VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0.1 Deployment Series-Part1

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Hello Everyone,

Today, I am covering about the VMware Cloud Foundation deployment series. It will be a long series as well.

VMware Cloud Foundation aka VCF, is an integrated soultion stack which bundles with VMware vSphere, vSAN, NSX and Monitoring and Logging solutions like vROPS and vRLI.

VCF is a Hybrid cloud platfrom which can integrate with cloud platforms like AWS, GCP etc.

Once the VCF is UP then we can deploy other solutions like VMware Tanzu Grid, Horizon View, vRealize Automation as well as a VI Workload Domains.

There are 2 types of VCF Architecture i.e Standard and Consolidated.

In Standard architecture, we have a first domain i.e called Management Domain which contains all the management components servers like vCenter, NSX Manager, vROPS, vRLI. In this domain, we should have 4 ESXi nodes with vSAN as a storage. Management domain can run with vSAN only.

For VI Workload domain, it can accept vSAN as well as other storage like FC, NFS etc.

Once, we have Management Domain UP and running then we can deploy the VI workload domain.

In Consolidated architecture, it is mainly used and deployed for testing or POC kind of environment where we have six or less ESXi nodes. In this architecture, Management and VI workload domain runs in a single cluster and isolation can be achieved via resource pools only.

You can follow below VMware docs for VCF to understand it more.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/4.0.1/rn/VMware-Cloud-Foundation-401-Release-Notes.html

Now, we are going to start the VCF platform deployment and will go with Consolidated Architecture as I have 4 ESXi nodes only with one Cache and Capacity drives (All flash).

For Each and Every VCF version, there is a Cloud Foundation bill of Materials which tells you about the components version are supported with this VCF version.

So, we are going to deploy the VCF 4.0.1 version and below components versions are supported with this.

 

To Deploy the VCF environment, we need to use Cloud Builder appliance provided by VMware.

VMware Automated the deployment process via this cloud builder appliance. we need to install/prepare the ESXi nodes only with above listed ESXi version. Rest components like vCenter, NSX, vSAN, vROPS, vRLI will be deployed by Cloud builder appliance itself. 

we don't need to deploy these components manually.

So, i have already installed ESXi 7.0b version on all my 4 ESXi nodes, configure the IP address, DNS, NTP etc.

Now, we have to download this cloud builder applaince as per the above version listed from VMware site and deploy it as a OVF.

I have download and deployed the Cloud Builder appliance on my another vSphere environment. we can access it via FQDN or IP address. We need to make sure that this appliance should be reachable to ESXi hosts network otherwise we can not deploy the VCF environment.

So, that's it for this Part-1, we will start with Cloud Builder in our next Part-2.

Cheers..








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