As part of upgrading an existing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment from either VCF 5.x or 9.0.x to VCF 9.1, one of the required steps is deploying the new VCF Management Services (VCFMS) component using a workflow provided by SDDC Manager.
The current default behavior of the VCFMS deployment workflow is to automatically deploy the VCFMS components, shown below, onto the existing VM Management network. This is typically the same network that hosts infrastructure components such as vCenter Server, NSX and other management services.
While defaulting to the management network may be convenient, most enterprise organizations do not have a large number of free IP addresses sitting idle. Even if there was available IP capacity, it is usually not contiguous blocks of IPs, which can make accommodating the CIDR-based IP allocation requirements of VCFMS more challenging than expected.
The good news is that we can use the SDDC Manager API to select an alternative vSphere-based VLAN network to deploy VCFMS!