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Enhancement in VCF 9.0.1 to bypass vSAN ESA HCL & Host Commission 10GbE NIC Check

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.1 is the first maintenance release for VCF 9.0, delivering a number of important fixes but also several exciting enhancements for lab deployments or running proof-of-concepts (PoC).

VCF 9.0 had already introduced a number of built-in capabilities and some neat “tricks” that makes it easier than ever to deploy a minimal VCF footprint, which you can read more about here.

However, there were still a couple of minor annoyances around vSAN ESA HCL or Host Commissioning pre-checks that could be improved to provide a better customer experience when deploying VCF for non-production usage. With feedback to VCF Engineering, I am pleased to share that these issues have now been addressed as part of VCF 9.0.1 release!

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Enhancement in VCF 5.2.2 to bypass vSAN ESA HCL Check

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When vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) is selected as the primary storage for deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x, the Cloud Builder Appliance will validate the system against the vSAN ESA HCL and will block the deployment if the hardware components are non-compliant.


For a production deployment, this should be the default experience but for non-production or proof-of-concept (POC), this can be annoying if you wish to accept the risk and proceed with using non-certified vSAN ESA hardware.

Today, the most viable workaround is to install the vSAN ESA Hardware Mock VIB , which will allow users to proceed with the deployment but it does require the additional installation step for each ESXi host.

Having spoken with VCF Engineering about this topic awhile back, they have introduced a nice enhancement with the latest release of VCF 5.2.2 that will allow users to easily bypass the vSAN ESA HCL check without requiring additional ESXi configurations changes.

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Quick Tip – How to Rename a vSAN Virtual Machine and its files

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While renaming a vSphere Virtual Machine is very straightforward using the vSphere UI or API, this operation only updates the display name in the vSphere Inventory. To ensure the underlying VM configuration files (e.g. .vmdk, .vmx, etc. ) are also updated, a Storage vMotion is also required, which requires you to have at least two vSphere Datastores to perform the operation.

If Storage vMotion is not an option, you only have a single datastore or you are using vSAN, then your only option is to manually rename the individual VM files. For vSAN-based VMs, one additional step is required as vSAN manages objects and not files.

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