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Infinite possibilities with new VM Service CloudInit transport for vSphere with Tanzu in vSphere 8

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When the VM Service capability (part of Sphere with Tanzu) was first introduced back in vSphere 7.0 Update 2a, I was really excited for the possibilities this feature could unlock for both DevOps personas but also for our VI Admins. Currently, the VM Service can only deploy two specific OVF images (CentOS and Ubuntu) that are pre-built by VMware and distributed from the VMware marketplace.

While the potential for the VM Service is definitely there, our customers and even our partners need the ability to create their own custom images and using approved operating systems that they have built and harden based on the needs of their organizations. Even though I was able to get the VM Service to deploy a non-default image like a Nested ESXi VM using a couple of tricks, there needs to be a much easier and supported way to create and deploy non-default VMware OS images and this is where vSphere 8 can now help 😀

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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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Automated Lab Deployment Script for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.2

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One of my pet projects that I have been looking into is to easily deploy the required infrastructure, using Nested ESXi of course, to be able to quickly standup a "basic" VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment. There are a couple of solutions that currently exists in the community that can help take a user from having no infrastructure to setting up all the components required to standup a complete functional VCF envionmrent, similar to that of a physical VCF deployment. As such, the pre-requisites for using those tools was a bit more than what I was looking for and can also feel overwhelming for a new user. I certainly fell into that category while looking at some of the existing tools.

Ultimately, my use case was slightly different and I also did not need all the bells and whistles such as configuring Application Virtual Networks (VCN) and this also meant that I could dramatically simplify the deployment. For example, instead of deploying the ESXi hosts from scratch, I could simply take advantage of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance and use that as a starting point. For those familiar with my various PowerCLI automated lab deployment scripts, I have created a simliar experience for VCF that will deploy a set of Nested ESXi Appliances along with the VMware Cloud Builder appliance, which is then used to deploy VCF on top of the Nested ESXi VMs. To ensure the user experience is as painless and simple, I also use the customer supplied configurations within the script to automagically generate the VCF configuration JSON file that can then be uploaded directly to the Cloud Builder appliance to begin the VCF deployment once the initial infrastructure has been deployed by the automation script.

Note: Although AVN and the respective NSX-T configuration is not in scope for the automation script, it is definitely possible to use a solution like VyOS or pfSense and using techniques like the following to automate the additional infrastructure to enable the ability to deploy a complete VCF environment. I will leave this as as fun and interesting learning exercise for the reader.

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