VCF Installer overview

VCF Installer Walkthrough

VCF Installer

VCF Installer previously known as the Cloud Builder Appliance is used to deploy the first VCF management domain. It validates hardware and networking ensuring consistency.

Once VCF is deployed, the installers role is largely finished. SDDC manager takes over the life cycle management.
If at any point you have entered incorrect information that is non-compliant. The Installer stops.

One of the very first items we need to understand is the installation workflow of a fresh VMWare Cloud Foundation install.

First, we need to study the design considerations followed by the prerequisites. These are important as we work through the installation. After this we move onto the VCF Installer and then configure the depot. This allows us to download the software bundles.

Next, we deploy VCF Fleet 9.0 and finally we configure licensing from VCF operations. Lets dive deeper into each stage of the configuration.

VCF Requirements

Before diving into the new platform, we must first ensure we meet the following requirements for fleet deployment.

- VLANs on physical Fabric.
o Mgmt VM
o ESX mgmt.
o Vmotion
o Storage
o Host teps
o Edge teps
o Edge uplinks(optional)
- Forward & Reverse DNS for all mgmt. components
- Configure NTP
- Deploy ESX images
- Assign static Ips to ESX hosts
- Setup depot (Offline Only)
- Deploy VCF Installer VM

The networking for K8s has been simplified compared to previous versions of VCF where specific T0’s had to be deployed for K8s.

Preparing ESX Hosts

Once we have fulfilled these requirements, we need to prepare the ESX hosts. We need the following:

- Install ESX 9.0
- Configure VLAN for host mgmt.
- Configure VLAN for VM mgmt.
- Configure NTP

VCF Installer

This finally brings us to the VCF installer. This simplifies the deployment of VCF for new and existing deployments. The installer allows for bulk install of components and reduces the risk by using validated designs. You’ll see as you go further into this blog. Each step is verified and you cannot go further. This is why its very important to meet all the pre-reqs.

Next step in the process, configuring the depot. this gives two options. Offline depot (Which will require more details) or the online depot which will ask you for a download token (The download token can be generated from the Broadcom website).

Binary Management

Once you have generated the download token, the next steps allow you to select the images you wish to deploy/download.

Deployment Wizard

Now that we have downloaded our binaries we can move onto the deployment wizard. We have a couple of options. Deploy VMWare Cloud Foundation using the wizard or deploy using JSON spec (You’ll see later in the blog, you can export the JSON and import when deploying new instances) This saves a whole load of time if you are deploying multiple instances.

Deploy a VCF Fleet

The installer can be used to deploy the first VCF instance or you can add a instance to an already existing Fleet.

Deploy a VCF Fleet

The installer can be used to deploy the first VCF instance or you can add a instance to an already existing Fleet.

Deployment Steps

Existing Compnenets

In this next stage we can migrate old components into VCF. If this is a greenfield deployment, simply click next.

Deployment Steps

In the next 12 steps of the deployment, you will be required to fill in the spec of your VCF instance. This is where those pre-reqs will come in handy at the start of this blog.

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