in their homelab.

As with any vSphere release, you should always carefully review the release notes when they are made available and verify that all of your hardware and the underlying components are officially listed on the VMware HCL, which will be updated when vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 GA's. This is the only way to ensure that you will have the best possible experience and a supported configuration from VMware.

Disclaimer: The following considerations are based on early observations using pre-GA builds of vSphere 8 and it does not reflect any official guidance or support from VMware.

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