Lab

Overview Before the VCF Installer can build anything, three practical questions need answers. Where does the installer appliance run when no datastore exists yet? How does it get the 9.1.1 binaries? And how do you produce a deployment spec that passes validation? This post walks through each, with the small mistakes that cost time in this lab. Installer prerequisites to settle first The placement decision depends on what the installer needs, so check these before choosing a host. They follow the VCF 9.1 documentation for deploying the VCF Installer appliance. ...

Overview The VCF Installer does not trust an ESX host because of its name. It trusts the certificate fingerprint you put in the deployment spec and then checks that the host still presents that certificate on port 443. If the two differ at any point, validation fails or, worse, a deployment fails halfway through. Two certificate problems cost the most time in this lab. Both were avoidable. This post covers the host preparation order that avoids them, with the exact commands and what each failure looked like. ...

Overview This is the first post in a hands-on series that builds a VCF 9.1.1 environment from empty hosts to a working Supervisor, with the real issues and fixes along the way. Before any appliance gets deployed, the lab needs a design. Names, VLANs, subnets and sizing are the decisions that are cheapest to make on paper and most expensive to change once the VCF Installer has certificates, thumbprints and DNS records baked into a deployment spec. ...