A hands-on build of a VCF 9.1.1 lab on nested hosts, from empty ESX to a working Supervisor and VKS cluster, including what broke and how it was fixed. This is a 25-part series, and 3 posts are live.

Published

  1. Designing a Nested VCF 9.1.1 Lab: Names, VLANs and Decisions, October 21, 2026
  2. Preparing Nested ESX Hosts: Certificates and Thumbprints Done Right, October 29, 2026
  3. VCF Installer in a Lab: Appliance Placement, Offline Depot and a Spec from the Planning Workbook, November 4, 2026

Coming up

  1. Walking the VCF Installer Wizard for a New Fleet
  1. Bring-up Milestones: What Each Stage Builds and How Long It Took
  1. Troubleshooting Bring-up 1: Thumbprint Mismatch and vSAN ESA Disk Eligibility
  1. Troubleshooting Bring-up 2: VPC Config Type and the NSX Version
  1. Troubleshooting Bring-up 3: LOQSE1 and P2KLT7
  1. Day-N Starts in VCF Operations: Verifying the Management Domain
  1. Host Commissioning in 9.1.1: Network Pools and the API Path for Nested Labs
  1. Creating the Workload Domain from VCF Operations
  1. After the Wizard: Static Host TEP Pool, NSX Agents and a Datacenter Rename
  1. VCF SSO Without Active Directory: Keycloak as an OIDC Provider
  1. One vSphere Client for Two Domains: vCenter Linking in VCF Operations
  1. Guided Edge Deployment from vCenter: Port Group, TEP Pool and the Edge Cluster
  1. Tier-0 Active/Standby and eBGP to the Lab Router, Verified from Both Sides
  1. Centralized Transit Gateway and IP Blocks: What Gets Advertised and What Does Not
  1. VPCs and Subnets from vCenter: Private, Public, DHCP, DNS and NTP
  1. Proving VPC Isolation with PowerCLI Test VMs and a Ping Matrix
  1. Lab Hygiene: Reverting Troubleshooting Changes on SDDC Manager
  1. Activating a Supervisor on VPC Networking: Design Choices, the Wizard and the First 50 Minutes
  1. Namespaces, Storage Policies and Kubernetes Releases: Getting VKS Ready for a Team
  1. A VKS Cluster in 8 Minutes from the vSphere Client, Then an App with a Load Balancer and Storage
  1. VMs Next to Containers: VM Service with cloud-init, and a Volume from the Local Consumption Interface
  1. Micro-segmentation Between VPCs with the Distributed Firewall, Proven with Traceflow