Blog Date: July 10, 2024

To get straight to the punch, this is not supported yet. If you already have an existing VCF deployment, there currently is no supported way to migrate your workload domains to vLCM, per the support article here -> Transition from vSphere Lifecycle Manager Baselines to vSphere Lifecycle Manager Images is not supported with VMware Cloud Foundation. While you can technically use the vCenter UI / APIs to make the switch, it will cause workflows in SDDC manager to break, VMware support/engineering will have to get involved, and most likely the changes will have to be reverted.

If you are in the beginnings of deploying a new workload domain, by default it will use vSphere Lifecycle Manager baselines as the update method, unless you specifically checked “Manage clusters in this workload domain using baselines (deprecated)” during the workload domain deployment. However, this option would require you to have an existing vLCM image prior to the workload domain being deployed. If you don’t have a vLCM image yet, the VMware documentation suggests that you deploy the workload domain using legacy images (VUM), and that documentation can be found here -> Deploy a VI Workload Domain Using the SDDC Manager UI.

Doing a little research on the available options if no vLCM baseline image is available, and if you already have identical ESXi hosts deployed to the VCF environment, in vSphere, you can create a new empty compute cluster, select the option to manage the cluster with vLCM baselines, select a identical host already deployed to the environment to import and create the vLCM baseline from including the NSX driver. Now you have a vLCM baseline you can use for new workload domains and clusters using identical hosts. The new vLCM baseline can be imported into the SDDC manager. One might ask if it is safe to create a new compute cluster using the vSphere UI in a VCF deployment? For this purpose because it is temporary, the answer is yes. Technically, if you add additional compute clusters in vSphere without going through the SDDC manager, the SDDC will have no knowledge of it and won’t interact with it, so for our purposes, it is safe to create the empty compute cluster to create the new baseline, and then just delete the empty cluster when finished. Always remember to clean your room.

Although it will take a little work on the font end if you currently do not have vLCM baseline images to deploy a new workload domain, the above process can be used to create it. Eric Gray put together an excellent blog and YouTube video on this here -> Updating VCF Workload Domains deployed using vLCM Images. This walks us through the process of creating a new vLCM baseline image for a vLCM enabled workload domain to upgrade it, but the same process can be used to create a new vLCM image for a new workload domain with identical hardware.

If you have just deployed a workload domain and selected Manage clusters in this workload domain using baselines (deprecated) (legacy VUM), there is no way to convert it to vLCM baselines (at the time of writing this blog). You have to REDEPLOY the workload domain. You could however, take the opportunity using the above method to create a vLCM baseline image for the workload domain, so that when you redeploy it, you’ll have a vLCM image to use. Silver lining?

Unconfirmed reports indicate that the functionality to migrate existing workload domains from legacy VUM to vSphere Lifecycle Manager baselines is *targeted* for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.